Improve Business Performance
Do you want to be a better leader?
Improve business performance?
Enjoy your leadership role?
- Let me offer you the chance to
- Benefit from my experience to determine business resources you need
- Develop business, marketing and sales strategy with good critical thinking,
- Plan to improve marketing and brand positioning.
- Think through staffing requirements.
- Create targeted metrics to meet goals
- Know variable and fixed costs to price appropriately
I am a former banker, corporate treasurer, CEO and consultant with strong marketing, finance and planning experience. I have walked that walk and seen it from both inside and out. Learn from my mistakes. Let me help you with thinking through your plan, setting your goals, planning your next steps, and determining how to get where you want to go and executing on your plan.
Taking a holistic approach to improve business performance includes defining what you want to accomplish, evaluating what you have done and where you want to build on your accomplishments. It also means thinking through how the world in which you operate is evolving and changing so that you can anticipate what is coming and be ready to meet it.
Finding Good Advice Starts With Good Questions
I am a big Seth Godin fan. His daily blog runs from the obvious but simply stated to the different and thought provoking. That is hard to do on a daily basis. I find he often takes something ordinary and makes me see it from a different perspective.
Seth Godin writes that good advice is priceless. “Not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. Not imaginary, but practical. Not based on fear, but on possibility. Not designed to make you feel better, designed to make you better.”
The real issue is finding and recognizing that good advice. Finding good advice starts with good questions asked. One thing that measure the quality of advice is the quality of the question that is asked. How difficult is it to both ask and receive a good question. Much harder than most people realize!
Everyone gets trapped in their own thoughts and plans. An independent mind can bring a new perspective, provide validation, improve the planning process. Like the old maxim about asking why five times to get to the route of the issue, questions done well make you think.
Sometimes a good question is not one that should be answered but gives you food for thought and changes your view of the decisions to be made.
Email me if you want to get some new questions. kputnam@me.com
We can talk. and question together.
CEO Assistant – Kate Putnam
CEOs need assisting but too many consultants have never been CEOs. That is why I have started my business – to be a CEO Assistant and counsellor. For years, I have enjoyed learning about other people’s businesses. I think it was why I went into banking in the first place – so I could see how lots of businesses do things. For 18 years I ran a manufacturing business and sat on countless boards. I realized how little people who were on the outside knew about running a business. I got lots of advice from people who had never managed another soul, but found it easy to tell me how to do it. My peers on various boards loved my insights and what I brought to them. People who worked with me told me that I helped them with their business, so I am finally formalizing what I have been doing for years. My method is this.
- Tell me what you see your problem to be.
- Let me ask you clarifying questions that we can discuss.
- Let’s agree on what the root cause of the problem is.
- We come up with a structure and plan to solve it that works for you and improves your business’s performance.
If I tell you what to do or what I would do, it might not work for you. But you need someone to ask you those questions that you might not ask yourself. That is why it needs to be collaborative.
The good news is that, as your CEO assistant and councillor, I can help you implement your idea or process or guide you to resources that can. Here is a link to the kinds of things I can do for you.
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