Worth a thousand words

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a picture made of words worth? I found this tool that lets you create some really attractive “word clouds” based on terms you frequently use on your blog or in a bunch of text. It shows you what you’re actually writing about the most.

This is mine… the fact that it’s football-shaped is very appropriate for me. (Hook ‘em horns!)

Check it out at wordle.net, and send me yours.

-JB

New $5 Million Investment in Boundless

The vision of Boundless Network was conceived more than 10 years ago, with the goal of being #1 within the $20B promotional products industry. The company was launched in 2005, and it’s hard to believe we’re already four years into this. Reflecting on those years, I’m certainly pleased with our progress–but not satisfied.

We have built a great company with a solid national brand and a technology platform that gives us major leverage against our industry competition. Over the last six months, the company continued to have record months and record quarters.

Today we announced the closing of an additional $5.0MM investment by our strategic partners, Austin Ventures and Silverton Partners, to continue executing our vision of being the #1 platform in the promotional products industry. This funding will be used to continue providing our business partners, our sales professionals and their end customers, with a significant competitive advantage in accomplishing their goals.

As I say to our team on a regular basis, the best of Boundless is in front of us. We’re excited about our success, but we won’t rest until we accomplish the end goal. #1, here we come.

Cheers!

-JB

What’s your plan for 2010?

The year 2010 is a stone’s throw away.

In less than 45 days we will be welcoming in a new year. I’m sending this message to remind you that, in addition to stuffing your face with turkey and shopping for your loved ones, this time of year is great for defining next year’s plan of action. Checking this one more box in 2009 will greatly impact the next 12 months of your business.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “work smarter, not harder.” As a young’n it was constantly drilled into my brain by those who wanted to help me succeed, but it wasn’t until I was 10 years into the business world that I fully understood that first part of the equation – the working smarter side of things.

My definition of working smart is pretty simple, and it centers around one question: is each one of your daily tasks working toward a specific goal? Every day we do 100 different things; the tighter these tasks align with your defined goal, the smarter you’ll be working, and thus the higher the probability of accomplishing your goal. In Texas terms, you need to have a plan and work the plan.

At planet Boundless, our teams are deep into their business planning for 2010. In the interest of sharing some best practices, I wanted to forward our business planning four-step process to other industry professionals. This is a very simple exercise, so hopefully it will start the fly-wheel for your own business planning.

**Click here to check out Business Planning 101, our one-page guide.

Hopefully this will provide some value and assist your efforts in having a great 2010.

Best of luck!

- JB

Predictions: the Industry in 2010

I recently did a Q&A with Promo35, a new group that aims to bring together various generations of promotional product professionals. We talked about my predictions for how the industry will evolve in 2010. Take a look…

Describe what 2010 will be like for our industry in one word.
Bumpy

Will 2010 be up, down, about the same compared to 2009?
Overall, we should expect a slight uptick in the economy. But the fundamentals of our economy are still broken, thus I continue to remain very bearish. If there is a recovery, it will be at a slow crawl. Until we see growth within the small business sector, the economy will just bounce around. Right now, we are experiencing a lot of “false positives.” As a lot of people state, you cannot spend your way out of your problems and that is the current challenge our economy faces (short term and long).

Do you see major changes happening to our industry in 2010 and the next few years?
Yes. Here are a couple for you to chew on based on continued and emerging trends:
Read the rest of this entry »

A Game-Changing Adjustment

It’s halftime in the big game of running your business, and it’s time to think about what adjustments can be made to improve your game. Boundless recently called a new play, and we’re excited about this new adjustment to our business model.

We’ve decided to shift our operational strategy to focus 100% on driving our organic growth through our existing sales organization. Historically, Boundless has grown approximately 100% year over year through a combination of organic and strategic acquisitions that met our culture and regional growth strategy.

In this industry, growing via acquisitions is a viable strategy so long as you have a high level of visibility into the future revenue stream of the acquired distributorship. But this method of growth is trickier in an unpredictable economy, because your visibility into future sales is more limited.

I’m really excited about this game-changing shift because it accomplishes two key goals: it allows us to focus on supporting our existing team 100% of the time, and it gives our operations and support teams the ability to refine all of our business processes in preparation for the next big growth spurt.

Our team is excited about the shift in growth strategy; we’re looking forward to the opportunity to challenge many of our business assumptions.

My challenge for you as a business owner: what halftime adjustments can you make to improve your business? Are you being proactive and strategic, or are you content to be tossed around by the winds of a screwball economy?

Best of luck. Stay nimble and flexible, maintain your entrepreneurial spirit and always strive for excellence.

Carpe Diem!

- JB

I’m proud to welcome PromoCorp to the Boundless team!

Great news! I’m excited to announce that Boundless has welcomed PromoCorp to the team, our second Virginia-based distributorship to join us in the past six months. PromoCorp has been around for close to a decade and is among the top 3 percent of distributors in the industry. I’m happy to welcome Larry Ledoyen, Sean McColl and his team to the Boundless family! I am pleased that more and more professionals and distributorships are aligning with the Boundless vision for the industry and are experiencing success when offering customers a new type of solution. I think Larry sums it up nicely:

“We were impressed with the company’s vision, the caliber of its people and the management team’s ability to understand the needs of our sales professionals and the changing needs of our customers. But ultimately what mattered to us was partnering with a company that had long-term goals that would enable us to take our accounts to the next level. The Boundless platform provides an advantage that we have not had in the past, and our clients are already responding positively.” -Larry Ledoyen

Click here to read the complete details.

If you’re curious as to why top distributors like PromoCorp make the decision to join Boundless you can always feel free to shoot me an e-mail at jason.black@boundlessnetwork.com.

-JB

Surprise! There aren’t 48 hours in a day.

Some people just don’t seem to understand that the day is only 24 hours long. You’d think after a few years on Earth people would get used to this fact. But after working with sales professionals for the last 15 years I have developed some (hardly unique) insight: all sales professionals want to increase their sales, and many think the best way to do it is to work harder with longer hours. Sadly, this strategy will never work. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

As the adage goes, you have to work smarter, not harder.

Let’s take a look at some steps that proven sales leaders use regularly to maximize their business.

The key attribute that the doers (those that have consistently grown their business) have in common is they understand that in order for them to continually get better, they have to be willing to change their behaviors when necessary. For most people, change is hard, and a pain in the ass. That’s why so many fail to grow and reach their goals. The good ones–the ones who experience the quickest growth–work smarter by constantly scrutinizing their business and maximizing their time.

Four areas you can change to double your business:
Read the rest of this entry »

Why We Need Rigorous Debate

My favorite book, Jim Collins’ Good to Great, is full of principles that can be applied to real life. In the past 12 months I must have told at least 100 people to go read Chapter 5, “The Hedgehog Concept.” This chapter is about identifying your passion, your “one big thing,” and figuring out what drives your economic engine and where you can be number one. These days, thanks to the tough economy, focus is a key to solid execution and success. Management teams need to continually challenge their hedgehog concept to ensure that they’re working smart.

Another principle Collins discusses in Good to Great is the necessity of management teams engaging in rigorous debate. There will be some screaming and hollering, feelings may be hurt and opposing viewpoints will be aired. It can be messy, but it ensures that management teams turn over every rock and consider every option before finding the best plan or execution strategy. The key is that everyone is dedicated to the common goal of finding the right answer for the long term success of the business.

In the public realm, the rigorous debate principle can be applied to a topic that’s dominating the news: health care reform.
Read the rest of this entry »

Son of a Coach

I recently sent this email to the Boundless sales team. Based on the positive feedback received, I thought I would forward this to the blog. The hope is that it will assist someone with “getting into the end zone.” As we all know, market conditions are tough for the promotional products industry. The theme of this message is that you can never replace hard work.

Best of luck – JB

—————–

Boundless professionals…

Being the son of a coach, this video (below) struck a strong cord with me. Starting at a young age, my father would push me, challenge me and sometimes bring me to a breaking point.  Candidly, some of those times he pissed me off.

He followed his “lessons” with the statement, “if it were easy, then everyone would do it.”
When I got to college it finally all made sense, and I realized just how much my father loved me.

Being a pain in the ass was his way of teaching me the importance of not taking life for granted and maximizing my potential.

Right or wrong, I feel like the coach in this video (at Boundless). I started this company not for personal gain, but to provide a business for people to maximize their potential.

I encourage all of you to put the blindfold on… don’t let the burn slow you down… push yourself until it hurts… and go to the end zone.

I hope this video can serve as some encouragement for you. Recognize that “if it were easy, everyone would do it.” You have all the assets you need—just keep going!

A Prescription to Avoid the Death Spiral

Change is a frightening word, especially for businesses, and especially when the economic reality is dismal. But sometimes change is the only way to prevent an inevitable slow decline in your business–the proverbial death spiral. Sometimes you have to do something drastic to stop it in its tracks.

I’ve written about the death spiral as it relates specifically to distributors within the promotional products industry. Seth Godin, author, marketing guru and all-around smart guy, recently gave his own insight about this terminal business illness.

As Tom Peters says, “You can’t shrink your way to greatness,” and yet that’s what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don’t. This isn’t a dip, it’s a cul de sac. It’s over.

His prescription: change. Do something new with your business, whether that means embracing technology and social media, changing your strategy or even switching companies.

As the economy begins to show small signs of impending recovery, you may be tempted to just bide your time and ride it out. But the time to make a change is now, BEFORE the death spiral starts. Once you’ve lost too much business, too much credit with your suppliers… it might be too late.