Higher Achievement: Supporting 100,000 College Graduations

I'm on the Board of a fledgling non-profit organization called Topplers. We're expanding our community service initiatives and the following blog post describes the initiative that I'm leading. Until we launch our new website and community site for Topplers, if you want to get involved please contact me at chris@topplers.org.

---

In simple, factual, somewhat dry terms, Higher Achievement is an initiative supported by Topplers, where we’ll use the Topplers community and the Topplers ‘pay it forward’ online tracking system to build support and track progress. The substance of Higher Achievement is supporting 100,000 college graduations, which is a personal goal where I hope myself and many others can positively impact students at various stages of their college careers, giving each a foundational set of skills and knowledge at the front-end of a lifetime of learning. But as I said, this is the somewhat dry, simple, factual stuff.

To the people we will impact with the efforts of Higher Achievement, an entirely different picture will emerge—one rich in personal growth for every student we support, and jammed full of hard work, fun, excitement, exhaustion, and ultimately the achievement of a credential that marks the first major accomplishment of many peoples’ adult lives. This is important to the people we will support, because a college degree not only marks the achievement of a valued credential, but because it signifies a skill-set, a body of knowledge, and an accomplishment based on hard work and determination.

For each person we support, they’ll also likely achieve $1,000,000 in additional income over their professional lives. In fact some analysis by smart people at Arizona State University revealed that, based on year 2000 census data, average annual earnings of individuals with a bachelor’s degree was from 74 to 87 percent higher (depending on age) than the earnings of individuals whose maximum educational attainment was a high school diploma.

Not only do employers need these people, and pay them well, but so do governments, who need these people and deploy them on critical missions around the world. And we—yes, you and me—need these people in our communities solving the tough problems we encounter at both the local and global level—from cleaning up the environment to solving massive problems like hunger and global warming.

So how do we get there? How do we support 100,000 college graduations?

It is at the individual level where our efforts will focus, because it takes a massive, concerted effort of time, energy and money—along with some highly targeted advice and prodding—for any individual to both enter and graduate from college.
We need to work together to identify the events and influences that make college graduation happen. Certainly students have to respond. But we, as a supportive community, have to build the expectations and support systems.

Junior High and High School curricula have to be interesting and challenging. According to some of the experts, it is the academic intensity of students’ high school curriculum that counts more than anything else in providing the momentum a student needs to complete a bachelor’s degree. So how can you support the teachers, administrators and students at a school?

We need to set the expectation that student should be prepared for tough courses, and that participation in tough courses paves the way for handling life’s tough challenges. Simple public dialog, sharing examples and setting high expectations contributes significantly to preparedness.

What else? Curriculum is one key element of supporting students, but we can’t ignore attendance and performance. Looking at performance, as measured by grades, it’s clear that higher grades equate to higher academic momentum and graduation rates. Relative to attendance, repeating or dropping courses is bad. Also, the longer students wait, the less likely they will finish. The year a student graduates from high school is the year they should enter college. Help make that happen for someone that might not otherwise.

How can we help 100,000 students graduate from college? Here are a few ideas.
•Help a student with college readiness:
o Mentor a student or get involved in a support program for first generation college students—focusing on Jr. and Sr. high school students both
o Help someone with their college application
o Contribute to an endowment or scholarship fund
•Help a student with college persistence:
o Find an opportunity for in-university mentorship and personal support; you might also find a way to get involved with the career services office, including career planning and networking support through your alumni organization.
•Support students with a STEM focus (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). These types of tough academic programs get students to really excel in college and after graduation.
•Support a foreign exchange student. Cultural fluency is a powerful asset.
•Get involved in a University 101 program at a university, which supports student success and retention. These programs tend to focus on getting students launched into successful college careers by focusing on the early steps they take at an institution.
•Get involved in cooperative community/university organizations—social cohesion is huge in helping students achieve in school.
•Get involved in learning communities – academic clubs, or even social clubs like fraternities and sororities—because a strong college community supports academic achievement.
•Support student groups that are involved in peer mentoring, which also equates strongly with college graduation rates.

There are certainly many other ways to support a student in moving into and through college. Our efforts with Higher Achievement and Topplers will try to communicate more ideas, and take a range of specific actions ourselves; I hope you will also contribute to this community with ideas, and most importantly, I hope that you’ll decide to take an action that supports a student.

Tell someone else what we’re doing. Take action yourself and ‘pay it forward.’

Growth-As-A-Service

Service projects resulting from hardware and software sales to enterprise customers represent an often uneven revenue stream. While VARs, Distributors, SIs, and OEMs all participate in the B2B mass market IT channel, it’s VARs that play the central role in selling and delivering hardware, software and services in combination. In this context an enormous opportunity exists for Professional Service Executives to create recurring, non-project revenue by developing subscription or annual service packages.

Service organizations that develop a robust portfolio of non-project services also benefit from creating customers-for-life, which enables not only involvement in a larger percentage of client IT portfolios on average, but also ensuring that the VAR’s business is well-positioned for follow-on hardware and software sales due to client intimacy.

There are two primary objectives that need to be achieved to growing services with enterprise customers:

• Increase the number of your customers who have a service relationship with you.
• Increase the total amount your customers spend annually on services.

In support of these primary objectives, an organization can achieve significant progress by focusing on three characteristics of expert service delivery:

• Sales excellence. Services sales are different from product sales—they’re longer, more strategic, and if done successfully contribute to long-term, durable relationships. It is services sales that allow enterprises to purchase a total solution.

• Customer relationship excellence. Customers can be retained for longer and spend more when relationships are invested in. Durable customer relationships also provide strategic feedback that enables a business to refine its “solutions” to the specific needs of customers, ultimately shortening sales cycles and improving profit margins.

• Delivery excellence. Substantive expertise in architecting, implementing and monitoring critical enterprise systems and infrastructure immediately establishes trust and credibility. Delivery excellence also produces real results for clients in the form of tangible business value.

A significant number of VARs are attempting “managed services,” the latest buzz term, which are intended to provide a high value service for client companies where IT operations aren’t the core of their business. Additionally, managed services provide a constant connection to each client, which allows a higher degree of engagement in solving IT problems for each client enterprise. “One big area of investment in 2010 will be managed services, where VARs plan to increase their already growing business. In 2009 (sic), managed services accounted for an average of 9.5 percent of revenue, up from 8.6 percent in 2008. That percentage is expected to jump to 11.4 percent next year.” (CRN Study: By Scott Campbell, ChannelWeb, Dec. 14, 2009)

While it can be fairly straight-forward to package and market services, the sales process is generally longer. Additionally, service packages that don’t have significant substance behind them are less likely to create significant revenue. The sophistication of processes, controls, reporting and ongoing improvement all of these elements, aligns with the level of strategic fit and budget allocation at each client.

Strategic importance. More budget. This is the substance, and reward, of being a true value added reseller.

Entering A New Market

I was recently preparing for a meeting were I expected to spend significant time on the topic of entering a new market. Gaining access to a new market for a business can obviously drive significant growth. It can also be a phenomenal waste of time and money for a business that’s not ready to enter the market. So as I prepared for my meeting, I made some notes that I thought were worth sharing here. Also, these notes anticipate either entry into a new industry market or a new geographic market.

So how do you prepare to enter a new market to grow a business? Ask some questions and plan carefully:

1) Walk in customer shoes--meet with them, don't necessarily sell to them, but connect with them and their peers.
• How do they work? Why?
• Who do they work with? Why?
• What are their business processes or behaviors of the market/audience in the area of business you're interested in?
• How do they buy products/services? Why?
• How are the answers to these questions any different today than they were 5 or 10 years ago? Why?
• Who are role-models for customers? Do they emulate customers you know from your ‘home’ market? How? Why?

2) Walk in partners' shoes--meet with them, don't necessarily sell to them, network with them and their peers.
• What is the scope of product/service they provide? Why?
• What is their growth strategy? Why?
• Who do prospective partners partner with? Why?
• How have they succeeded? Why?
• Where have they been successful? Why?
• What are the experiences and skills of their leaders? How do they make decisions?
• Build a case-study for something they were really excited about and very successful with. And build a case-study for something that they were really excited about and that failed.

3) For your product or service, understand expertly the perspective of target partners and customers.
• How do they talk about your product / service (categorically and specifically)?
• If you partner with companies in your home market, do those companies operate in your new market? How have they done it? If they offer different / variations on their solutions, how might that impact your product / service?
• What do competitors get paid for their solutions in the new market? Is it different than in the home market?
• If adoption of your product / service requires change on the part of your customer target, how can that be supported in the new target market?
• And critically, how can you demonstrate expertise and generate trust?

4) Evaluate your own business readiness.
• Based on what you’ve learned, what people do you need to enter the new market and make customers happy/successful? Can you get the right people?
• What advantages / disadvantages are there to partnering to enter the new market? How can your business maximize the advantages and mitigate the risks?
• What resources/systems do you need in the new market? What resources/systems do you need in your home market supporting you? Can you get them?
• What communication infrastructure and processes do you need to support entry and on-going operation of the business for the benefit of customers?
• Can the business make the sustained commitment to enter and grow in the market with the expected returns in year 1, year 2, year 3 and beyond? Can you build support for this? How?
• Is entry to the new market going to deliver results that are better than doing something else? Why?

This isn’t exhaustive, but is a decent start. If you have good answers to these questions, and can make the commitment—go for it! You have to be able to clearly shift from analysis mode to action mode to create the momentum to succeed.

Anything to add? Let me know.

The Formula for Business Alliances that Produce

I was talking to a local CEO who runs an online services business the other day and he asked me about what makes partnerships really work. There are far too many, and he’d experienced this, that take a lot of time and don’t render a lot of results; particularly with channel sales where your own sales team has to be involved. There isn't one formula.

Here’s the gist of what I told him:

1) There are other structures to business alliances—and maybe reseller isn’t the right one. Fit the agreement to the opportunity, and existing business models of each company: Lead referral, OEM, JV, reseller, etc.

2) Focus on process. Line up the abilities of your company and make sure you’re ready; then run a diligent process for each partner; and bring on only high-quality partners in a very public, organized, accountable way.

3) Continue the honeymoon. Everyone’s happy once a signature happens, but you have to keep it going. Have someone that owns the relationship and have them publish a contract summary to everyone, and use it as the guide to driving action on everything that was committed to by both parties. If it was put in the contract, it has to have mattered and must have value to getting a return from the partnership. (Hint: only put things in the contract that matter.)

4) Be aggressive and enthusiastic. I think you can be more aggressive with partners than with customers. You have to be to get action in many cases; and because you’re not selling to them like an end-customer, you can push and persist more emphatically. And in the end, we all know that the squeaky wheel gets greased.

5) Focus on getting meaningful early wins with a champion from the partner company. A big early win can put a lot of support behind the partnership from both organizations. And get the CEO (or someone that’s well-respected on the exec team) to sponsor the partnership—this way you can go back to them and make some big noise about the win to gain more support and focus. Keep building on the early wins.

6) Hire good partners. This means being very selective. It is the quality of the organization and people assigned to your partnership that will have a huge impact on success. If their people aren’t cutting it, figure out how to make a change. Tricky, but possible, and worth the effort.

7) Build a partner-friendly culture, so every functional area of the business is pulling some partner weight.

8) Measure success. Take the time to figure out what margin you’re getting from partner deals compared to direct sales deals. It should be more/better; and knowing the numbers can help drive positive changes to increase volume and margin.

Extend the Honeymoon

I think that a lot of people assess business development at the time a signature on a contract happens. And that assessment is often based on expected revenue or on how many deals get done on a particular calendar. But it is what happens after signature—integrating the deal into a business—that is a much better assessment of the value of business development. This means that project management and execution excellence are very important to business development deal success.

One habit that I highly recommend is communicating the contract:

1) Summarize the deal in plain language and communicate it to everyone that matters to the success of the deal.
2) And then use this summary (or better yet a copy of the actual agreement) as your constant guide to drive strong support and to drive your own priorities in the months that follow signature.

The spirit and intent of the agreement are captured in those pages and having everyone understand and act on this is central to the success of implementing the agreement, and realizing the revenue/opportunity associated with the agreement.

“Here's the thing: there isn't a shortage of ideas. There's a shortage of execution.” (Borrowed from Seth Godin’s blog) This is what I’m talking about. Love that contract and love its implementation or you’ll be doomed to waste all the effort that went into the courtship and negotiation. So commit to extending the honeymoon and you might just be surprised that it leads to new opportunities for the next…

Readiness, Reach, Revenue—A Business Development Framework

My basic assumption about the business development role in a company is that it should be about developing the business. It’s not sales. Sales is about developing and working a pipeline, getting contracts signed, and invoicing customers for product/service. This is extremely valuable to a business, but business development is a different endeavor.

I believe that business development should be framed by reach, readiness and revenue.

Reach: If you want to develop a business, you need customers, so how can you reach them? If they’re on another continent or in another market where the business doesn’t operate today—or maybe a market where you can’t get to scale without some help—can you get there with an alliance, JV or other structured agreement? Business development is about reaching a market full of good customers, which entails a smart, thorough evaluation of the market and the opportunity associated with entering it.

Readiness: Are you ready to deliver great customer experiences? What resources do you need to be sure you deliver on your brand promise? Business development should drive the readiness of the company, which likely means collaboratively working across the organization so that the business can systematically drive happy customer outcomes in the market you’ve just reached. Businesses that have started with a direct sales approach often have capacity that could be used to support a new partner-oriented way of doing business, so you need to find that capacity and put it to good use. For example, does your co-lo facilities have CPUs and bandwidth that go unused during the night? Can they be put to use during that time? What about the people on the tech support team or trainers? And, as an aside, part of this process (earlier in the process) is also evaluating whether the business is ready to enter a market at all, or based on readiness, how else you may enter the market.

Revenue: Developing a business is also about attracting good talent and paying them. So any BD process—from early exploration and diligence until contract negotiation and ultimately partner enablement—has to produce revenue so good talented people can get paid for their hard work. Strategic alliances, OK, maybe they’re sometimes needed. But I’m not sure that’s business development. All the effort and investment of developing a business should result in predictable, significant, good-margin revenue.

Reach, readiness, revenue… that’s it.

Non-Core Growth Strategies

There’s good reason to focus on the core of a business, to be sure a product delivers great value to customers, and cash can be generated consistently and at volume. But, I was reminded this week that there are both smart and un-smart ways to build around core to grow a business.



I’m currently vacationing in Holland and found some inspiration from a local farmer. His existing business is dairy farming. Cows graze his lush grassy fields, and he sells their milk. But he’s also found a way to build on his core. He leases long-term boat moorings along the canals that surround his property. So locals can enjoy fresh dairy products AND easily access their boats from the raised dykes surrounding his pastures. In addition, he offers Boer Golf (farmer golf), which is basically a larger scale version of croquet. Business teams or family gatherings have a lot of fun playing in a great pastoral scene, and yet again, Mr. Farmer has found another way to monetize his core asset—pasture land—at little cost, and in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the strength of his core.

The businesses that I’ve been part of have all found ways to build a great core. But some have been better than others at finding low cost compliments to their core. Services are the most obvious choice that are offered from a software business, but services aren’t low cost, and they’re often focused on filling gaps in core product. Not great. Requisite Technology’s catalog management software, eMerge, was a great compliment to the core product finding engine, BugsEye, and it helped the business sell into new markets on the coat tails of SAP and Oracle who bundled the finding engine. Better.

So if you’re looking to grow your business, one way to orient your thinking may be to look for non-core growth strategies.

• Criteria: Low cost and complimentary to core—but not filling gaps in core necessarily
• How: Can be found by looking at ways to meet an alternative market need

And don’t forget to have fun, since creativity is essential in finding the right complimentary growth strategy.