Howard Shore Articles

1 Simple Time Management Secret with Huge Benefits - Click To Read Article
A truly effective executive keeps his/her time commitments. Regardless the industry, position one holds, function you are in, or size of company, it is critical to take being on time seriously. In addition, I believe that if you do not get to most meetings at least 15 minutes early you are losing huge opportunities. While being on time and keeping your meetings is necessary, being 15 minutes early can be a gold mine. I have had clients partially apply this secret, and the results were automatic.

Take Control and Increase Growth – Article 3 - Click To Read Article
The purpose of this article is to help business owners understand the key daily decisions that influence dependence on external funding and either limit or expand the growth potential of a business. There are essentially 4 decisions: 1. cash; 2. people; 3. strategy; and 4. execution. This article (#3) addresses strategy, which is the primary driver of growth. If you are not growing in the top tier of your industry segment you have a strategy problem. In this article are ideas to help you develop your strategy.

Take Control and Increase Growth - Article 1 of 4 - Click To Read Article
The purpose of this article is to help business owners understand the key daily decisions that influence dependence on external funding and either limit or expand the growth potential of a business. There are essentially 4 decisions: 1. cash; 2. people; 3. strategy; and 4. execution. Article 1 of 4 will focus on cash.

Take Control and Increase Growth Article 2 of 4 - Click To Read Article
The purpose of this article is to help business owners understand the key daily decisions that influence dependence on external funding and either limit or expand the growth potential of a business. There are essentially 4 decisions: 1) cash; 2) people; 3) strategy; and 4) execution. This article (#2) addresses how your decisions about people affect growth and identifies 6 ideas for growing your business.

State your goals the SMART WAY - Click To Read Article
The first step in successfully executing a goal is to state it properly. You know your goal is well stated when anyone who reads it knows exactly what you are trying to accomplish and in what time frame. The better a person states the goal, the easier it is to create the action plan. An acronym commonly used for stating a goal properly is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistically high, and Time-based).

Seven Steps to Delegating for Results - Click To Read Article
Have you ever noticed that great leaders are also excellent delegators? Delegation saves time, develops and motivates people, and makes an organization more productive. Therefore, it is fair to say that this is one of the most critical skills for any leader or manager to acquire. For this reason, I encourage every leader to become a master delegator.

Sales Results the Old Fashioned Way - Click To Read Article
The secret of success in sales does not lie in the places where most people look: - Product quality - Service - Brand recognition - Convenience - Price While these are factors in decision-making, they are secondary.

Select Seminars and Workshops with Purpose - Click To Read Article
Recently, one of my clients asked me about a seminar offered by a competitor. His questions to me were, “Howard, take a look at this and let me know if you think I should go, and if you want to come with me?” Rather than answer the questions directly, I left him with these thoughts and some questions to ask himself.

Remove Distractions to Ignite Sales Growth – Part 1 - Click To Read Article
The most common thief of sales growth is distraction. Based on my experience, I estimate that on average, employees lose 40% of their time to distractions. This number ranges between 30% and 60%, depending on the company they work for, and can reach as high as 70%, depending on the individual. Distractions can be classified into two types: 1) leadership and organization; and 2) individual-specific. The leadership and organization distractions can be categorized into poor sales support, customer service mishaps, products that do not meet client needs, bad sales management, and poor communications. “Individual-specific” distractions refer to daily mental or situational conditions faced by the salesperson. Part I deals with leadership and organization because these have a more dramatic impact on growth than most companies realize

Remove Distractions to Ignite Sales Growth Part 2 - Click To Read Article
There are two facets to “individual-specific” distractions: 1) state of mind, and 2) quality of activity. State of mind is the primary culprit. To complicate matters, a person’s state of mind changes constantly. It is important that a sales manager stay in touch with their sales staffs’ lives and how they are feeling. As people transition through the different stages of life, their motivations and distractions change. In addition, daily, their emotions will dramatically affect their ability to become distracted. This article identifies 14 common obstacles to a sales persons time.

Proper Time Management Earns Trust and Success - Click To Read Article
If you are regularly rescheduling, canceling, missing, or late to meetings you must read this article. Keeping your time commitments is a success secret that I share with every client. However, many do not take it seriously at first. They find it hard to accept that time management provides such a big opportunity. This is particularly true in Miami, where being late and canceling meetings is an epidemic of grave proportions. Resistance notwithstanding, time management is a concept that is basic and simple to apply, and the positive results are astronomical. Whether you are in sales, management, or working your way up the ladder, being on time and keeping your meetings can be a goldmine. I have had clients partially apply this secret and the results are automatic. Interested? Then read on!

Prospecting for More Sales in a Bad Economy - Click To Read Article
A poor economy has too often become an excuse for poor performance of many businesses. While the current economic situation is a contributing factor, many of these businesses can perform much better. Most businesses in the U.S. are small and have sales that equal less than 1% market share. If your business has less than one percent of market share, it should be able to grow in any economy. One hidden area in which to find more sales is right under your own roof. According to “Baseline Selling” by Dave Kurlan, 60% of all sales people are not prospecting consistently, and 50% of all sales people won’t prospect. Combine those figures with the fact that 60% of all sales people suffer from the habit of making excuses, and I think we have uncovered one of the secrets to bringing more sales to your top line.

Productivity Gains through Positive Motivation - Click To Read Article
As leaders, we are trying to make the whole organization equal to more than the sum of its parts. In today’s business environment, it is essential that we find ways to make our organizational resources more productive. In many organizations, the most prominent and expensive resource we have is our people. As a result, a lot of time is spent on creating processes and conditions that drive and motive our employees.

“People”…The Secret Ingredient to Success - Click To Read Article
In simple terms, you can measure your business success by how well you get customers, keep customers, and the efficiency of your operations. Many companies measure their success by revenues, income and other traditional accounting yardsticks. The problem is that the accounting approach measures how you did but not how you should have done. For example, take a company that grew 20% last year, and had $10 million in revenue. Its management team was weak, so it lost an additional 20% growth, missed out on another 5% in net margin, and had unnecessary turnover of 10% in client base. So this same company (assuming a 10% net margin) could have seen another $800K added to their bottom line. The one secret ingredient was “people.”

My Give a Damn’s Busted! - Click To Read Article
Is it possible that your employees are singing “My Give a Damn is Busted”? A common complaint of many business owners is that their employees lack motivation. However, the real problem is that employees are under-engaged, and there is plenty of research to support this.

Never Leave a Meeting Feeling Good - Click To Read Article
Do your meetings result in everyone feeling good after they leave? Does very little get done in your meetings? If so, your meetings function like most, and they are probably worthless! Most often leaders are concerned with there being too many meetings, or meetings being too long, or some other wrong measurement. I would like to suggest that you change your measurement systems. For example, a good leading indicator that something important is being discussed is conflict. Other indicators of good meetings are the number of decisions made and the number of people held accountable for decisions made at the prior meetings. These are real indicators that your meetings are worthwhile. If you have a really good meeting, then everyone leaves feeling uncomfortable because there is so much more to be done, and they have a stake in it!

Measure And Build Employee And Customer Loyalty - Click To Read Article
The two most important measurements in your business are not revenue and net profit. While these are clearly desired outcomes, to get them one must focus on employee loyalty and customer loyalty, in that order. More employee loyalty drives customer loyalty, resulting in more revenue and profit. It is that simple!

How To Improve Your Team - Click To Read Article
Millions of dollars are misspent every year on team-building exercises and programs that do not get to the core of unlocking the potential of team performance. Teams are sent to exotic places to participate in fancy programs and fun activities that fail to help them achieve peak performance. This article explores why team-building programs fail and recommends ways to improve your team’s performance.

HOW DO I BUILD A VALUABLE BUSINESS - Click To Read Article
If you would like to learn how to build a valuable business and get top dollar for your efforts, read further. Many business owners spend years building and working in their business with little or no thought about their value creation. One of my responsibilities at a Fortune 500 company was building one of its divisions through acquisition. While we successfully grew the division from $400 million to $600 million in revenue, I am most proud of the fact that we received almost $1 billion when selling it. This price was 38% higher than anything imagined internally or by investment banks we hired to explore alternatives. This had everything to do with how value was created.

Have Your Goals and Achieve Them Too! - Click To Read Article
You see it every day in your daily lives and particularly at year-end, with all of the New Year resolutions and business plans. Next year you are going to do all of those things you have never done, and more. Or maybe you just want to get back to where you used to be. You set goals for some really important reasons: - Keep you on target - Make better decisions - Keep you focused - Increase self-motivation - Develop self-confidence

Goal Epidemic - Click To Read Article
Are you setting goals for yourself and/or your organization with conviction? Even worse, are you part of the audience at large that does not make a habit of setting goals? If I were to audit all the goals you set for yourself and your organization for the last 5 years, what percentage did you achieve? If you have success rate of less than 90%, you need to read this article.

Fighting Time! - Click To Read Article
Do you feel you’re in a constant battle with time? Does time seem to be winning, no matter which technology, process, and system one uses? While the amount of time in a day, week and year remains the same, people are attempting to fit more commitments into the same finite time spans. After many years of observing and working with senior management, I have found a fundamental flaw in how they approach time. This flaw causes significant bottlenecks in their companies. Worse, their poor leadership regarding time strategies causes others to have problems with time.

Employee Motivation - 5 Steps to Apply When Mistakes Occur - Click To Read Article
CEOs and other leaders continue to recycle employees who failed to make perfect decisions and act properly every time. On the surface you might be thinking, how big was the mistake? Many of these executives also use the cliché, “We pay them the big bucks NOT to make mistakes.” Blame is typically being placed on the wrong people. Worse yet, the leaders who don’t tolerate errors typically hold people to standards higher than those that they themselves achieve and attainable by less than 1% of the population, if that much. These are the very same leaders who cannot understand why their employees are not motivated, the same leaders who typically offer better-than-average compensation to keep people, yet still find it difficult to retain or attract top talent.

Create A Habit of Goal-Setting - Click To Read Article
One of the most beneficial habits you can create in life is goal-setting. As an executive coach, one of my biggest priorities with clients is to get them to set and write down goals on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. By setting goals they dramatically increase success.

Delusion of Trust is Compromising Growth - Click To Read Article
Do you have absolute trust among your ownership and leadership teams? Do not answer yes too quickly. Every organization tells me they have trust, yet most do not. There has been no research around how much money lack of trust costs organizations every year, but I am confident that you can increase your revenue and profits substantially by facing this issue. If you have cracks in trust you are missing the foundation to teamwork and will find it impossible to achieve peak performance in your organization.

Consistently Grow Revenue at Record Levels – Article 1 of 2 - Click To Read Article
There are very few CEOs that are not concerned with sales growth. Ninety-five percent of CEOs that I have spoken with this year described their sales growth as follows: A. Overall sales are below last year. B. Overall sales are about the same as last year. C. We are growing, but our growth rate is slower than that of our top competitors. D. Our growth rate is slower than last year. E. Our growth rate is not where we want it to be. While this may not be a surprise, you’ll be interested to know that the solutions are easier than you think. Even more fascinating is that many companies are meeting sales targets that have been set extremely below potential.

Convincing Others To Willingly Accomplish Your Goals - Click To Read Article
Great leaders have mastered the art of getting things done through others. Even more impressive, their people do things required of them because they want to. This is a foreign concept to the many leaders and managers that seem to only get things done by doing it themselves or by brute force. Great leaders are able to achieve amazing things while the masses find themselves awake at night.

Business Networking Strategies: Are Memberships and Dues Worth It? - Click To Read Article
Many business owners and leaders spend a significant amount of money, time, and resources on memberships to various organizations and continually wonder if it’s worth it. This article is going to discuss ways to make sure you are investing your networking time and money wisely.

Business Plan and Implementation Principle 1 - Click To Read Article
Let’s say you are my employee, and I ask you to build a puzzle of 1,000 pieces. The challenges are that there are no square edges, you cannot see the picture of what the puzzle will look like in the end, and most of the picture is pure black or white. Oh, and by the way, I am going to give you extra pieces. How motivated are you to build this puzzle for me? Welcome to the typical business. This is how the majority of employees feel in most organizations and why most employees only do the minimum expected to keep their job.

Close Faster By Wearing Your Prospects’ Shoes - Click To Read Article
There are many skills salespeople need to learn to be successful. In teaching these skills I have found that there are two words in the English language that most salespeople fail to clearly understand in meaning and application: “sympathy” and “empathy.” Not knowing the difference, and not knowing which will help you earn sales success, can cause significant delays in deals or may break them.

ARE YOU MANAGING FOR RESULTS - Click To Read Article
If you manage others in your organization, you are responsible for identifying business objectives, establishing a clear set of expected outcomes, creating policies and procedures to guide daily activities, aligning appropriate resources, and providing the development and support necessary to maximize the likelihood that expected outcomes are achieved. How would you grade yourself in all of these areas?

Are you winning too much? - Click To Read Article
Winning too much is one of the most common issues we see in successful people, from the executive suite to the top salespeople. The suggestion that this might be a detriment is usually followed by an incredulous look from the recipient. After all, shouldn’t everyone want to win all the time? Actually, this one behavioral problem belies many others.

ARE YOU CREATING RAVING FANS? - Click To Read Article
Customer service is a key opportunity for most businesses in today’s marketplace to add and keep more customers as well as increase the bottom-line. Unfortunately, today’s customers have been forced to accept poor customer service as many companies have cut back on customer care in order to compete on price and profitability. This decision is hurting top and bottom-line results.

Are You Playing To Win or Not To Lose? - Click To Read Article
Emotions were running high in the last quarter of 2008, with the banking debacle, stock market meltdown, the soaring foreclosure rate, jobs losses, poor earnings reports. and dismal projections. Finally, the admission by the government, which had long denied the obvious, that we were in an economic recession. Nobody wants to use the word “depression,” but that’s the word that best describes the mood of the country. The result was that businesses and consumers put on the brakes. Most everyone started operating in a “playing not to lose” mindset. This mindset can be costly for your career and/or your business.

Are You Sending Mixed Motivation Messages? - Click To Read Article
It is so easy to send mixed messages to an employee. The best way to discuss this is to share a real live example where a client hired me to coach a partner. Then my client unwittingly made several decisions that totally demotivated his employee.

7 Tips To Boost Your Business in a Down Economy - Click To Read Article
Listening to the news and many CEOs, you would think the country is in a depression. At a minimum, these reports put listeners into a depression. While I’m willing to let a few individual businesses slide because of what they do (e.g. residential real estate in Miami), if your company is not growing the way you want it to, and/or margins are shrinking, the problem is inside your company. If you believe otherwise, you are deceiving yourself. In many cases, even in sectors where the group as a whole is doing poorly, you should still be able to do better than you’re doing. Just like Warren Buffet does in the stock market, you need to jump on opportunities when the market is down and be aggressive, not defensive.

7 KEYS TO BEING A GREAT NETWORKER - Click To Read Article
Why is it that some people seem to know everyone at functions and get what they want so easily in business while others seem to waste their time week after week? I have found that that there are 7 keys to successful networking.

A Business Network Makes You Powerful – Article 1 of 8 - Click To Read Article
There are three key accelerators to a person’s success: integrity, knowledge and network. While there are other things that are important to success, these are key drivers. However, without a personal network you are powerless! The larger and stronger your network is, the more powerful you become. Most people focus their attention on integrity and knowledge. However, the highly successful business people have figured out that building their network is essential to promoting their uniqueness as well as furthering a higher degree of success. You cannot build empires alone. Nonetheless, even if you are not trying to build an empire, it is always simpler to accomplish things with many people’s help than to try to go it alone.

A Business Network Makes You Powerful – Article 2 of 8 - Click To Read Article
As mentioned in the first article of this series, there are three key accelerators to a person’s success: integrity, knowledge, and network. While other things contribute to success, these are the key drivers. A significant aspect of these accelerators is that they interrelate with one another. Therefore, one must build a network with purpose. If you build your network properly it strengthens knowledge and integrity.

A Business Network Makes You Powerful – Article 3 of 8 - Click To Read Article
As I mentioned in Article 2, your success will grow in proportion to your network. At some point, like the Internet, it can just explode, and the growth of your net worth, both personally and financially, can be 20 to 50 times your network. One of the qualities that can accelerate one’s network is magnetism. The more magnetic you are, the more people are drawn to you.

A Business Network Makes You Powerful – Article 4 of 8 - Click To Read Article
The most powerful networkers I have met have learned the art of genuinely helping others. This art is called many things; in Business Network International (“BNI”) they call it “givers gain.” This is a very important concept if you truly want to get the most out of networking and day-to-day living. While helping others is an obvious key to success, many networkers are not very conscious about how well they maintain the ratio between their giving and receiving. Many are downright selfish.

A Business Network Makes You Powerful – Article 5 of 8 - Click To Read Article
With proper planning and strategy, you can populate your network with the right type of people in a reasonable amount of time. People who make the effort to constantly develop and nourish their networks will find that it is fun and rewarding. The following are 7 ways to build your network whether you are in sales or just want to further your career.

7 Time Management Secrets that Can Make You Wealthy - Click To Read Article
Do you want to increase your earnings by 50% or more? Who wouldn’t? The challenge is how to do that and work less at the same time. Many of the ultra-wealthy in our country have figured out how to do just that. After all, at one point the person now earning $20 million a year probably earned $200,000 or less at an earlier point in his/her career. That same person is not working a 100 times harder today. That person has learned to maximize their own productivity and to help others in their teams do the same. There are 7 secrets to time management that can make you wealthy:

15 Ways to Motivate Your Employees - Click To Read Article
In today’s business environment, it is essential that we find ways to make our organizational resources more productive. In many organizations, the most prominent and expensive resource we have is our people. As a result, a lot of time is spent on creating processes and conditions that drive and motivate our employees. If your are spending a lot of money on motivation speakers and seminars, stop wasting your money. Read this article and find out the proper ways to motivate your employees.

5 Keys to Business Success - Click To Read Article
As many of you have learned from my seminar “Turning Strategy into Action,” the difference between success and failure in business can really be broken down into key factors. While some owners are lucky to have the right product at the right time, most find that if they do not do these 5 things they will either fail or, worse yet, discover that they would have earned a better living by getting a job.


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