Tweet

Prepared to Succeed

Written by: James Chan

Article Overview: Opportunities are often what we define them to be. Mike McGrail didn't go to church to find a client; he went because he always did. A business plan is useful, but if it's too restrictive, it can blind you to opportunities that you're well equipped to realize.

Prepared to Succeed

Opportunities are often what we define them to be. Entrepeneurs are frequently faced not with well-defined challenges, but with ambiguous situations. What we make of such chances can change everything.

On one level, Mike McGrail's story, which begins with an encounter at church, sounds like someone who was touched by an angel. Mike doesn't see it that way. Rather, he believes that the key to his success was reacting boldly and imaginatively to an opportunity that many people might not have recognized. He grabbed the chance and thought big.

Mike spent the first two decades of his adult life working for some of the largest companies on earth. When the multinational for which he was working re-engineered him out of a job, he quickly hooked up with an exciting startup that grew quickly into a 6000-employee company. When that company was acquired, many of those employees were out of a job and Mike was among them.

Even when he had been working as a top manager in these large companies, Mike had encouraged his wife Mary to start independent businesses -- as a stockbroker, a real estate professional, and finally a trainer. After his second downsizing, Mike and Mary purchased a franchise to train executives how to be better leaders. They also offered training in job fit assessment, psychological testing, and time management, among other areas. The first few years were difficult. Even though he was able to bring in gross fees of more than $100,000, his overhead and marketing costs were large.

In fact, much of the McGrail Group's business came from selling services to friends and neighbors, many of whom were executives. (It can pay to live in an upscale neighborhood.) These referrals were generating other word-of-mouth recommendations. In short, the trends were positive, but in order to prosper, Mike and Mary needed a breakthrough.

Mike is a religious man, active in his church. He decided to become a lector, one who reads scripture to the congregation, so he signed up for a training course that the church was offering. During a break in the session, all the participants went to the church basement for refreshments. Mike sat down at a table by himself, not thinking much of anything. Then another lector trainee sat down beside him and asked Mike what he did for a living. "I own a management training company," Mike replied, and the man's eyes lit up.

"Here's my card," he said. "Give me a call Monday morning." Mike looked at the card. The stranger was general manager of a large company known for caring about its employees, just the kind of company Mike and Mary needed for a breakthrough. The first time they met, the general manager told Mike that he had a vision for radically changing the company's operations and the way it assessed its results, but that he had been frustrated because people within the company were unresponsive. The second time they met, he gave Mike a job, but it was a disappointing one. It involved one-on-one training with only one vice-president. This was far from the breakthrough his business required, but he did the work to everyone's satisfaction, and hoped for more. It didn't come.

The general manager was quite cordial when Mike came to make his pitch for more work. Later, though, he interrupted Mike in mid-sentence by throwing a book on the table. "Did you read this?" he asked. The book was The Goal by Eli Goldratt, an examination of synchronized manufacturing.

Mike was embarrassed to have to say he hadn't, especially since the book's subject was one in which he claimed expertise. But he told the client that he would read it and get back to him. When he read the book, he realized that he had been issued an important, though unspoken, invitation. The client wanted to make major changes at the company, this book suggested their direction, and in the course of his discussions with the client, he had gleaned a great deal of information about how the company worked.

Mike returned to the client not with a mere reaction, but with a detailed proposal for putting Goldratt's ideas to work in order to solve the specific operational problems the general manager had been discussing. Although Mike wasn't trained as a manufacturing engineer, he realized that just about every step in his career had prepared him to work on this task. Mike's proposal outlined how to make the most of his own expertise, as well as that of others he planned to draw on. The client accepted his proposal, a six-month project that involved an immense amount of work. As a result, the client was able to achieve a 50 percent inventory reduction, which had an immediate positive impact on the bottom line.

Mike's experience made him an expert in an area he was well qualified for, but had never thought of entering. And when Mike's client was absorbed by a larger company, for once it was good news for Mike. His program has been put to work in the UK, France, Brazil, China, Spain and elsewhere, generating new billing and new opportunities for him. He began training one employee, and now has changed the lives of thousands and helped make the company's products competitive in construction markets worldwide.

For Mike, the moral of this story is: "You have to be prepared to be successful." But he also sees it as a story about flexibility, the willingness to explore different kinds of business opportunities you haven't foreseen. A business plan is useful, but if it's too restrictive, it can blind you to opportunities that you're well equipped to realize.

Mike didn't go to church to find a client; he went because he always did. And if there is something faintly miraculous in this story, it is that his eventual client seemed from the beginning to see something in Mike that Mike hadn't yet discovered in himself.

Related Articles
  Scare Yourself Successful
  Be Prepared For Success!
  How to Sharpen Your Edge Using Fear
  Be your own boss
  Starting A Home Based Business? – Avoid These 6 Costly Blunders

Article Tags: adult life, ambiguous situations, downsizing, encounter, first few years, franchise, friends and neighbors, gross fees, independent businesses, mcgrail, psychological testing, referrals, religious man, scripture, stockbroker, time management, touched by an angel, upscale neighborhood, wife mary, word of mouth



Related Forum Posts
Re: Books for Business Owners - Hi DougSchadle, Thanks for sharing your favorite business book with us! A good book I'm reading now is "Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed" by Brian Tracy as it was a birthday gift from a friend. Tracy's book is helpful in identifying what's important in your life and then setting an action plan to achieve it.
Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succ - Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed Ronna Lichtenberg 2005 From the inside cover: "As a woman, you probably feel uncomfortable when it comes to promoting yourself and asking for what you want." WHAT IN THE HECK IS THIS, I asked myself when I read that. Women are the fastest growing business owners in the US and Canada, there are t housands of women executives and CEOs - though not as many as might be expected, admittedly, yet the book opens with this surely out of date stereotype. However, as she continued to give examples of women who had high paying jobs but were routinely not paid as much as men because it hadn't occurred to them to ask for raises, etc., I decided it was probably true for a majority of businesswomen... Anyway, more of the info from the jacket: "Other books have told you how to get what you want by being more like a guy. Pitch Like A Girl tells you why its an advantage to be who you are and how to do better by bringing more of yourself to work." The TOC: 1. Pink and Blue 2. The Quck-dry Chapter 3. What's In your head that's not in his 4. The Me, Inc Mindset 5. Visioning: Discover What You Really Want 6. Identifying Prospects 7. Pre-pitch homework and heartwork 8. Crafting the pitch 9. Pricing the pitch 10. Packaging the pitch 11. Delivering the pitch 12. Closing Conclusion A Word to the guys The Empathy Quotient The Systemizing Quotient Bibliography And on a side note - non-fiction books without indexes - of which this is one, annoy me.
Why women don't charge more - I just read a chapter in Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed, by Ronna Lichtenberg that deals with this. THe chapter is called Pricing the Pitch. "In a WAll Street Journal article about what might be holding women back from corporate success, Terry Dal, a former vice president at Wells Fargo bank, said, "Good girls don't advertise; only prostitutes advertise. We feel dirty promoting ourselves." The author's advice: The first step in getting the money you desserve is to understand the market rate for your offering. Not what you think you need, not what they're willing to pay, but the going rate for similar goods and services offered in your area by someone with your skills and experience. Then, seek expert advice. "Men routinely consult lawyers, financial advisers, exxecutive recruiters and any other paid counselors to help them assess what constitutes a fair fee." Your research into going rates should not lead you to a single price for your pitch but rather a range of prices - both a market range and a personal range, which should overlap but won't necessarily be identical. In pricing, one size does not fit all. The final step in determining your price is to consider what you think you'd be paid for the same job if you were a man. The author also discusses why women usually discount their prices (must'n't appear too over-confident), the difference between discounting and "giving a discount", and other issues. I'd advise every woman wondering about what to charge to read at least this chapter of the book.
Napoleon on Project Management - Why do I include this in a list of books aimed at female entrepreneurs? Well...in the expectation that there are as many female history buffs as male ones, and in the belief that anyone interested in history will find this book fascinating, while those interested in project management will learn a thing or two. I think this was the first "gimmick" book - an author using a historical figure (usually a male, military figure, it must be admitted) to talk about modern day business management. I refuse to read any of the kind that advocates - even obliquely - the techniques of the Sopranos or the Mossad - but these military ones are pretty fun. Anyway: Only in the understanding of history, Napoleon might say, do we gain an understanding of strategy in the present. In the same spirit, Napoleon on Project Management offers the recipe for successfully managing your commitments using the strategies, tactics and priorities that propelled Napoleon himself to victory. [The book doesn't gloss over how Napolean eventually fell in defeat, of course, and there's lessons to be learned there as well. TOC Foreword by Douglas James Allan (Napoleanic Society of America) 1. The Rise to Power -The Skills to Succeed -A Compelling Vision -Diplomacy and Networking -Lessons from the Great Campaigns 2. Napoleon's 6 Winning Principles -Introduction -Exactitude -Speed -Flexibility -Simplicity -Character -Moral Force 3. The Downfall -What Went Wrong -Lessons from the Russian Invasion and Waterloo -The Four Critical Warning Signs -Napoleon's Legacy


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

How To Calculate A Minimum Fee For Your Services

How to Sell to the Price Driven Customer

How to Develop Your Powers of Thought.

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.