Get to Know ME – A Conversation with Debbie Potempa
Debbie Potempa, our Purchasing Production Manager, has been with us for 23 years. She shares with us what makes working at Motivation Excellence so special, how helping others keeps her motivated, and the one thing that always makes her laugh.
Engagement at Work: A Life Ring to Keep Business Afloat
Engagement is an emotional commitment, not only to your company, but also to its values, mission and goals.
Motivation Excellence™ Named One of the 2019 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in the Nation®
Motivation Excellence™ is excited to announce a new award recognizing the company’s innovative and thoughtful human resources approach.
Company Sustainability and Green Initiatives: The Future is Now
How do you incorporate company sustainability and green initiative practices? Take some tips from our very own David Jobes.
On Your Marks, Get Set, GOAL!
Between 2015 and 2018, I strung together more than three years of daily exercise. It was more than 1,110 days actually, and no one was more surprised by it than I!
My original goal was not that lofty. I knew I wanted to add more exercise into my lifestyle. I happened to exercise every day for a week at one point and wondered if I could do 30 days in a row. I hit that milestone and crazily thought, “Could I do this every day for a whole year?”
I’ve already given away the end of the story: I did! And then kept going for two more years. In that time I learned some critical things about setting goals, staying motivated and achieving success. Whether you’re looking to conquer goals in your personal or professional life, here are some ways to help you get from step one to step DONE!
Write it down, AND share it
I know you’ve heard this before. And if you haven’t: do a simple search online and you’ll have a plethora of articles from self-help coaches, leadership gurus, and published studies to peruse for the rest of the day.
The bottom line here is: if you can write down your goal in a detailed way, you’re already one step on the journey to achieving it. It’s a small step perhaps – but as I’ll write about next, it’s great to celebrate the little things too!
Even better than just writing your goal down? Share it! Personally, I still share my exercise goals on social media and love the feedback I get from other people with their own goals. Finding a community of others working toward a similar achievement can be quite motivating. I post frequent post-workout selfies to keep myself accountable. They’re certainly not my most flattering photos, but I see them as a way to not only keep my fitness goals alive and present, but also inspire others on their own goal journey.
Celebrate the small stuff
Your ultimate goal might be something HUGE! If that’s the case, you can identify several smaller goals that will lead you up the mountain to the BIG ONE.
Perhaps you’re undertaking a new playbook for your sales team in 2020. The definitive goal will be to turn over a comprehensive collection of product information and how best to represent it in the market. That’s a huge chunk of work to chew on all at once. Figure out how to break it apart and tackle one piece at a time. If you write down each of these smaller steps, then cross them off as you go, you’ll see progress and keep the motivation flowing to the end!
I’m a huge believer in celebrating the small victories. It’s a much more effective motivator than beating yourself up for all your small failures.
With my exercise streak, I counted any day that I put at least ten minutes into personal fitness endeavors. I didn’t need to train for a 5K every day – I just needed to put in the effort. Overall I averaged more than thirty minutes a day, but I certainly celebrated busy days when I could only fit in a power walk or ten minutes of body weight exercises.
Get it done right away
Have you heard about the “eat the frog” analogy? It was new to me, but makes sense in a number of ways (other than the actual visualization of eating this poor frog – that makes me go “eww.”)
Mark Twain is quoted as saying something along the lines of, if you start each day eating a live frog, it’s probably the worst thing you’ll have to do all day. Thus the rest of your day will be better, or at least, less gross.
What does this mean when it comes to your goal? Often, we tend to push certain items down on our to-do list because perhaps they’re overwhelming or time-consuming, or other little things pop up and get in the way.
As we push our goal down our priority list, it tends to feel heavier and we set ourselves up for losing momentum, focus, and desire to get it done. For me, this still means getting up early and getting my exercise done before work. Not only do I always feel good about getting it out of the way first thing, it also makes me feel productive right off the bat and I carry extra energy and drive as I head off to work. If I push it off until after work, I often just don’t have the energy or stamina to follow through.
So, plan to tackle something related to your goal right away each day. You may be surprised how it drives you to accomplish more than you expected and gives the rest of your day a boost in attitude!
Start TODAY
Don’t wait for Monday or the start of the month or after your birthday. If you want to achieve your goal, just start already. A Tuesday in the middle of February is just as perfect a day as any other. This goes for losing weight, drinking more water, starting a résumé or creating that aforementioned sales playbook. If you have a goal you want to achieve, don’t put any more distance than necessary between it and the finish line.
And if your goal involves lifestyle changes like cutting sugar, adding more veggies, or like me, increasing your exercise minutes, then no one day of the week, month or year holds more significance than another. In fact, the day you start now becomes a day of huge importance, because it’s the day you made the active decision to go after something you want!
Keep evolving
This can’t be stressed enough: the path to your goal might fluctuate and you need to be able to evolve to stay on the road. Things out of our control are always going to throw up obstacles.
Back in the 80s and 90s you could lose an entire file because it didn’t get saved properly on your PC. Today, technology offers a myriad of other less-than-fortunate situations to throw us off our game (no wi-fi, internet crashes, syncing problems…ugh!).
Lifestyle changes, like eating better, can be easily derailed by a mood swing, Halloween, or a Super Bowl party.
Being able to take a step back, reassess the situation, and move forward in an unplanned direction are invaluable characteristics to have when in the pursuit of a goal. Remember that celebrating the victories, even the small ones, will help keep you motivated to continue. Failures, either self-made or thrust upon us by outside forces are inevitable. Getting back on track is always commendable! Save that work on a flash drive and bring your own healthy snacks to the party.
For me, just shy of my three year anniversary of daily exercise I hurt my ankle playing soccer and was put in a boot for two weeks. I was undeterred. I still took my dog for a walk around the neighborhood. I hula hooped while watching TV. I lifted weights and used resistance bands. Then an MRI showed I had actually broken my ankle and I was non-weight bearing for six weeks! I still persevered for another week, doing exercises from a chair or the floor.
Celebrate your success
I did end up giving up the streak. I just couldn’t do it with crutches and all the challenges of being one-footed. It was a difficult day, but I eventually saw it for what it really was: time to adjust and go in a new direction. I had met my goal times three and that was reason to celebrate! To this day, I still workout 5-7 days a week, so the ultimate goal for me is still being achieved: making exercise part of my lifestyle.
Now, it’s your turn to take on something you really want to achieve. I hope what you just read gives you a little kick into action! Feel free to share your goal with us at Motivation Excellence. Maybe we can help, but for sure we can cheer you on. Good luck!
Why You Should Make Charity a Priority at Your Company in 2024
How can you encourage charity in the workplace? Here are a few suggestions we practice ourselves.
5 Reasons to Not DIY Your Meeting & Events Planning
If you have a company-wide or customer event or conference to organize, you may be looking to save a few dollars by handling the event internally. If you’re a small-to-medium business, it may be easy enough in-house: pick a local venue and coordinate with on-site staff. But it might not be so easy when you have multiple locations, sites, or people to deal with. “What could go wrong?” you ask.
Turns out, a lot.
Here are five reasons a DIY-meeting idea might not be the best option
1. There are only 24 hours in a day
Planning a conference, meeting, or launch event quickly becomes a full-time job in and of itself. There are so many aspects to consider: what location or venue? Have you sourced the hotel? Who’s attending? What’s the budget? What vendors are you using? How about contracts? Concessions and attrition clauses?
You also need to think about your audience, coordinating with the team, and how you can balance their needs while being mindful of cost. It’s no easy feat, especially if that’s not your only responsibility throughout the day.
2. Going over budget
If you’re planning and managing the event yourself, it’s easy to get lost in and overwhelmed by all the details. This has the potential to lead to confusion among employees and customers and – inadvertently – a blown budget. If you’re new to event planning, the little details add up. You may think you’re getting a great deal, only to find surprises in the venue’s small print which can add up to hundreds or thousands more in other fees and add-on costs you didn’t expect. Having relationships with vendors will help, but they will not necessarily help you find the best deals.
3. Problems at the venue
Even for seasoned professionals, it’s inevitable that something will go wrong once you’re at the venue – but it’s all in how you prepared you are and how you handle it. Since you don’t own the place, you can’t control every little thing – and this is where having a professional to take away those problems come in handy. It’s also a good idea to have an emergency plan in place, especially in terms of weather – what happens if the venue you’ve selected was hit by a hurricane just weeks before your event?
4. Disengaged employees
This is a fact. A Google search for “corporate” or “office events” shows hundreds of articles answering the question, “Must I attend that dreaded company event?”
Unless it’s a very well organized and engaging event, employees will find any reason they can to excuse themselves. Or if they attend, they may not participate at all. It takes experience and a good understanding of what motivates employees to put together an event that will keep them engaged and will help them come back to work re-energized and ready to contribute more.
5. Not seeing the forest for the trees
When organizers get into the weeds of organizing and managing an event, they often run the risk of forgetting who it is for. With customer-focused events in particular, you may be so focused on the details meant to make them feel welcomed and appreciated that you won’t have the bandwidth to connect in a personal way.
Customer appreciation events are a great opportunity not just to entertain but to listen and learn from your customers. What are some of the problems they are facing, what has changed, what are they looking forward to? Don’t miss this important opportunity to connect and show you care about them.
Done for you means less stress, happy employees – and your time back
At the end of the day, having an event planned for you instead of trying to manage it yourself is worth it for the stress reduction alone. And let’s admit it, no one wants to expend so much effort only to hear later, “I’m so glad it’s over.”
Having an experienced team to work alongside you to iron out the details will not only save you time and money but will also lead to a memorable experience your audience won’t soon forget.
Motivation Excellence Named One of Chicago’s 2019 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For!
We are honored to win this award! Read the full press release below.
Motivation Excellence, an award-winning sales and channel engagement firm, specializing in sales growth, building market share, creating channel loyalty and enhancing meeting engagement was named one of Chicago’s Best and Brightest Companies to Work For® in 2019 by the National Association for Business Resources (NABR).
Each year, companies throughout Chicago compete to be named one of Chicago’s Best and Brightest Companies to Work For. Only organizations that distinguish themselves as having the most innovative and thoughtful human resources approach can be bestowed this honor.
An independent research firm evaluates each company’s entry, based on key measures in various categories. They include Compensation, Benefits and Employee Solutions; Employee Enrichment, Engagement and Retention; Employee Education and Development; Recruitment, Selection and Orientation; Employee Achievement and Recognition; Communication and Shared Vision; Diversity and Inclusion; Work-Life Balance; Community Initiatives; and Strategic Company Performance.
Motivation Excellence CEO & President, David Jobes said, “We live by our mission statement, Inspire Extraordinary Performance, where we pride ourselves in offering an innovative and empowering environment with a focus on community involvement for our team.
“Our culture centers around how we impact people’s lives for the better and that starts with our own colleagues. Winning this award is a validation of that, we remain committed to focus on how we can inspire people to achieve greatness, however they define this.
“The war for talent is raising the bar each year. Team member expectations continue to grow and our clients continue to evolve. Each of our solutions and services leverage our clients’ organizational culture, target specific goals, create unique experiences and build best practices for engaging their top performers and channel partners. It is all about achievement, relationships, and putting people first. That is how we define excellence at Motivation Excellence.”
Over 1,200 companies participated in the competition. Motivation Excellence and 175 other organizations were selected.
How to Escape the Commodity Trap
Commoditization, a lack of meaningful differentiation, drives products to have razor thin margins that are differentiated and bought only on price. Unfortunately, we see it far too often:
- Supply Chain/Sourcing driving for a low price
- Contractors don’t see product cost/benefits
- Amazon making it easy for customers to compare prices and availability without picking up the phone
Distribution companies are recognizing the world is dramatically changing and are finding ways to escape the commodity trap by de-commoditizing and differentiating themselves beyond price:
- Segmentation: Driven by market research and analytics, segmentation serves as the foundation of where to focus time and investment
- Determination: A mind shift and attitude to de-commoditize by saying “no” to less profitable customers/markets and “yes” to new higher profit markets. The decision of where to compete accounted for 80% of the differences in growth in a McKinsey & Company study of the 100 largest U.S. corporations
- Product, brand and service differentiation: Expanding the markets served such as MRO, safety, fluid power, power transmission and the industrial market
- Innovation: Being positioned as the market leader for innovative new products and technology then adding value via knowledge and expertise
- Bundle: develop a package of complementary products and services around commoditized products to provide long-term value
- Customer Experience: Maybe most important, create an environment that serves the customer, empowers and enables employees to deliver and finally, drive a customer-centric culture
If you have not read it and are looking for a practical approach to get above the commodity business, check out Blue Ocean Strategy. Recently updated with fresh content, the book discusses how cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.
New Year, New Sales Performance Tips
Kick off your 2018 sales performance initiatives with the latest best practices.
So, the champagne has run dry, the wreaths are back in storage, and for many, the new year’s resolutions have already fallen by the wayside. But 2018 is still a new year and an opportunity for a fresh start, especially for your sales performance.
