Bonnie D Huval

I said I evaluate more by actions than words. Sometimes I’m asked what I mean by that. How does “doing it right” look?

It’s like good art. Although you couldn’t give anyone a single definition that would work for every piece of art, you know it when you see it.

A lot of my clients are manufacturing companies. The bigger they are and the more hazardous their manufacturing is, the more they talk about their safety programs. But if you dig into their safety records, one company has a safety record much better than other companies in their industry–not just a little better, but several times better than the industry average. By contrast, another of my clients based its safety program on my ultra-safe client, yet they struggle to get workers to stay alert and safe.

At my struggling client, there is a lot of emphasis on reports, figures and recording safety related information focused on procedures in the workplace. At my ultra-safe client, they keep track of incidents and drill in the importance of safe procedures–but their obsession is behavior, not reports.

When I’m near a big factory belonging to Ultra-Safe, in the town I can tell which people work at the factory. After stepping onto an escalator, they stand with one hand holding the moving railing until the end, then step off. They don’t walk on escalators because that would be less safe. At a fast food restaurant, if they drop a blob of sauce from the condiment bar onto the floor, they don’t leave it for restaurant staff to clean up later. They get a paper napkin and clean up the slip-and-trip hazard right away.

They make mistakes, have accidents and get hurt just like the rest of us, but I can see that paying attention to safety (their own and that of everyone around them) is a deeply ingrained habit.

I don’t see this near the other client’s factories even though they talk more about safety.

This is an example of what I mean when I say that I believe behavior more than words. I’ve used safety as a touchstone because it’s a familiar concern for everybody.

The principle translates well, though. In every field, if you really look, you can tell who the standouts are by what they do.

My current primary project is within sight of completion, so I’m looking for my next project. Of the interviews and meetings I’ve had so far, one stood out beautifully and another badly.

The lovely one was with a company that prides itself on the high quality of its work. I tend to evaluate more by what people do than what they say, and in this case their actions were impeccable.

In the other case, I got email asking me to call someone early in the evening. That meant right after leaving my current client’s site, so I had no chance to research the person ahead of time. It was the CEO of a company that provides a certain kind of software. Think enterprise level–that kind of software.

First, it was the weirdest, most unfocused “interview” I’ve ever had. Second, this fellow was far too keen about my past involvement with a particular other software vendor. He mentioned he used to run it. He was its executive vice president.

This is unfortunate. On his watch, that vendor tried to get me to falsify test results. Never mind what their glossy marketing literature says. Remember, I care more about actions than words, and my integrity is not for sale.

Ghosts aren’t the only things that haunt. Past actions do too. Nobody is perfect. Everybody makes mistakes, and those mistakes haunt us. But I would rather work with people who try to do well than with those who intentionally do not.

Wouldn’t you?

My online presence became quiet as 2011 moved on. Late in the year I was due for visa renewal. I felt anxious about it. I worried that even the smallest misstep could prevent me from staying.

Getting permission to stay was the best holiday gift I could possibly have gotten.

So… welcome to the New Year. What shall we make of it?

Through my businesses and personal ties in the States, I can see the USA has pockets of economic improvement. Some of these pockets are regional. Others are specific industries. It doesn’t look great yet and it’s fragile, but it certainly looks better than Europe’s current mess.

In 2010 I came up with a way to handle market entry for a USA firm to sell in the UK with lower cost and risk than the usual model. Right now, for most businesses it makes more sense to go from the UK to the USA. As long as what you sell is presented and supported appropriately, the States offer a much larger market in a better buying position. It looks like that will remain true for quite some time to come.

Since that is the best salvation I can see for certain small to medium sized businesses here in the UK, I’ve got a handpicked pool of talent on standby in the States to take up UK-to-USA market entry projects. The companies that can benefit most from this are not necessarily in technology. (Let me know if you have a British business that would like to sell in the States and wants to be considered. That initial conversation doesn’t cost anything except a little time, and it could be worth big money to you.)

Although Britons tell me that I’m crazy to stay, I’m staying. Now that there’s no “go away” date on my visa any more, I’d actually like to make some changes about what I own in each country. Later this year I’ll probably put some assets on the market.

Last but not least, during the holidays various family members had some health news and in my household the new year began with the unexpected death of a beloved pet. Some things are more important than business.

There is plenty to do this year, one way or another. Let’s get to it!

If you want to see an example of proud ignorance, look at the Republican party’s Congressional members right now. They think they are playing chicken with President Obama. They are playing chicken with the global bond market–which only a fool would do–and they don’t even realize what game they are really playing.

Whenever anybody gets a new job or a promotion, they go into something they don’t entirely know yet. Maybe they know most of it, maybe none of it. That’s normal and okay. But refusing to learn is not wise. Too bad practically everyone is lined up to pay for this mistake except the people who are making it.

For any of my readers who are not from the States, the most risible part of the showdown in Washington is the very notion that Obama could somehow be to blame for the impending crash against the USA debt ceiling. Congress holds the purse strings in the USA. Congress sets the debt ceiling and the budgets. The President has a veto and can influence, but only Congress is legally empowered to resolve this unnecessary mess (just as only Congress was legally able to create it).

Three clients have been keeping me busy. The past couple of years or so have been so bad for so many businesses, seeing some businesses show an uptick is as heartening as seeing new flowers in early spring.

But for many businesses, it has been so long since they could bring in more people, they’ve forgotten how to do it. Are you making more sales these days? Getting enough business to justify hiring more staff? Then do it right! If you don’t, you’ll throw money away.

Many years ago, a client brought me in and then left me to figure out how to settle in on my own. Unfortunately, their building was cleverly designed to hide meeting rooms and bathrooms. No signage. No site maps. The rooms were tucked away in what appeared to be dead-end hallways leading to something like janitorial closets. It took me an hour to find a loo–and they were paying for that time.

Before you laugh at them for being so foolish, think about whether you unwittingly leave new hires, contractors or consultants similarly rudderless or handcuff them with absurdities.

If your policy says everyone has to use your equipment and software but your procedures take two weeks to set that up, you are wasting half a month’s worth of money for every new employee or contractor. Your money, down the drain!

You need to tell them where to get supplies, how to find the company cafeteria, where the photocopier is, who to call when they need a piece of kit they don’t have… The more of these things you leave them to figure out for themselves, the more money you waste.

Yes, this is basic. I run into it so often, it bears repeating. When you have the pleasure of expanding your workforce, start your new people on the right foot. It isn’t just courtesy or kindness to them. Do it for the sake of your bottom line, too. In much of the world right now, wringing a profit out of the current economy is no easy task–starting your new hires smoothly is simply part of using your money as smartly as you can.

Unless you use the type of antispam service I offer, you have probably noticed a new onslaught of spam.

This is particularly crippling for many businesses in the UK, where the most popular antispam services are not as sophisticated. With a less refined filter, they’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea–if they tighten the filter enough not to be driven crazy by this wave of spam, a lot of legitimate email will be blocked also and they will lose business (which nobody can afford, especially these days).

The culprit is a hacker who penetrated Epsilon, the largest permission-based email service on Earth. So far it looks like the hacker only got email addresses, not password or other sensitive information that could be used to hijack people’s accounts. But the email addresses are now in the hands of spammers. Unless you live under a rock, chances are high that your email address is among those now being flooded with new spam.

Seven of the ten biggest companies on the Fortune list use Epsilon to manage their customer email lists. Epsilon has more than 2,500 clients. According to MSNBC, the customer lists they manage in the USA include:

• TiVo
• JPMorgan Chase
• Capital One
• Barclays Bank of Delaware
• Marriott Rewards
• Ritz-Carlton Rewards
• Best Buy
• Walgreens
• LL Bean
• Kroger
• Home Shopping Network
• Disney Destinations
• Robert Half Technologies
• The College Board
• Target

I’m on some of those lists. Thanks to my antispam system, I haven’t seen any difference in what comes to my inbox. My system is very good at blocking spam while letting legitimate messages through. But I noticed blocked traffic suddenly burgeoned, and this is why. (Filtered-out email doesn’t come through to my PC, but I can look at it in a browser and release anything on the rare occasions when I want a blocked message to be delivered.)

I maintain one account through Postini, the next best thing, for comparison. It doesn’t toss in disaster redundancy at no charge, as I do, and it isn’t quite as good. I really feel sorry for anybody whose antispam isn’t as clever as what I use.

If this latest flood of spam is giving you headaches and you control the email for your Internet domain, click here to get the same antispam system I use, free for 30 days. If you find the form at that site too long, click here to find out how to contact me directly. I will be glad to set up a 30 day free trial for you–it doesn’t matter whether you are working solo or have a company with thousands of accounts. Setup is easy and will get you through the worst of this flood. At the end of 30 days, if you don’t want to continue, just say so and I’ll undo it in minutes.

Late last week I got email apologizing because a client who “needed an immediate start” has now decided to postpone 2 to 3 months. For me, that’s the fourth client to delay a project start within a couple of weeks. This is happening to other people too, apparently on both sides of the ocean.

I wasn’t overly concerned about some delay at first. Most of my clients are big and big companies are notorious for not moving very quickly. But now it is beginning to smell like all of these projects are going to disappear within a month of when they were hot to start immediately.

When odd patterns like this start showing up in the market, colleagues in consulting and IT often ask for my view of what’s going on. Over the past 20 years I’ve been very good at predicting downturns and upturns in the market. I might as well put my thoughts here and save a few people the bother of an email or phone call to ask me.

One person quipped that it must be anxiety about Libya. There appears to be more to it than unease about Qaddafi.

In the Greyhaven Realty Management newsletters, we have often been months ahead of the mainstream media and pundits in our articles about what we see coming. Late last year we were saying real estate had entire other rounds of trouble to go through, and that is now moving up to mainstream notice.

Here’s what I see when I take a larger view than real estate.

Some parts of the economy are indeed doing better. It isn’t exactly that we’re coming out of the recession. It’s that some businesses have figured out a new equilibrium–they’ve adapted to a radically changed reality and have found some way to get along in it. Those businesses are okay. They are building factories and such, which is wearing out tires on large construction machines. That trickles through to one of my clients which has been running its factory flat-out for six months or so now to provide materials for those tires.

One of the clients who just postponed my start date also reached a major turning point around the middle of last year. The increase in their revenues and profits from mid-2010 is beautiful to behold. They made some smart decisions and financial moves to make that happen. Their materials are used for structural elements in construction, shipbuilding and civil engineering projects.

Both clients are benefiting from pent-up demand. There are some businesses that absolutely must build new plant from time to time in order to stay alive in their markets. They will get an additional boost from the catastrophe in Japan. Although the Japanese are famously economical in their use of materials, even they can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. They will need structural material and large construction machines (with large tires) to help them rebuild. They are too smart to use an inferior grade from China if they can rebuild to their remarkably sturdy standards with higher grade materials.

As soon as you get away from the building projects that can’t wait much longer, though, there are problems upon problems. The uproar in the Middle East is much broader than Egypt or Libya and promises uproar in the oil markets, adversely affecting everything about normal commerce. It increases the cost of transporting everyone and everything, including food. It increases the cost of plastics and packaging. Add to that an anticipated food shortage that may be of crisis proportions, and that is aggravated by subsidies and laws to divert food into biofuel production. Compound the mix with systemic flaws in the financial system. (To understand that without getting a headache, even getting some laughs along the way, read Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay if you haven’t yet.) Bear in mind that Basel II helped make this downturn worse than it would have been, and Basel III is poised to go even further in the same direction. (To read The Guardian’s brief about it, click here, but the BBC explained it more clearly on Radio 4.)

Small to medium sized businesses may not be aware of much of this. Large businesses keep people on the payroll whose whole job is to pay attention to such things and think about how their business could be affected. When there’s just one significant problem area, adjusting for it is not so hard. When there are this many, it’s difficult. The potential ramifications of flare-ups in the Middle East plus the catastrophe in Japan, so close together, seem to have shaken the budding confidence that was about to give birth to a round of fresh projects.

It’s too soon to say whether this will be a brief lull. I would like to think the postponements will be lifted and projects will go ahead in a few weeks as long as matters don’t get worse, but there are some other potential shocks to the system that could fall into the mix. It’s a matter of timing. If enough of these projects go ahead, those projects are meant to improve effectiveness and profitability, so they will build up some extra momentum for the businesses sponsoring them. Get that in place before more shocks hit, and we will all come through this in better shape than we would if fear keeps us collectively on the back foot.

Like everyone else, I am watching the news about Japan. My family lost houses (no people, thankfully) to Katrina’s storm surge, but even that does not let me truly comprehend what is happening over there.

Technology plays an ever-larger role in crises and the aftermath of disasters. Until this disaster, the world was riveted by uprisings in Egypt, Libya and around the Middle East. These uprisings rely heavily on ubiquitous technology to organize and communicate. Then the earth shook Japan onto center stage.

But if ever there has been a test of how effectively technology can be used to facilitate disaster response, this has to be the biggest the world has known for the kind of technology we have now. Surely Japan of all countries can wring as much help as possible out of modern technology. Every Japanese technology professional I have ever worked with is superb and relentlessly strives for excellence.

If you have ever been in a disaster zone, you know how difficult it can be to get in touch with loved ones and report how you’re doing or find out how they’re doing. Normal communications aren’t working properly. Emergency responders need priority in whatever is left of the communications network, yet it is swamped by people trying to contact loved ones.

It’s usually a little more feasible to place a telephone call from inside the disaster zone to the outside than the other way around. Having been through a few disasters, I learned long ago to designate one family member I will try to reach first with my news, and a fallback if I can’t reach that one, and so on. The family knows not to try to call me when I’m in a disaster zone. After I reach one contact, that person will update everyone else. We only use the crucial overloaded telephone connections in the disaster zone once. We all use some version of this system. Since much of my family lives in hurricane-prone areas, we have a lot of practice.

This time Google is making a special database available to help people in Japan find each other. Google’s database strikes me as a wonderful idea, much more efficient than the telephone tree approach.

I feel for the people hit by this disaster anywhere but especially in Japan. What is happening there right now is terrible. But I suspect that out of this awful catastrophe, the Japanese will give the world something priceless–a model for disaster response that moves the entire field forward by giant strides and saves a lot of lives in a future disaster somewhere else.

I had forgotten who bought the very first copy of “Make Sure You Get Paid (And Other Business Basics)” but last week the buyer mentioned it. We had a long telephone call, mostly about business. At some point Gloria reminded me. At the time she asked whether it was the first copy sold, and when I confirmed that it was, she had me inscribe it accordingly.

She still keeps it close at hand on her bookshelves and refers to it regularly.

You can hardly imagine how that makes me feel. That book has become for her exactly what I wanted it to be. It isn’t a one-time read, quickly forgotten. It’s an ongoing resource that helps her take good care of her business.

Come to think of it, that’s my attitude about business in general. In my consulting firms, I don’t make sales so much as I build and tend relationships. It pleases me to no end that one of my projects helped a client stay open through the Credit Crunch instead of needing to close up shop. It pleases me that at my largest UK project, my direct client’s key technical person learned so much from me that he could probably handle the next project of that type without me. Some people would think I did away with my own job by transferring expertise. I see it as setting up both me and my client to step up to successively higher pursuits each time we work together.

As far as I am concerned, I am not an expert who zooms in, does a little something, then zooms out and forgets about the client. Whenever possible, my work is collaborative and my techniques are meant to be shared with my clients, not dispensed.

I wish I could say this is the direction the whole civilized world is going, but it isn’t. I see a distinct split.

On one path I see businesses that are looking for easy cookie-cutter solutions to their needs, choose outside expertise in a tick-the-box manner, and think one person who ticks certain boxes is interchangeable with another who ticks the same boxes. The stresses of the Credit Crunch seem to have pushed hordes onto that path.

On the other path I see businesses that still think in terms of building relationships with other firms. The proportion of businesses on that path has diminished in recent times.

The hordes have forgotten the power of teamwork. The motto of the USA is E Pluribus Unum for good reason. Europe decided to form the EU for good reason. If you need a smaller-scale example, go on an Outward Bound course. Notice how much more you can do when you are part of a brigade than when you are on solo, entirely on your own.

Life goes better when you go through it with friends. It is more survivable in bad times and more enjoyable in good times. That is just as true for organizations as it is for individuals.

How is your business going through life? Who will watch your back when you hit a rough patch? If the answer is nobody, remember that no business is an island. Let your business make some friends.

A couple of weeks ago at a local business group, it was my turn to let people know more about what I do than I can fit into 60 seconds. Most people give a presentation. Sometimes they have PowerPoint slides or a flip chart.

It was more interesting when a therapist brought some of the gadgets he uses and gave us a quick demonstration by giving a mini-treatment to a member who happens to be one of his clients. It meant more when we could see a little of what he does instead of only hearing about it.

Group members had repeatedly mentioned not clearly understanding what I do. I wanted them to comprehend, and to realize I can help small companies as well as large ones.

People often look at the big multinationals among my clientele and think my services must be beyond their means, but I’m working with a very small local manufacturer right now.

Talking about it wouldn’t do. I had to give an unpresentation.

For a few minutes the business group became a property management company. Three members became the big boss, the head of the office staff and the chief of the new maintenance department. Everyone else became part of the staff.

In our scenario, the firm originally tried to just substitute internal work orders for the purchase orders they used to send to maintenance firms and completed work orders where they used to get invoices for repairs done to properties. That was drowning them in paperwork. The new department had inventory of frequently needed parts, as well as other differences from the outside vendors.

We had (in theory) figured out the current workflow earlier. It had been drawn up while we all took a break, so we all had a copy in front of us. We went through an abbreviated version of figuring out what workflow the firm needed instead–and where data ought to be instead of where it is now. The result tells me what changes I need to orchestrate in the appropriate IT systems and how those IT systems should interact with what people are doing.

No good IT project can start with the computer systems. First it’s important to take a good look at what the business does and what it needs to do instead. Then the IT systems need to fit that. Otherwise, the business will end up distorted to accommodate the IT. That’s bad for business.

Over the weekend I’ll add a summary of my unpresentation to the Havenshire website. If you don’t understand what I do, maybe that will help.

Addendum: The example is now available by clicking here.