Norm Brodsky in Inc Magazine “Selling My Company (Again)”

Posted on Aug 20, 2009 in Records Management News

Norm Brod­sky: Sell­ing My Com­pany (Again)

I thought I cashed out. But then the credit squeeze changed my plans By Norm Brod­sky | Sep 1, 2009

Yogi Berra famously observed, while man­ag­ing the New York Mets, that “it ain’t over till it’s over.” Now I know what he meant.

If you fol­lowed the saga of the sale of CitiS­tor­age and my two other com­pa­nies (see “The Offer: Parts One–11″), you prob­a­bly fig­ured — as I did — that I had wrapped up that par­tic­u­lar phase of my busi­ness career back on Decem­ber 21, 2007, when Allied Cap­i­tal acquired a major­ity stake in the busi­ness and I went from being CEO and prin­ci­pal owner to well-paid adviser. Well, not so fast, Kowal­ski. For the past six months or so, I have been work­ing to find a new owner for the records-storage, document-destruction, and deliv­ery busi­nesses I spent most of my adult life build­ing. Along the way, I’ve had a front-row seat to the unfold­ing finan­cial cri­sis, and I’ve seen how and why it has caused the rest of the econ­omy to seize up. I’ve held off writ­ing about the expe­ri­ence out of fair­ness to the other par­ties involved, but we’re now at a point where I feel I can share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned.

To read the whole arti­cle click here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090901/norm-brodsky-selling-my-company-again.html

Com­ple­ments of File­Man Research

To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/ Cary

PRISM’s Economic Barometer Mid Year 2009

Posted on Aug 20, 2009 in Records Management News

For more Infor­ma­tion con­tact PRISM Inter­na­tional (jim@prismintl.org)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The infor­ma­tion man­age­ment indus­try remains resilient in tough eco­nomic times; in mea­sur­ing changes between Q4 2008 and Q1 of 2009 there is a slight down­ward trend in some key indi­ca­tors. In all mea­sures, sur­vey respon­dents remain opti­mistic about sales, show increases in items in stor­age over the pre­vi­ous year, and most did not imple­ment any types of cost sav­ing mea­sures dur­ing the first quar­ter of 2009. In addi­tion, job losses have not affected the indus­try in any sig­nif­i­cant way, but they are increas­ing (albeit slightly). Job growth con­tin­ues to out­pace losses in the first quar­ter of 2009 but the gap is nar­row­ing. Most mem­bers did not require credit in the fourth quar­ter; for those using credit, the mar­ket remains tight. Most mem­bers who sought credit were able to find it. Web based mar­ket­ing jumped ahead of exist­ing cus­tomers to become the most pro­duc­tive chan­nel for mar­ket­ing. Almost all respon­dents con­tinue explor­ing ways to broaden their cus­tomer base and increase their value propo­si­tion to exist­ing clients as a means of respond­ing to the eco­nomic down­turn. Some cap­i­tal improve­ments and invest­ments are being delayed by respon­dents – so rene­go­ti­a­tion of terms with ven­dors is tak­ing place. In Q1 2009, as in the pre­vi­ous quar­ter, the indus­try seems to have weath­ered the finan­cial storm very well and, accord­ing to respon­dents, is posi­tioned for con­tin­ued growth in 2009.

INTRODUCTION
This is the sec­ond in a series of quar­terly busi­ness barom­e­ter stud­ies con­ducted dur­ing this period of gen­eral global eco­nomic down­turn. This sum­mary mea­sures the first quar­ter of 2009. 43 mem­bers out of 440 total com­pany mem­bers responded to the sur­vey (9.7%).

The sur­vey instru­ment was designed to mea­sure real growth or decline, atti­tudes regard­ing growth or decline, pro­duc­tive and non-productive mar­ket­ing strate­gies, grow­ing and declin­ing ser­vice offer­ings, and the avail­abil­ity or restric­tion of credit and financ­ing. Mea­sure­ments were also sought regard­ing new hir­ing or force reduc­tion, response strate­gies to the eco­nomic down­turn, receiv­ables aging and cap­i­tal projects. The results of the sur­vey are out­lined below.

39% OF RESPONDENTS REPORT THAT ITEMS IN STORAGE HAVE INCREASED BY MORE THAN 10 PERCENT COMPARED Q1 2008. In addi­tion, 25 % of respon­dents reported that their inven­tory of items in stor­age increased less than 10% and 28% reported no change. Only 7% of sur­vey respon­dents reported a decline of items in stor­age com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year, and this decline was less than 10%. (Note: Com­pared to Q4 2008, Q1 2009’s rate of growth slowed by more than 10%)

HARD COPY RECORDS STORAGE REMAINS THE FASTEST GROWING SERVICE OFFERING FOR 60% OF RESPONDENTS. Shred­ding ser­vices cap­tured sec­ond place among respon­dents with 28%. Scan­ning was a close third with 21%. Tape stor­age and dig­i­tal records stor­age indi­cated the low­est rates of growth among respondents.

INDUSTRY CONTINUES TO REPORT MORE NEW HIRES THAN LAYOFFS – 60% OF EMPLOYERS REPORT THAT EMPLOYEE HEAD COUNT IS UNCHANGED. 11% of employ­ees have low­ered their total num­ber of employ­ees by less than 10% and 2% of respon­dents have low­ered their head­count by more than 10%. 14% of respon­dents have increased their num­ber of employ­ees by less than 10%. 11% of employ­ers have increased employ­ees by more than 10%. (Note: Com­pared to Q4 2008, employee head count is grow­ing at an almost flat pace.)

SEARCH ENGINE AND WEBSITE LEADS SURPASS EXISTING CLIENTS IN MARKETING RESULTS. 51% of respon­dents reported web­site and search engines gen­er­ated the major­ity of their mar­ket­ing results. Exist­ing clients fell to 36%.Yellow pages and direct mail mar­ket­ing scored poorly on the sur­vey. Face to face mar­ket­ing is still a main­stay of the indus­try with net­work­ing scor­ing 27% and cold call­ing scor­ing 18% as the most pro­duc­tive mar­ket­ing strat­egy for respondents.

HALF OF RESPONDENTS DID NOT IMPLEMENT ANY TYPE OF COST SAVING MEASURES IN THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2009. 32% of respon­dents reported delay­ing cap­i­tal improve­ments. 19% of respon­dents reported reduc­ing employee hours. In addi­tion to cat­e­gories mea­sured sev­eral respon­dents indi­cated that they had “reviewed and altered ven­dor or sup­plier agree­ments.” Oth­ers reported they had “elim­i­nated over­time,” “ini­ti­ated more expense mon­i­tor­ing or strict con­trol of expenses,” and acted to “reduce oper­at­ing costs.”

75% of respon­dents reported future plans to lower expenses and 12% of respon­dents plan to post­pone invest­ments to deal with the cur­rent down­turn. 87% of respon­dents plan to search for new clients and 65% plan to increase value of ser­vices to retain clients as a response to cur­rent eco­nomic con­di­tions. Other strate­gies respon­dents vol­un­teered included “adding branches to help with regional deals,” “tele­mar­ket­ing,” “adding and retrain­ing sales staff,” “major over­haul on web­site includ­ing e-mail offers.”

38% OF RESPONDENTS DID NOT REQUIRE CREDIT IN Q1 2009. An addi­tional 31% did not notice a dif­fer­ence in avail­able credit. Among the remain­der of respon­dents, 14% found avail­able credit with greater restric­tions (or scrutiny), 7% found credit with greater restric­tions and a higher inter­est rate and 7% of respon­dents did not find a source of credit.

60% OF RESPONDENTS SAW NO DECLINE OF CASH FLOW DUE TO RECEIVABLES AGING. One third of respon­dents responded by increas­ing col­lec­tions calls. Only 10% responded by restrict­ing ser­vices until over­due accounts were paid. 2% responded by ini­ti­at­ing legal action to col­lect. .One respon­dent reported “respond­ing to customer’s requests for addi­tional time to main­tain cash balances.”

RECORDS ABANDONMENT IS ON THE RISE. 53% noticed no change in the num­ber of clients aban­don­ing records (down from 80% in Q4); 28% saw a mod­er­ate increase and 14% noticed a sig­nif­i­cant increase. Respon­dents reported “shred­ding is 25% higher,” “more [aban­don­ment] in first quar­ter than in last 10 years,” and “sev­eral clients [have aban­doned] but not with many boxes.”

THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT! 53% of respon­dents are mod­er­ately opti­mistic about the next 12 months. 16% are very opti­mistic. 16% are neu­tral. Only 9% of respon­dents are mod­er­ately pes­simistic about the next 12 months – 5% of respon­dents were very pes­simistic. 63% of respon­dents are expect­ing a mod­er­ate increase in sales; 14% of respon­dents are expect­ing a sharp increase in sales. Only 4% of respon­dents antic­i­pate a decline in sales in the next six months. (Note: This num­ber is trend­ing upward toward mod­er­ate growth from Q4 2008.)

IN 2009 MORE THAN HALF OF RESPONDENTS (51%) EXPECT THEIR COMPANY’S REVENUE TO GROW BY MORE THAN 10%. An addi­tional 32% expect their rev­enue to grow by less than 10%. Nine per­cent of respon­dents are antic­i­pat­ing no growth or decline and 5% antic­i­pate a decline of less than 10 % in rev­enues – 2% antic­i­pate a decline of more than 10% in rev­enue.
For more Infor­ma­tion con­tact PRISM Inter­na­tional (jim@prismintl.org)

Amazon cloud evangelist Simone Brunozzi to give Storage Expo opening address

Posted on Aug 19, 2009 in Records Management News

Ama­zon cloud evan­ge­list to give Stor­age Expo open­ing address August 2009 by Marc Jacob

This year’s Stor­age Expo promises to be a ground-breaking event, with atten­dees able to gain direct access to some of the industry’s most knowl­edge­able experts on the sub­ject of data stor­age, infor­ma­tion and con­tent management.

Kick­ing off a com­pre­hen­sive two-day edu­ca­tion and sem­i­nar pro­gramme at the event — which takes place at Lon­don Olympia on Octo­ber 14–15 — is a pres­ti­gious open­ing address from Simone Brunozzi, Ama­zon Europe’s Web Ser­vice Tech­nol­ogy Evangelist.

Mr. Brunozzi will be giv­ing his audi­ence a case study pre­sen­ta­tion on Amazon’s cloud ser­vices and activ­i­ties, as well as out­lin­ing the poten­tial ben­e­fits — and pit­falls — of cloud tech­nol­ogy to busi­nesses. Read more … http://www.globalsecuritymag.com/Amazon-cloud-evangelist-to-give,20090818,11825.html

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research … To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/

Cary

Creating a Client Relationship Management (CRM) Strategy

Posted on Aug 19, 2009 in Records Management News

Cre­at­ing a Client Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) Strategy

Con­tact Man­age­ment Strat­egy should have a binoc­u­lar cen­ter; i.e., both a “Client Focused Strat­egy” and a “Prospect Focused Strat­egy”. Each is sim­i­lar in struc­ture but with slightly dif­fer­ent imple­men­ta­tion method.

Many have attempted to define a con­tact man­age­ment strat­egy. One of the best dis­cus­sions on this is eas­ily ref­er­enced in the col­lab­o­ra­tive ency­clo­pe­dia Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_relationship_management. A review of that infor­ma­tion may be a good start­ing point for you to con­sider when build­ing your own.

As I assist clients in devel­op­ing this strat­egy as part of their over­all ser­vices and mar­ket­ing plan I have found that the fol­low­ing are help­ful guide­lines for our own indus­try and are eas­ily trans­lated into the media vault­ing, doc­u­ment destruc­tion and imag­ing industries.

Let take a look at some impor­tant points that seem consistent.

Set­ting a Goal

Before we ven­ture out on any trip we typ­i­cally deter­mine where we are going, what we will do and how we will get there. The same trip may have mul­ti­ple objec­tives. This is true in the devel­op­ment of any busi­ness strat­egy. An organization’s strat­egy must be appro­pri­ate for its resources, cir­cum­stances, and objec­tives. The process involves match­ing the inter­nal resources and capa­bil­i­ties to the exter­nal busi­ness envi­ron­ment the orga­ni­za­tion faces.

May I sug­gest these as com­po­nents of your con­tact man­age­ment strat­egy goal?

1. To deter­mine what efforts or projects your client or prospect is engaged in or may be plan­ning in regards to Records and Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment (RIM) 2. To ask your client or prospect to grade your com­pany, employ­ees and ser­vices against their expec­ta­tions and stan­dards 3. To present prod­ucts and ser­vices to deci­sion mak­ers and to close for poten­tial new business

Assign­ing Account­abil­ity & Responsibility

You may want to con­sider that the Client Account Man­ager (Farmer — Sales Rep­re­sen­ta­tive) be assigned over­all respon­si­ble for the imple­men­ta­tion, main­te­nance and bud­get of the Client Con­tact Strat­egy. Respon­si­bil­ity of the prospect man­age­ment strat­egy should be assigned to the New Busi­ness Account Exec­u­tive (Hunter – Sales Rep­re­sen­ta­tive) for over­all respon­si­ble of the imple­men­ta­tion, main­te­nance and bud­get of the Prospect Con­tact Strategy.

Deter­min­ing the Scope of your Con­tact Man­age­ment Strategy:

The scope of the con­tact strat­egy should be based on sev­eral issues;

1. Your CRM (Client Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment) bud­get. Activ­i­ties and com­po­nents are lim­ited to the amount of money that you apply to this pro­gram. A car­di­nal rule of the devel­op­ment of any mar­ket­ing pro­gram should be to apply fund­ing only to those activ­i­ties where you can mea­sure the results of that activ­ity. If you can’t mea­sure it you can’t man­age it.

2. The num­ber of clients that you need to man­age. If you do not have a Client Account Man­ager you should hire one if you have more than 200 client accounts. If you have less than 200 accounts your oper­a­tions man­ager may be able to han­dle these respon­si­bil­i­ties. Our stud­ies show that one CAM can han­dle up to 300 account rela­tion­ships in a CRC, but that is stretch­ing it a bit, 250 clients per CAM is recommended.

3. The num­ber of prospects that you need to man­age. The num­ber of active prospects that you have will cer­tainly be lim­ited by your sell­ing process. If the process is a for­mal con­sul­ta­tive process like the File­Man 7 Step Method © you will have all sus­pects, prospects, qual­i­fied prospects in your prospect data base, per­haps hundreds.

4. Seg­men­ta­tion of the client and prospect base. It may be seg­mented by size, value, rev­enue or some other mea­sure. The more seg­men­ta­tion the bet­ter so that you can develop tar­get mar­ket­ing strate­gies by SIC Code or other mea­sure of importance.

5. The qual­ity of your CAM (Farmer) and your AE (Hunter) per­son­nel. We really have to be care­ful not to over­whelm these folks. I had a recent client CAM tell me that she was respon­si­ble for more than 500 client account. She was dis­traught because she couldn’t keep up with them. I told her that it is impos­si­ble for one CAM to keep up with 500 clients. Do the math with only about 250 work days in a year how could any­one keep up that pace.

6. Your capa­bil­ity of man­ag­ing the CRM process. Yes, that is right I said man­age the process. It is incum­bent on you the owner to man­age the process. If you don’t it sim­ply will not work. Any­thing that is unman­aged ulti­mately goes astray.

7. Use of a CRM soft­ware pack­age such as ACT 2007®. The most pro­duc­tive tool that I know of today is ACT. Since Sage® bought ACT from Syman­tec® it has become both con­tact man­age­ment soft­ware and cus­tomer rela­tion­ship soft­ware. Addi­tion­ally if you use the File­Man Method or any other con­sul­ta­tive sell­ing processes you can add to it sales cycle man­age­ment. This com­po­nent is avail­able as Com­pan­ion software.

Decid­ing on the Types of Contact

There are sev­eral kinds of con­tact that could make up a con­tact strat­egy, all are impor­tant and rely on one another to achieve your CRM goals. You should not con­sider this a full list but only a start­ing point.

1. Direct Face-to-face Client Calls — There is noth­ing more impor­tant than keep­ing up to date with your cur­rent clients or prospects. A face-to face meet­ing is the very best and most impor­tant of all types of con­tact. Direct face-to-face con­tacts with any client should always be sched­uled at min­i­mum once each cal­en­dar year. The client and prospect data­base should be coded into monthly, quar­terly, semi-annual and annual direct contact.

2. Direct Mail — Peri­odic let­ters, infor­ma­tion pack­ets and score­cards should be devel­oped to sup­port this effort

3. eMail — Reg­u­lar email cor­re­spon­dence regard­ing items of inter­est should be lim­ited but regular

4. Newslet­ters — You should develop and main­tain a reg­u­lar email newslet­ter that con­veys news, infor­ma­tion, prod­uct launches and edu­ca­tional top­ics that would help your client’s focus on RIM related activ­i­ties. Ian Thomas of O’Neil Soft­ware tells me that one of the most effec­tive mar­ket­ing dol­lars he spends is their e-newsletter. I know it works well for me and I track everything.

5. RIM Edu­ca­tion — The Com­pany should develop a peri­odic edu­ca­tional event for clients and prospects. Once or twice a year the com­pany should spon­sor an edu­ca­tional event for its clients regard­ing a care­fully selected RIM topic. This gen­er­ally takes the form of a client sym­po­sium or an exec­u­tive brief­ing. (File­Man Client Sym­po­sium Method and Man­ual is avail­able from File­Man at no cost to its Clients)

6. RIM Arti­cle Update — The Com­pany should col­lect arti­cles of RIM impor­tance from numer­ous sources and share them with clients and prospects peri­od­i­cally. There are many free resources avail­able for these arti­cles. You can sub­scribe to the New York Times and the LA Times for exam­ple and select only arti­cles to be emailed to you with cer­tain key words in the title. Addi­tion­ally peri­od­i­cals such as the Har­vard Busi­ness Review and the Wall Street Jour­nal have exten­sive search­ing data­bases for high level dis­cus­sions on any RIM or other busi­ness topic. One of the best free resources are the legal arti­cle data­bases like Find­Law® http://library.findlaw.com/

7. Local ARMA Mem­ber­ship — CRM and AE rep­re­sen­ta­tives should be mem­bers of the local or regional ARMA chap­ter to build rela­tion­ships. They should par­tic­i­pate in com­mit­tees and lead­er­ship. ARMA is a great place to see your clients and prospects on a reg­u­lar basis.

8. Other Busi­ness Asso­ci­a­tions — There are an end­less num­ber of orga­ni­za­tions that you can either join or attend to get to know your clients bet­ter. Find out where the deci­sion mak­ers go; per­haps the young pres­i­dents club, exec­u­tive sec­re­taries club or the speak­ers forums.

9. Buy Stock in your Largest Clients Com­pany — There is no bet­ter way for you to know what is hap­pen­ing in any com­pany than by being a share­holder. Pay close atten­tion to reports like the 10K and the 14Q to feel their pulse.

Best Per­sonal Regards,

To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/

Cary

It’s All About Business, Not Technology

Posted on Aug 15, 2009 in Records Management News

Man­aged Stor­age: It’s All About Busi­ness, Not Tech­nol­ogy Busi­ness Solu­tions, Sep­tem­ber 2009 Writ­ten by: Gen­nifer Biggs

This man­aged ser­vices provider (MSP) says sell­ing stor­age is not about the hard­ware any­more; it is about a full under­stand­ing of busi­ness dri­vers and a con­sul­ta­tive approach to ser­vices. Read more at … http://www.bsminfo.com/index.php?option=com_jambozine&layout=article&view=page&aid=3998

A SERVICE OF FILEMAN RESEARCH

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary … FileMan