Valuable Accounts

Here’s some old news—the world has changed. Things aren’t the same that they were 2 years ago. It’s not all bad, in fact, there are some very good things about the spot we find ourselves in (see my contrarian entry of December 28, 2009). But we have to operate in ways that help us succeed in this new world.

That goes for our account management programs as well. Account managers don’t need quotas and call logs to be successful. They need tools that help them serve and penetrate customers more effectively.

In the old world, we simply had to keep up with the growth that most of our customers were experiencing. In the new world, we have to understand our customers in a way that allows us to help them succeed. That’s how we find new opportunities to grow our businesses. Do account managers in your company have that understanding of your customers?

In the old world, we needed to convince our buyer of the value we provide. We did that by focusing on the product or service and its features. In the new world, the power often belongs with procurement. If we don’t build strong relationships with our buyers and develop solutions that help them drive their business, procurement will make a pure commodity of our offering. Do your account managers have the tools and direction they need to build these relationships and deliver solutions rather than products?

In the old world, capital was plentiful and we could take risks in how we allocated our resources. In the new world, our margin for error is tiny. We better be right when we make decisions to allocate resources, including decisions to allocate account managers and other resources to our most strategic accounts. Does your company make these decisions in a vacuum or based on gut feel, or do you use objective measures and input from the customers themselves?

It’s a new world. We must arm our account managers with tools that set them up to succeed.

You know that you have witnessed or experienced something remarkable when you say, “Wow!” When you say it aloud when you are the only one in the room, you have experienced something truly special.

This weekend, I saw a story about the latest structure to warrant the moniker of the World’s Tallest Building. The Burj Dubai was just opened in Dubai, The United Arab Emirates. The following chart gives a little perspective to just how tall the Burj Dubai is (follow this link for a list of the tallest buildings in order—The World Trade Center is not on the list, but would have come in at the tenth spot).
 

The pictures of the building would have made me say, “Wow!” if I were among other people. The chart showing how much taller the Burj Dubai is than other buildings designed to be inhabited made me say it out loud, very loud, when I was alone. By the way, The United Arab Emirates is home to an incredible 13 of the top 100 tallest buildings (33 are in China and 30 are in the USA).

That’s the kind of experience we want to create for our customers. How can we do something or help create an experience for our customers that makes them say, “Wow!” when they are all alone? That’s the kind of experience that creates a commitment that will allow you to power through many challenges and struggles, and achieve many successes together.

There are many things that are simply required in business relationships. And we must do those things really well. But doing the fundamentals flawlessly doesn’t create that moment that really gets your customer’s attention. That requires something else. That requires creating an experience for your customer that they will not forget.

Think about the things that are important to your customers and over-deliver. Surprise them with something that helps them. Do something for them that your competitors would never think of doing. Do something that creates an experience that really sets you apart.

Don’t tell them that you are going to over-deliver, don’t even tell them once you do it. Let them discover it for themselves and experience it. Let them look off in a daze and say to themselves, “Wow.”

Have you ever noticed that some people manage to find the worst in everything? Or how the grass is greener on every other side of every other fence?

The great philosophers have always recognized this. And I heard it from one of them this morning on my drive to work. This great philosopher was famous for his works in the 1970s and 1980s. His name? Meat Loaf.

In one of Meat Loaf’s hits which has become a cult-like classic, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, near the end of the song in a line that is repeated many times, he laments:

                        It was long ago and it was far away,
                        And it was so much better than it is today.

Meat Loaf, no surprise, wasn’t talking about a great macroeconomic environment or business trends, but it sums up how many people think about the situation we find ourselves in.

Here’s a bit of a contrarian view—I think we are better off today than we were 2 years ago. Here are a few reasons I think that…

·         Because a defeatist attitude will get you one thing—defeat.

·         Because 2 years ago things were so heated—overvalued, overleveraged, oversold, overbuilt, etc.—that there was only one way to go. And we went.

·         Because today we have a base to build on that is much more solid. A base we can grow from. Instead of treading on thin ice waiting to fall, we are now in a position to slowly, steadily, fundamentally grow again.

·         Because now we have all been through Marine Boot Camp. The Marines “knock ‘em down to build ‘em up.” We’ve been knocked down. We’ve learned a lot. We’ve survived and it will make us stronger.

So, as we head into 2010, I am very bullish. I am excited about the things that we are going to see in the coming years. I am excited for steady, controlled, fundamental growth that creates a stronger economy and more wealth for more people.

Best wishes for a prosperous 2010. We’re headed in the right direction now!

I just read an article about this in Reader’s Digest. Wowie. Most of the things would cause your stomach to turn, especially the three sections titled “What We Lie About,” “What You Don’t Want To Know,” and “What You’re Really Swallowing.” Sometimes that high level of trust that we place in restaurants may not be warranted.

Then I came to the end of the article and saw this snippet offered by Melissa McCracken, a longtime waitress in Hawaii.

Once on Mother’s Day, this older lady came in alone and told me that her kids weren’t able to be with her that year, but they had mailed her a gift card. So I told my manager that we had to make this an exceptional experience for her. I told her to come back with a friend some time and use her gift card because tonight, her meal was on us. We comped her dinner, and I sat with her through dessert while she told me about her kids. My coworkers were happy to cover my other tables for 15 minutes. The woman told me she would remember that dinner forever.

That’s the kind of experience that causes a customer to be so emotionally attached to your business that almost nothing will drive them away. And, they will look for reasons to buy from you more often. It is an experience driven by the unexpected, not the free meal.

Do something unexpected for your customers, and do it before the end of the year. Start the year off with a bunch of customers that have just been treated to an unexpected, good experience. Start the year off with a bunch of customers that will help you grow your business.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. In my entry titled Phil or Tiger? I wrote about the reasons that people are loyal to Phil (because we can relate to him) and Tiger (because we admire him). Whoa! OK, because we admired (past tense!) him. Tiger has offered us all a very important lesson about the slippery slope of image. (Note: I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of people judging Tiger. That doesn’t mean I agree with his actions, I simply think that angle has been covered and it’s not the point of this entry.)

Tiger worked very hard to create an image that really worked for him. It worked to the tune of $92 million in endorsements in 2009. That image started with his appearance on the Tonight Show and the Mike Douglas Show. It was built by his 3 consecutive wins in the U.S. Amateur, and grew with each of his 14 major championships. It was years in the making. Yet he destroyed it quickly.

Our images as companies are similar…it takes us a long time to build an image that we can rely on to help grow our businesses, an image that drives customers to us, an image that allows us to attract and hire the best people.

We work very hard to deliver an exceptional experience to our customers every time. We do that to build our image and our relationships. It takes a solid repetition of positive experiences to build that image and only one bad one to damage it.

Every experience you deliver to your customers must be good. Don’t allow yourself to ever get close to that slope of image-damaging disappointments. Tiger did and it was steep and very slippery.

For those of you who think a Gee Haw Whippy Diddle is the same as a Thing-a-ma-bob or a Whatchamacallit or Doohickey, let me fill you in. In the Appalachian mountains, people would often make their own toys out of the resources at hand, which often meant wood whittled or carved with their knives. The Gee Haw Whippy Diddle is one such toy. The toy has a propeller that, by rubbing a stick across notches carved in the handle, either turns to the right (“gees”) or turns to the left (“haws”). If you make a good one and know just how to handle it, you can successfully make it gee or haw on command.

Let me tell you, it’s not that easy. I can usually make one gee or haw but not make it go either direction on command. To do both you must really know the toy, have lots of experience with it and then treat it just right.

Just like customers. In order to really help our customers succeed, we must first really know them. We must build strong, trustworthy relationships with them. We must strive to understand their needs. We must really understand how their business and their industry works.

We must also understand that in order to make our relationship strong we need to constantly work on it. Persistent focus on helping our customers succeed will help to develop the trust we must have. This experience is the ingredient that both comes from and makes for long relationships.

We can never lose sight of our responsibility to take care of our customers. Ask yourself, “What have I done today to make my company as important to our customers as they are to us?” What valuable insight can you offer them today? What have you heard or read about their industry that they need to know? Take care of them constantly.

It takes a lot of practice to make a Gee Haw Whippy Diddle gee and haw. It takes a lot of work to earn the trust of your customers. It’s a good feeling when you can get a haw to follow a gee. It’s a great feeling when your customers come to you for advice because you have earned their trust and respect.

Here are a few things that I am thankful for that have popped into my head since Thanksgiving Day.

I am thankful that my wife (who made a great Thanksgiving meal and a terrifically prepared turkey) does not push leftover turkey. I know it’s healthy, but I’ve had enough.

I am thankful for clients that are extremely demanding—they make us more proactive, more innovative and more humble.

I am thankful for clients that have left us and told us why. They allow us to avoid mistakes in the future.

I am thankful for good competitors. They make us diligent and sure to bring our “A” game all the time.

I am thankful for all the people at Walker that challenge what we do to help our clients succeed—every day. They are the value that we deliver for our clients.

I am thankful for all our clients that trust us to help them solve their issues and leverage their opportunities. They are the heart and soul of our company.

I am thankful that sweet potatoes taste more like dessert than potatoes.

Companies spend billions of dollars on acquisitions. They spend millions of dollars with lawyers to make sure that the companies they buy are legally formed and protected from certain legal and business risks. They spend millions of dollars with accountants to make sure that the financial disclosures are a good representation of the target’s financial position and operating results. They spend millions of dollars with engineers to make sure that the products do what they are supposed to do. These millions are well worth it.

And most companies spend and do almost nothing with respect to the single biggest and most valuable asset in most transactions—the customer base.

Before you spend your shareholders’ money on acquiring another business, shouldn’t you know how valuable that single largest asset is?

Wouldn’t you like to know…

·         How loyal is the customer base that you are buying? Are they likely to continue to do business with you after the deal?

·         What are they loyal to…management? The brand? The product or service? The account team?

·         What challenges are customers having with the target?

·         What opportunities exist within the customer base to jump start post-deal growth?

·         How much of the revenue stream is in high risk of leaving?

·         How do customers view the target relative to its competitors?

Due diligence on the customer base—real due diligence, not the standard phone call to 5 pre-wired customers—can dramatically increase and accelerate value accretion. After all, what’s more important than the customers that account for every dollar of revenue that you are buying?

We all set goals for ourselves and then, truth be told, most of us forget the goals and just continue our daily routine. In order to succeed and help our customers succeed, we must be willing to be relentless in the pursuit of our goals.

There is a group of people that have formed a subculture that demonstrate this unending, unwavering drive to achieve. They are those people who set out to hike the Appalachian Trail from one end to the other in a single trip. They are called thru-hikers.

To add a little perspective to the goal of a thru-hike, the Appalachian Trail (AT) runs 2,178 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. Most thru-hikers start in Georgia in the spring and finish in Maine about 6 months later. And they do this with a backpack that can weigh as much as 40 pounds strapped to their back.

They walk anywhere from 10 to 20 miles each day, encountering many challenges that nature throws their way—weather, wildlife (bears, snakes, skunks, bees, etc.), dramatic elevation changes, primitive shelters or no shelter for sleeping, injuries (lots of ankle sprains, many ankle breaks), etc.

Now that you are convinced that they are crazy, what can we learn from them? Here are a few things that I think are worth applying to our everyday work.

1.      Teamwork. The thru-hikers are all on their own or in small groups. But they all help each other and work together to achieve their common goal—to summit Mt. Katahdin. They even give each other “trail names,” nicknames to be used only on the AT.

2.      Resourcefulness. Out in the wilderness, you get real resourceful, real fast. You learn how to find and filter water, how to find a safe place to sleep, how to dry wet clothes, how to keep the bears out of your food (and therefore out of your campsite!), and so on. Mostly, the thru-hikers use the many natural things at their disposal to accomplish these tasks.

3.      Self-Awareness. Thru-hikers go off the trail occasionally to go into town and buy food, medicine and other supplies. I won’t sugarcoat this—after a week on the trail, a hiker is hardly civilized. They smell, they are disheveled and they are dirty. But they recognize that and either spruce themselves up first or go to places that are known to cater to thru-hikers. Back on the trail, they rarely take risks that they are not capable of handling. Trying to climb a rock that is over your skill level is a quick way to injure yourself and require a trip home.

4.      Persistence. The hikers that make it from Springer to Katahdin are persistent. There are times they want to go off trail and go home and take a warm shower, have a drink and watch TV. But they know that the only way to achieve their goal is to stick with it. They trudge on in the rain because they know that the next day will be a sunny, dry 20-mile trek through beautiful terrain.

All of these traits can help us achieve our goals too. Work together as teams all pulling in the same direction to achieve the same goal—success for your customers. Be resourceful and find new ways to serve your customers and help them, especially during these challenging times. Know your strengths and leverage them. Know your weaknesses and compensate for them. And be persistent, relentless, uncompromising.

Take a thru-hiker approach to hitting your goals.  Think about how the sense of achievement that a thru-hiker must feel at the top of Mt. Katahdin.

If your business is like most, you have some problem customers (See my last post, Firing Customers to Increase Profits) and those customers could be harming your profitability in many ways, the worst of which might be by distracting you from properly serving your best customers.

So before you fire those problem customers, what steps should you take?

The first step is to make sure that you have correctly identified the customers that are hurting your profits (again, see last post and the study by Kaplan—check out the graph!). These customers are ones with which our mutual value equation is off kilter. We use a tool we call Value Mapping to understand the mutual value equation—what we are getting from the relationship and what do our customers think they are getting. When both halves of that equation are low, the customer will likely be in that 5% of customers that cost us 20% of our profits.

The second step is account planning with open communication. Sit down with your problem customers and have an open dialog with them about the difficulties you are having serving them in a mutually beneficial way. Just make your points clearly. Keep their perspective in mind while you are doing it, but still be firm in your communication. Then listen. And as hard as it is, let them vent. Let them be defensive (they probably will be). Don’t argue, just listen. Make a point to write down the things they are saying and points they are making. Even though they are arguing or being overly defensive, they hear you.

If you think the second step was hard, you might not like the third step. Find something in the notes you took that you can make point of “giving” on. Find an adjustment you can make. Make that adjustment publicly with them and make a big deal of it. Major mea culpa. Then expect some changes in their behavior too.

Give them a chance to change, but don’t wait too long. If they have had opportunities to come around and haven’t shown any willingness to do so, you are going to have to hike up your proverbial pants, take a deep breath and confront them. Work on the relationship and transform them into a profitable customer.

You might have to fire them if they are simply a bad customer (especially if they continue to push the ethical or moral boundaries discussed briefly in my last post), but work hard to avoid that. Just don’t ever think that it is out of the realm of possibilities.

And don’t let your problem customers destroy your relationships with your good customers.

Revenue is the life blood of business. I absolutely abhor the thought of giving up any revenue or suggesting that any business should do so. But sometimes, it is simply the right thing to do. Businesses are quick to deal with problem employees, but employees are a vital part of the value equation just like customers. Shouldn’t we deal with problem customers similarly? Problem customers, just like problem employees, harm our relationships with good customers.

The profitability equation is simply out of whack with some customer relationships. Some customers just cost too much to serve. See if any of these sound familiar…

·         The customer that starts your relationship with their procurement department negotiating all the value added components out of the relationship—then the customer accuses you of bringing no value. In order to deliver the value that you are accustomed to providing your customers, you add more resources, do more work, all under the contract and price negotiated originally. Profitability suffers.

·         The customer that negotiates your contract to the bare minimum level of acceptability, effectively commoditizing your business, yet continues to ask for more and more and more. Then, when you present or suggest a billing for the additional work, they accuse you of “nickel and diming” them. You don’t bill them, profitability suffers.

·         The customer that is so difficult to work with that none of your talented people wants to work them. Someone is assigned, tries to power through the combat duty and eventually you lose a good employee that you have invested in training and developing. Your profitability suffers.

·         The customer that continually pushes your people to cross ethical or moral boundaries. Your people can respond several ways to this dilemma (hopefully acquiescing is the way they refuse to respond!), none of which is generally healthy for the customer relationship (although taking the high road is always the best answer, but this is a more in depth topic for another time). Regardless, profitability suffers.

In all of these cases, your company might be better off without these customers. But companies often feel they are not in a position to do without and, therefore, they live with the drain on their business.

In a study done by Robert S. Kaplan of The Balanced Scorecard fame, he found companies have a few unprofitable customers that could be costing as much as 20% of the profits of the company. The following chart was published in that study.

Remember, the objective is to serve our customers in a way that helps them be more successful. Some of these problem customers prevent us from helping them and our other customers that aren't problems. That simply cannot be a customer-focused way of doing business.

So, should we fire these customers? Maybe, but as a last resort. There are many other things we should do first. That’s the topic for next time.

Do you have any scenarios of customers that drain profitability?

Wait a minute, what curse?! I thought we were supposed to be customer-driven…isn’t that a good thing? Everything I read says that customer-driven companies are more successful, not less. Nope, being a customer-driven company is detrimental to creating value for your company and your shareholders.

So, if not by our customers, how should our companies be driven? We have to drive our own companies. If we let customers drive and make our decisions for us, our companies would all be commoditized. Who would really make decisions for us? Procurement. Now, you’re starting to see things my way, huh?

So, just ignore the customer and run things our way, right? Hardly. We should be running our companies in a very customer-focused manner. It might sound like a fine line between customer-driven and customer-focused, but simply put, run your business by bringing your customers' perspectives into your decision-making and strategic-planning processes, run your business to help your customers succeed, run your business with customers in mind and always to deliver value to them; just make sure you are running your business and not your customers.   
     

The above chart is a great analysis of the impact of taking a good thing too far. In Customers at the Core by Schieffer and Leninger, they discovered that companies that were customer-driven (“customer controlled” in the chart) were far less profitable than those that were customer-focused (or, “customer insight controlled”).

Two good indications of being customer driven can be seen in how your company responds to price pressure and how certain account managers act during confrontational moments with customers.

When price pressure arises, does your company sound an alarm and figure out what you need to do to buckle to the pressure? Is it a foregone conclusion that you will acquiesce to the demand for a lower price? Or does your team work to better understand what your customer is trying to achieve and design a better solution then work to describe and document the value being delivered to your customer?

What about those confrontational moments or courageous conversations with your customers? Do your account managers handle those like they work for the customer, or like they work for you with the intent of helping your customers succeed? Ever say, or hear someone say, “Sometimes I wonder whether he works for us or for the customer”?

It may be a fine line, but working to help our customers succeed is a recipe for mutual success. Letting our customers drive our businesses and make decisions for us is one that will surely result in failure for our companies.

Every once in a while I come across another phenomenon of nature that reminds me of how incredible our world is. Nearly always, these little tidbits have interesting applications to our business world as well.

This summer my family was on vacation in South Carolina, spending most of our time on the beach. One morning, there were a few cannonball jellyfish washed up on the beach. I surprised my kids when, first I picked one up (these jellies, which have a rather solid body that is well-formed in a spherical shape, don’t really sting humans) and second when I predicted that the jellie did not live alone.

Sure enough, when I picked up the jellyfish and turned it over, inside was a longnosed spider crab. It is pretty common that small crabs live inside these jellies. Why? Because they work together to make each other’s life better—the scientific name for this relationship is symbiosis. The jellyfish attracts and kills more food than it actually eats. This provides a rich source of food for the spider crab. The crab, by eating every little crumb it can find, helps the jellie to keep clean, enabling it to live a healthy life and attract more food. The crabs also protect the jellies from other sea creatures that happen by to feed off the jellie, and the crab is protected from its predators by living inside the jellyfish. Working together, both are better off.

Relationships with our customers should work the same way. Good relationships are mutually valuable. We benefit and they benefit. Working together, we should both be better off.

We generally know when we are receiving the right level of value from a customer relationship. We know whether we are enjoying the appropriate level of profitability (contribution to fixed costs, gross margin, customer profit…whatever we measure), share of wallet, growth rate and other financial measures that are pretty easy to measure. We also know if we are getting good referrals or references from the customer, and we have a good sense as to whether they are good partners for us. We usually measure how good of a partner they are by thinking about things like: Is this customer a good strategic fit? Are they easy to work with? Do they challenge us and work with us to co-create?

We should also be clear in terms of the value we are providing them. The best way to determine that is to ask them. Many companies sit down with their customers and interview them about the value they are receiving. Some do it in a very formal scorecarding exercise and others do it informally as part of executive visits. Another way to determine the value they are receiving is to determine how loyal they are. There is usually a strong relationship between customers’ perceptions of the value you are delivering and how loyal they are to you.

In the best relationships, there is not a winner and a loser. There is not a supplier and customer. There are partners. Cannonball jellies and spider crabs. Who’s driving that relationship? Who knows. They work together constantly for the good of them both. I think that’s a good lesson for all business relationships.

OK, here it is straight up…one of my colleagues bet me that I could not write a meaningful and relevant blog entry about the world’s largest pumpkin. So I figured it is October (autumn in Indiana) and that seemed like a timely topic. Actually, that’s not at all true. I just can’t pass up a challenge like writing about the world’s largest anything, even a pumpkin.

If you watch the video—which is not very exciting, but it is mercifully short—you get an idea of the lengths that these gourd farmers go to in the effort of growing big pumpkins. This couple knows what they are doing and they compete against each other. There are a few things they do that I think we can learn from to grow big accounts.

First, they pick seeds that are genetically predisposed to grow large pumpkins. Makes sense, right? We should be choosing prospects that are “genetically” predisposed to be successful customers. That means we should understand the profile of our best customers well enough that we choose to chase prospects with similar profiles. What makes our most valuable customers strategic for us? What separates them from those that aren’t as valuable?

They second thing that the gourd growers did was nurture their pumpkins. They prepared the soil with compost, coffee grounds and other fertilizer and they diligently kept the weeds out of the pumpkin plants. We need to constantly nurture our strategic accounts too. Fertilize them with new ideas, new products or service offerings, their involvement in our innovation activities and flawless relationship management. As for the weeds, you probably can’t totally eradicate the weeds, but you can pull them before they become problematic. Same for service or quality issues. They might occur, but take care of them quickly before they fester and become serious issues.

Good healthy competition among account managers or pumpkin pushers is always effective too. It may not be as easy in account management as in pumpkin growing to watch the fruits of your labor each day, but creating ways to track how well we are doing against each other does stoke the friendly competitive fire in each of us. And that can drive results.

Lessons learned from the Great Pumpkin. Wonder what Linus and his blanket could offer?

Toyota is “grasping for salvation,” according to Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the founder of Toyota and the current leader of automotive titan. He also is quick to say that the way they turn the business around is by making better cars, cars that people want.

An article in Business Week details Toyoda’s comments from a recent press conference. It also discusses that he has reams of customer satisfaction data at his disposal. Reading this, I instantly recalled my most recent car-buying experiences and the customer satisfaction surveys that came with them.

First, the discussion of satisfaction vs. loyalty. With the exception of financial services and automotive industries, most companies are way past that. Satisfaction is simply a low standard that has no correlation to the outcomes we are trying to achieve. I’m sure Toyota scores very high on customer satisfaction surveys. Maybe this is the latest proof that satisfaction is not an adequate management tool.

Second, how are Toyota and other carmakers using their customer satisfaction surveys? I see automakers advertise satisfaction levels everywhere—magazines, television, billboards, etc. Yet, after completing several of these surveys, I have yet to be contacted in an effort to resolve or further understand any of my complaints.

Third, every survey I have taken after buying a car has been accompanied by “strong-arm” tactics from the salesperson regarding the scores that I intend to give them. Let’s face it…they don’t want to know how we feel! They simply want high scores.

General Motors is now controlled by the U.S. government. Toyota is teetering and forecasting an $8.4 billion loss for this year. Maybe it’s time the car companies get serious about listening to us (their customers) and really get customer-focused. Maybe we are the salvation that Toyota is grasping for.

I don’t ever remember my grandfather being mad at me. I do, however, remember like it was yesterday when I heard him say, “I am disappointed in you.” Ouch. And coming from my grandfather? Double ouch. And preceded with the drawn out, clearly articulated, full name salute, “Phillip?” Forget the band-aid, I need stitches.

Same thing goes in business. The big difference is, my grandfather couldn't fire me; your customers can and will if you disappoint them.

It really hurts when one of your best customers tells you that she is disappointed in you. It is such a personal, ego-crushing word. But I’ll bet that a little introspection would reveal that you deserved it. When we disappoint, we almost always have done so knowingly—probably not maliciously or with the intent to disappoint, but well aware of the risk that we were taking. The good news about that is, anything we do knowingly, we can choose to not do.

One way to avoid having to take the "disappointed medicine" is through proactive communication. Make sure that you are helping your customers solve their problems. Never assume that everything is great just because you haven’t heard from your customers. Assume the opposite. Assume you aren’t hearing from them because they are talking to your competitors.

Be proactive. Listen to your customers and act accordingly. Find ways to make sure that you are delivering the solutions they need, before they have to remind you, before they ask twice. Before they give the work to someone who won't disappoint them.

I remember as a child when my mother told me to clean out my toy box, I was not happy. It was a chore, a “no-fun” task. I dreaded it. But once I got started I always found things I had forgotten about, things that I later played with for hours. Looking back, cleaning out my toy box was one of the things that always paid off.

One of the things that always pays off for me now is my involvement with community organizations. Most of my community time now is spent with Special Olympics. The personal rewards for me are many and meaningful and I call on them almost daily.

But like my toy box, Special Olympics often surprises me with business pay offs too. I frequently find some type of inspiration that leads to a positive outcome in my business life. The latest inspiration that I found in my Special Olympics toy box came from the founder of Special Olympics, an incredible woman named Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Many of you might recognize her as the sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy. Both Mrs. Shriver and Senator Kennedy passed away in August 2009.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was one of the most visionary people of our times, especially when it comes to people and our society. Want a little inspiration from her? She founded Special Olympics 40 years ago. What did she do? She provided a safe place for those with intellectual disabilities to fit in, to make lasting friendships, to compete and improve their physical fitness. All of those things are very important and a tremendous task in and of themselves. But those are simply things that describe how she did what she set out to do. Those are how she changed the world forever.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver catalyzed a movement that has lasted 40 years and is still going strong. The movement includes Special Olympics athletes, their parents, their relatives, their friends, thousands of volunteers in every state and nearly every country and small, unbelievably dedicated staffs that make the organization run.

The movement has brought intellectually disabled people into the mainstream of our society. It has forever changed how the world views and treats those with intellectual disabilities. But here is the real kicker…it has changed each and every one of us that has been touched by the Special Olympics athlete that works in our office, bags groceries at our local grocery store, works at the home improvement store where we shop. The insights and inspiration we get from this dedicated, valuable and loyal part of our business world are priceless.

Mrs. Shriver set out to change our society. She gave a 40-year gold medal performance. All of the benefits that athletes derive in their daily participation in training and competition are really parts of the “how” she succeeded in changing our world. And this is terrific inspiration for those of us thinking about the value proposition that we bring to our customers. What are we ultimately trying to accomplish on their behalf? How can we bring profound change to their world in a way that makes them more successful?

Keep your eyes open. Inspiration is all around us.

Have you heard? The recession is over! Maybe technically, based on the definition of a recession it is over. Who knows? And when will we really know? We didn’t know we were even in a recession until six or seven months after it started. Actually, we knew, we felt it. It’s just the economists and other people who tell us what we need to know that didn’t know until six or seven months after we knew. Know what I mean?

So if the recession is over, should we do anything differently? I say no.

I think our customers are still hurting and still need our help. Anything we can do to help our customers survive this downturn will strengthen our relationship with them and ensure that we will continue to grow with them as we really do come out of the recession. Forget all about what you do and think about what problems your customers are dealing with. How can you help them solve those problems? How can your products or services help your customers gain additional revenue or reduce costs?

Companies must buckle down and use this opportunity to really understand and serve their customers effectively and in a way that drives value. Companies that succeed at that challenge will be the companies that enjoy dramatic growth as demand starts to regain traction.

Those that don’t? Well, at least they can rest assured that the recession is over.