Month: November 2014

The Jobs Only You Can Do

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/11/the-jobs-only-you-can-do.html

Sharing this awesome blog post…. “One of the milestones every entrepreneur passes is when she stops thinking of people she hires as expensive (“I could do that job for free”) and starts thinking of them as cheap (“This frees me up to do something more profitable.”)

When you get rid of every job you do that could be done by someone else, something needs to fill your time. And what you discover is that you’re imagining growth, building partnerships, rethinking the enterprise (working on your business instead of in it, as the emyth guys would say). Right now, you don’t even see those jobs, because you’re busy doing things that feel efficient instead.”

This concept really resonates with me as DMAI passes the milestone of one full year working on the invaluable.com account. One of my goals early on with this client was to find people to train and empower employees to take on more things as we grew. This freed me up to spend my time on other things and its worked like magic so far.

From my perspective one of the keys to being a successful entrepreneur is doing just what Seth’s talks about… focus your time on doing what no one else can do and delegate things that you don’t have to be the one doing. Managing Payroll. Recruiting. Operations Management. Business Development. All things I have passed off to my team so I can focus on other things.

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And the coolest thing we are seeing now, one year in… is the ones who I’ve delegated too… my leadership team, are now doing the same. Passing off tasks to new employees so they can focus on what they do best.

Its a pretty exciting story to talk about! A true case of empowerment!

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Hogan High Spartan Goes Global

This is a special blog post to my Hogan High classmates.

Just wanted to take a few minutes to share with you a few things that I have been up to as of late, that you may find interesting.

As some of you may know, about 3 years ago I left a long and successful career with Wells Fargo to set up my own company, DMAI, in the Philippines.

If you are interested in following my adventures, you can follow my blog at http://www.dmaiph.wordpress.com

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DMAI stands for decision-making, analytics and intelligence and is really all about offering training, consulting and customer support services to small and medium sized businesses both here in the U.S. and in the Philippines.

Over the past year, I have primarily focused on helping businesses here in the U.S. set up virtual and office based teams in the Philippines. Now, I know some of you may have an aversion to the concept of outsourcing, so let me assure you that my business doesn’t work with companies that are looking to cut jobs here and ship them overseas. I only work with companies who need to diversify their operations by adding overseas resources.

So why am I bringing this up now? Well, my company has been extremely successful as of late, so successful that I have an opportunity to share my expertise with companies looking at an overseas option.

If you know of anyone who might be interested in talking with me about the services DMAI offers, I’m happy to offer a referral fee of up to $1,000, depending on the value of the new relationship.

And in case any of you have and/or know college students looking for an internship opportunity, I do have an intern program as well. I teach college students to do some basic entry level data analysis and train them how to use free analytics applications. This can be a great resume builder and all of my interns have gone on to do some pretty cool stuff after graduating from schools like UC Berkeley and San Diego State.

Thanks for your time and I hope you enjoy the fast approaching Holiday Season.

Sincerely,

Dan Meyer
Class of 1987

5 Strategies For Recruiting Analytics Talent

http://data-informed.com/5-strategies-recruiting-training-decision-science-talent

Came across the above mentioned article. It starts, “A career in decision sciences/analytics continues to be one of the sexiest jobs of the 21st century, but the supply of analytics talent threatens to limit the promise of decision sciences.

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A report by McKinsey and Company estimates a shortfall of 140,000 to 190,000 data scientists and 1.5 million managers who have the skills needed to use the insights to drive decisions. And Gartner predicts that by 2015, big data will create 4.4 million jobs globally.

Data scientists are in short supply, but the dearth of decision scientists – the rare breed that combines the interdisciplinary prowess of math, business, technology, behavioral sciences, and design thinking – is even more alarming. For this reason, there needs to be an increased emphasis on recruiting and training as opposed to relying on acquisition.” The writer then listed his 5 strategies for recruiting analytics talent.

I have a few variations on his top 5, here they are:
1. Destroy the Top Talent Only Comes From Top Schools Myth
2. Test For Curiosity and a Learning Mind Set
3. Appreciate an Inter-Disciplinary Perspective
4. Teach the Art of Asking Questions
5. Be Both Big Picture and Tiny Detail Kinds of Analysts

So basically what it boils down too, is that business don’t just need high-end, well-educated data scientists, they need lots of people who think like analysts.

That’s what I specialize in, I take people who are curious, regardless of their background and I train them to unleash their curiosity and empower then to use data to make decisions.

Hiring a data scientist is not really an option for most companies I work with, but hiring one of my trainees to work in their office or online for their business is a very good option.

At The Mid-Point Of My First Five Year Plan

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/write-five-year-business-plan-1391.html

Came across this how to write a 5 year business plan article. I think its pretty good. Back when I was just starting BPO Elite, I spent a lot of time crafting a pretty thorough strategic plan that helped me really get a grasp on what I hoped to accomplish.

Whenever I consult with a small business owner or a senior manager at a larger company, it’s pretty easy to imagine the ones who wrote business plans… people who think strategically generally like to put thnings on paper and use that document like a blueprint.

Those who go more off gut feel and intuition… its a lot harder for me to help.

Anyway, I guess I am in the middle of a five year plan right now, so here is how I would articulate the DMAI 5 year plan.

Year One was all about laying the foundation. Not much money is made, but the connections you make will be difference makers. Finding fans and advocates are the big goals of year one.

Year Two was all about trial and error. Figure out what makes money and what doesn’t. Finding a mix of products and services that you enjoy and you can pay the bills with is key.

Year Three has been all about expansion. Adding more of what works, finding key people to delegate things to who also believe in your vision, adding roles that allow employees to see career growth. Its all about adding value.

Year Four will be all about duplicating thing to a scale to optimize the business and really start turning a significant profit. This is where you should expect to start getting paid some nice returns on investment.

Year Five will be all about spending more time doing what you love and less managing the things you don’t. By now you should have surrounded yourself with a core team who can run the business without you so you can actually really take some time off to smell the roses.

A Data-Driven Approach To Networking

Starting today, I am going to go into full networking hyper mode. My goal is to find a new outsourcing client here in the U.S. to add to my roster of DMAI clients who are using our services based in the Philippines.

I will also be looking for a few more consulting gigs here that are simple data analytics or market research projects that I can pass on to my intern teams. I have interns both in the U.S. and the Philippines.

So how to make my networking efforts more impactful. Using primarily LinkedIn, I will share blog posts, contribute to groups, add new connections and re-connect with existing ones to share with them updates on DMAI and what we offer.

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I will track all these efforts using a simple Excel spreadsheet. Using excel will help me set and meet daily quotas for new connections, shared articles and sending email messages to existing connections. Just this simple and easy to set up approach will make my networking 10x more impactful because each day I have a clear idea of what’s ahead of me.

For new connections, I had some interns make a list of over 200 companies in the U.S. who posted jobs on indeed.com . I will search LinkedIn to see who 2nd and 3rd connections at these companies are and who might be involved in business strategy, outsourcing and/or analytics and try and add them. I will not just send the standard add me connection request, but one of several canned intros I have prepare depending on job level, company type and how I think DMAI can help them. I will personalize each one. My goal is to do 20 connection requests a day for 10 days. Form that I hope to get about 5 hot leads to work on.

For sharing, I will repost and/or link to various blog posts I have written or will write over the next two weeks. My goal is to post to 10 groups a day. So in two weeks I will have shared my story over 100 times to a variety of analytics and outsourcing focused groups. From this effort I hope to get 2-3 more leads.

Finally, for re-connecting, I will send 10 emails a day to connections who might either be interested in our services or sharing our story with their connections who might. These will not be hard sell e-mails, but more an update on what I have been doing and how DMAI has grown since the last time we talked. I can export a list of my connections from LinkedIn that includes e-mail address of all my connections. I’ll then sort it by company and focus on connections with companies involved in analytics and/or outsourcing. Again a half dozen or so leads should come out of this.

So over the next two weeks, I plan on spending about 2 hours a day networking with 400 points of contact and hope to get 20 or so leads that will end up bringing me 1-2 clients.

And I will use an analytics approach to track my progress towards my goals and in the end give me a bunch of data to use to see where to refocus future networking efforts.

I will let you know how it goes. And if you ever want help doing something like this, DMAI has helped clients in the past with similar approaches!

Social Media Analytics – Is Your’s Doing What’s It Is Supposed To Be Doing?

There are so many free tools and resources out there to help manage social media. Many of them like Facebook Insights and LinkedIn Analytics are free and easy to use.

They easily capture demographic data on visitors and track social media buzz.

But are you using them to do the following?

1. Discover, monitor and measure online buzz. Do you pay attention to what generates more traffic and can you easily say why?

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2. Provide understandings what on your customers are thinking and saying publicly about your brand. How do you capture the text comments?

3. Systematically measure consumer sentiment toward your brand. Beyond likes and followers, do you have a more calculated way to measure satisfaction?

4. Learn more about content authors; engage brand advocates and critics as appropriate. So do you look at who is following you and making comments to understand how powerful they can be?

As you can imagine social media analytics is a lot more then just counting the numbers, you really need to dig deeper to find true meaning!