Wise Counsel
I just had lunch with a banker I used to work with. He always impressed me with his preparation for our meetings……industry data, future-looking financial forecasts for our business, great questions to get me thinking about our company’s future. He wasn’t just my banker. He was a valued advisor to the president and part-owner of a mid-sized corporation, a Senior Advisor.
As small to mid-sized business owners and leaders, it’s often difficult to find people we can talk to about our businesses, our challenges, our fears, our stressors. It can be a lonely position to be in at times.
If you’ve done your relational homework, you have several trusted Senior Advisors that you can lean on…..today! They are your outside CPA and Accounting firms, your lawyer(s), and your banker(s).
As individuals and organizations, they are advising hundreds of other clients. They can be a wealth of counsel and information. They may have information on other companies that are in your industry. They may be seeing trends in an industry, your industry, or the economy in general. The bottom line is that we need to leverage these relationships to maximize their value, value that we are already paying for.
Here are some questions to ask when you meet with these individuals:
- What is something new that we should be considering operationally?
- What have you seen change in my industry or the economy in general since we last met?
- Can you think of any ways that we should structure our sales efforts to be more effective?
- What are your best-run clients doing that we should be doing? Not doing? Why?
If you are not able to use these relationships in this way, maybe it’s time to find new “Senior Advisors”.
