A risk, if you don’t keep visibility of it, becomes an issue. When it becomes an issue, you have to refocus, spend more money and change your resources around so you can actually solve the problem.”
— Shawn O'Rourke
UNITED STATES, June 19, 2019 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Risk is part of everyday life. However identifying risks and knowing how to mitigate them can make or break your day or worse — make or break a company and its reputation. For example, a daily commuter may use a GPS navigation app such as Waze to avoid accidents or traffic jams to ensure getting to the commuter’s destination on time. Waze gives turn-by-turn navigation based on user-submitted travel time and route detail information. The success of the app is based on other commuters’ submitted information. What about companies who document company risks but the proper project managers and executives are not informed? How does a company ensure the visibility of risks, opportunities and issues or ROI within the company?
Here’s an example. In a recent CNN report, the aerospace manufacturer Boeing knew about a problem with the 737 Max airplane before a fatal crash in October 2018. In Boeing’s official statement, the review of the faulty alert system was made by “… multiple company matter experts…” but the “Senior company leadership was not involved in the review and first became aware of the of this issue in the aftermath of the Lion Air accident.” According to this statement, if all responsible parties were informed, this deadly mistake could have been avoided.
“Many companies have created their own system in tracking risks within their company,” says Shawn O’Rourke, president of Pro-Concepts, a strategic risk management consulting firm. “However those systems are not always real-time and oftentimes they are not regularly maintained which could lead to missed risks.”
“Every organization faces risks and unfortunately issues impacting their business objectives and operations. Critical resources are expended in collecting and disseminating information from various resources to resolve each situation,” adds O’Rourke.
Pro-Concepts offers to companies Risk Radar® Enterprise, a web-based application. RRE assists in mitigating risks within a company. The latest version released in May is version 7.0 RRE. The application facilitates proactive management of risks, opportunities, and issues (ROI) and communications throughout the organization. It is designed to increase the visibility of the enterprise, program, and/or project ROI by helping managers determine the best way of identifying, analyzing, tracking, mitigating, and controlling ROI. RRE provides global access to a company’s vital risk data and enriches the interaction between executive management, program and project managers, their teams, and others within and outside the organization. This type of communication could have helped Boeing correct the alert system sooner and before lives were lost.
To better serve their clients, Pro-Concepts continually updates RRE. “The new release of RRE integrates real-time time tracking of risks and any resulting issues into a single solution. The solution empowers the organization to integrate, enhance, and streamline their risk and issue management program into daily workflows, says O’Rourke. “By proactively engaging all of your organization’s stakeholders, risk, issue and opportunity awareness is improved and a risk-resistant organizational culture is advanced.”
Risk Radar® Enterprise not only provides a real-time visible perspective but more importantly, encourages risk awareness and remediation participation--from the corporate board to critical frontline workers. For more information or a demonstration of the Risk Radar® Enterprise application, call (757) 502-8246 or email RiskRadar@proconceptsllc.com.
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Life Coach Is Trendy, But Therapy
Is Where You Will Find Answers
Life coaching is a booming industry. Everyone from struggling sales reps to executives and celebrities is hiring coaches to help them maximize their professional and personal potential.
But for many people who seek life coaching, therapy might be a better answer because it often exposes the roots of problems that pose obstacles for people personally and professionally, says John Collopy, author of The Reward of Knowing (www.johncollopy.com).
“Being coached isn’t nearly the same thing as being in therapy,” says Collopy, a successful real estate broker and sales manager whose book reflects on his battle with addiction and ongoing recovery. “There’s a tremendous reluctance among people to seek help from a qualified doctor when it comes to emotional issues, because therapy is a slow, introspective process that drills much deeper than life coaching.
“A lot of people aren’t willing to go that deep because they’re afraid of the truth. And they worry what people will think about the appearance of taking therapy.”
Collopy gives five reasons he thinks therapy is a better solution for personal and professional problems:
There’s no quick fix in therapy. “Honestly, all this motivational stuff among life coaches is popular because it’s easy,” Collopy says. “But it’s not real. It’s a game, showbiz. It’s often a lot of rah-rah in a big room or in small groups. Motivational speakers and life coaches do offer advice on how to quantify the quality of your life, but they can’t answer your central question of ‘Why do I do these things?’ ”
Prompts introspection. “Asking what’s wrong, why you’ve been depressed, why you are constantly stressed, etc., are much deeper personal questions than why haven’t you made your sales quota,” Collopy says. “A good therapist can help you get to know who you really are with questions like, ‘How did I get here? What do I want to change, and how can I look for opportunities to grow and improve?’ ”
Real breakthroughs happen. “In therapy, you know you’ve made a genuine breakthrough when you have an ah-ha moment of clarity, of self-discovery,” Collopy says. “It provides an insight into a part of yourself you’ve never acknowledged or even been aware of. That’s the moment when change ‘takes,’ not the moment when the seminar crowd jumps up and says, ‘Yay!’ ”
Forces accountability. “Can having a coach be beneficial?” Collopy asks. “Of course. A coach demands accountability, and in sales, accountability is essential. But you’re going to find it easier to become accountable to yourself if you first find out who you really are, which you do through therapy.”
Ends underlying troubles that drag you down. “If you have personal problems in your life, your life coach really can’t help you with that,” Collopy says. “You can’t perform adequately in your career if you’re dragged down by underlying personal problems, because they’re going to distract and exhaust you.”
“Why would anyone not want to work with a professional therapist,” says Collopy, “whose life’s work is helping people uncover what’s holding them back?”
About John Collopy
John Collopy (www.johncollopy.com), author of the book The Reward of Knowing, is the owner and broker of RE/MAX Results and its subsequent 38 offices across Minnesota and Wisconsin. With annual sales of more than $5.3 billion, RE/MAX Results is now one of the largest RE/MAX franchises in the world. Collopy lives in Minnesota with his wife and children.
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*For a review copy of Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader's Guide or an interview with Lindsay Pedersen, please contact Dottie DeHart, DeHart & Company Public Relations, at (828) 325-4966 or simply reply to this email.
Six Ways a Strong Brand Makes Your Company Money
If you haven't given much thought to your company's brand, you'd better. A strong, well-defined, well-articulated brand increases your profitability in many ways. Here are six of them.
Seattle, WA (June 2019)—Many company owners go about their business without thinking much about brand. They either ignore it altogether, hand it off to marketing (or maybe a talented graphic designer), or make strategic decisions based on an incomplete understanding of what brand really means. If one of these describes you, Lindsay Pedersen says you could be making a big financial faux pas: A strong brand can be a huge money maker.
"Your company's brand may not be a dedicated line item on your P&L, but your profit will absolutely increase based on the strength of your brand," says Pedersen, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader's Guide (Lioncrest Publishing, April 2019, ISBN: 978-1-544-51386-7, $27.99). "It's too bad so many leaders think brand is 'squishy' or insubstantial, because it serves a very pragmatic economic purpose."
In fact, she points out, a recent study found that 87 percent of business value among the S&P 500 is intangible value, including brand equity. Another study valued S&P 500 companies' intangible assets at 74 percent, with brand comprising 20 percent of that.
So, what exactly is brand? While Pedersen admits the concept can be tough to pin down, she defines it as "the interconnected web of what our business means and how we deliver that meaning, all made possible by our special position in our customer's universe." (NOTE: See attached tipsheet.)
Pedersen says brand should be a company's North Star. Every decision you make should be filtered through it. Forging what she calls an ironclad brand lets you occupy the single best position in the hearts and minds of your customers. When you pinpoint this optimal position, you'll be able to create value, maximize scale, and lead with purpose.
That said, here are six ways a strong brand creates immediate value:
It creates a high "willingness-to-pay" factor, which translates directly to better margins. In a recent study, strong brands on average commanded a 13 percent price premium over weak brands. Look to your own purchasing behavior. When you love a brand, aren't you willing to pay more for it than for an alternative brand? Renowned brands like Apple, Mercedes-Benz, and Williams-Sonoma—or niche brands like Lululemon, Campagnolo, and Vitamix—are examples.
It commands attention and makes it easy for customers to choose you. Consider the infinite stimuli competing for your customers' attention. To break through and secure a place in their minds—and their wallets—you need to make it easy for them to notice you. The solution is not to shout the most loudly—most lack the marketing budget to shout loudly enough. The solution instead is bracing clarity. Be crystal clear about what your business is and why that matters to customers. This way the customer's mind has to do less work to grasp your offering.
It enables you to hit that sweet spot between old and new that persuades people to buy. Wharton School marketing professor Jonah Berger writes in his book Invisible Influence that people like a blend of similarity and difference. When it's the right blend, he refers to it as "optimally distinct." For a brand position to be compelling to customers, it should be similar enough to something a customer already knows so that the person will feel its "warm glow of familiarity," as Berger has called it—yet it should be different enough that it stirs the customer's curiosity and desire to be different themselves.
"When selling something new, it helps to piggyback it on top of something else the customer already understands," notes Pedersen. "This is why automobiles were positioned as 'horseless carriages.' It's also why Airbnb referenced the familiar B&B idea, with its associations of belonging and safety and psychological comfort, when trying to persuade people to embrace the dramatically new idea of sleeping in non-hotel beds they find on the Internet."
It sets the groundwork for customer loyalty. Your brand strategy enables you to focus on what matters to the target customer—on that which produces customer desire for your business. Once customers have found it easy to see you and buy you, and those customers value your big benefit, they will love your business. In this way, great brands deepen and lengthen your customer relationships, increasing customer lifetime value. Brands set the conditions for loyal customers who come back again and again because you singularly bring significant value.
"Starbucks brings a big benefit—good coffee, uplifting third-place space, human connection, consistency across locations," notes Pedersen. "This fills a deep need and delivers meaningful value, which spurs loyalty. It makes somebody a customer not just once, but countless times."
It "digs a moat" around your business. A great brand is good defense. It protects what you have, helping you to survive and defend, as well as thrive and grow. If you have built a powerful brand, your competitors cannot credibly copy it, and this un-copy-ability protects your business's long-term value. Pretty much everything else can be copied, given enough time. Patents expire; features obsolesce. But it is hard to copy an emotional territory that your brand occupies in the mind of your customer.
"A strong brand is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage," notes Pedersen. "Consider that Brooks Brothers has been around since 1818, DuPont since 1802, and Jim Beam since 1795—and our country goes back to only 1776!"
Finally, it guides strategic decision-making. When your brand is well defined, you can look to it to filter where and how you can innovate, or what categories you can expand into, with confidence in your ability to grow. In this way, it prevents you from making costly mistakes.
"If I am the CEO of Brooks Running and I'm considering areas for innovation, I look to my brand, represented by the tagline of 'Run Happy,'" says Pedersen. "My brand is about the joy of running—not the joy of skateboarding, not the joy of sports in general, not even about running for the sake of things other than joy. This lens puts into sharp relief where I can or cannot grow, making my decisions easier and more accurate."
Keep in mind that all of these money-making benefits hold true ONLY if your brand is strong.
"A weak, anemic brand simply doesn't command the same value," says Pedersen. "Make sure yours is customer motivating, distinctive and ownable, simple and singular, and that it leverages your unique competencies. The strength of your brand is just too important to leave to chance."
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What Is Brand, Anyway?
The Seven Layers of Brand and How They Fuel Your Business
Excerpted from Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader's Guide
(Lioncrest Publishing, April 2019, ISBN: 978-1-544-51386-7, $27.99)
by Lindsay Pedersen
We all use the word "brand" as though everyone else's understanding of it were the same as ours. Yet chances are it's not, says Lindsay Pedersen, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand.
"Logo is part of brand," she says. "TV and social media are parts of brand. Naming is part of brand. So are your product, your customer experience, and your SEO tactics. So are your font, your tagline, your business's personality, and the color of your employee uniforms. But none of those are, by themselves, brand."
To make smart decisions around shaping and communicating your brand strategy, it's important to understand all the aspects. In her book, Pedersen identifies seven layers of brand:
Brand Is What You Stand For. It's what you mean to your customer. It's the place you occupy in his or her mind. Everything your business does either reinforces your meaning, solidifying and growing its place in the customer's mind—or it weakens that meaning, blurring its place in the customer's mind. If you sell shoes that enable customers to run fast, everything you do reinforces or blurs your meaning of fast shoes. If you sell hospital software that streamlines patient check-in, everything you do reinforces or blurs your meaning of streamlined check-in.
Brand Is a Relationship Between Your Business and Your Customer. These relationships have existed for millennia. The pre-Industrial Age, small-town butcher made a promise and faithfully fulfilled it time and time again, making his relationship with his customer ever more meaningful for both. Today, with the web and social media and the countless ways customers can communicate with a business, it's even more important to deliver value.
There was a time when the business with the most spending power had the loudest megaphone and, therefore, the most powerful brand. Now, the customer has a megaphone, too, and once again carries clout in the relationship. The feedback loop demands a mutually fulfilling relationship. Businesses must carefully make distinctive promises and deliver on them faithfully.
Brand Is Your Promise and Your Fulfilment of That Promise. When a brand has integrity, its promise is true. The business makes a promise—to deliver a scrumptious-tasting dinner, or eliminate a software system's downtime, or make a home-buying experience more enjoyable—and delivers on that promise. It is not merely what you say you do—it is what you actually do, how you do it, and why.
As Don Knauss, previously CEO of Clorox and head of North American operations for Coke, puts it: "A brand is a promise of performance. Any transaction between two parties requires a promise of performance. To sustain your business over time, you've got to, first, be very focused on defining your promise of performance and, second, be diligent about delivering consistently. If you can't do these two things, you are not a sustainable business."
Brand Is a Filter. A brand captures and guides attention. It serves as a filter for customers as they perceive your business, shaping how they see you and believe you. We humans need these filters. When faced with too much information, we use cognitive shortcuts as filters to tame sensory overload. Brand ties your business to something already in your customer's head, making it easier for the person to engage with your business. Brand creates a similar neural pathway, leading the customer to choose your business with ease.
Brand Strategy Is the Deliberate Articulation of Your Business's Meaning. While brand is the meaning you stand for inside your customer's mind, your brand strategy is the deliberate articulation of that meaning. Brand strategy distills your promise so you can make choices across your business to carry out that promise. It answers the questions: What kind of business are we, and what kind of business do we want to be? What do we want to mean to customers?
By distilling what you stand for, you give yourself a tool to guide the choices you make to grow the business you want. Brand strategy is about getting to self-knowledge. It's about defining your business as its best possible self, so that it can become more of that—more of its most intentional, most purposeful self.
Brand Fuels Differentiation. Consumer packaged goods leaders, like those at Clorox, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, and Nestlé, have been using the power of brand for decades because they have to. Consumer packaged goods companies are bastions of excellent brand-building, because the largely undifferentiated products force brand excellence. When your products are pretty much the same as those of your competitors, you better have an outstanding brand.
A bottle of Clorox bleach contains essentially the same bleach as store-brand bleach—6 percent sodium hypochlorite, 94 percent water. But the consumer price of Clorox bleach is often double that of store-brand bleach, and Clorox bleach still wins 65 percent market share of the bleach category. That's because the Clorox brand stands for something different from the others, something that resonates and motivates the target customer. Clorox stands for feeling like a good, competent, loving parent. The target customer values this, and Clorox can deliver this.
Brand Is Your North Star. When every element of your business is aligned around a single brand strategy, you leverage human nature to work for you, and all parts of your business work in concert. This creates a compounding loop of goodness for customers, employees, and investors. Operating this way simply makes growth easier and more gratifying.
Successful brand strategies are not squishy, elusive, or superficial. They are logical, proven, and always ready to guide you. When you create a brand strategy deliberately and carefully, you define the business's North Star that will clearly guide every decision you make and every decision your team makes. Brand forms your most durable competitive advantage. It lights your way to creating purpose, value, and scale.
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About the Author:
Lindsay Pedersen is the author of Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader's Guide. She is a brand strategist, board advisor, coach, speaker, and teacher known for her scientific, growth-oriented approach to brand building. She developed the Ironclad Method for value-creating brands while working with billion-dollar businesses like Starbucks, Clorox, Zulily, T-Mobile, and IMDb, as well as many burgeoning start-ups. Lindsay lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.
For more information, please visit www.ironcladbrandstrategy.com.
About the Book:
Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader's Guide (Lioncrest Publishing, April 2019, ISBN: 978-1-544-51386-7, $27.99) is available at bookstores nationwide and from major online booksellers.
