For starters, what do you know about the car you are getting into?
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No matter how long you have been in the business, benefits abound for everyone who attends the LCT-NLA Show East.
Why Go?
Many operators believe after 20 or more years in business they know everything about operations and could teach any of the classes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Twenty years ago, DOT laws differed. We took reservations on paper. Operators lacked GPS tracking and social media options like Facebook and Twitter. Now, we must change with industry trends. Conferences offer the opportunity to supercharge your business with new ideas, technology, and most importantly, compliance with labor laws and DOT laws.
Office Coverage
Cited as the number one reason for not attending a trade show are concerns about who will run the business while you are away. Your staff should be cross-trained to perform your duties, so if you become ill or injured, your business can keep running. Show schedules are designed with breaks to allow you to return important business calls. If you are a one-man show, train a family member, friend or chauffeur to provide basic information about your company and take detailed messages. You can use call-forwarding to route your calls anywhere for the few days you are gone. You also can forward calls to your cell phone and pre-record a message stating that your company is involved in a training activity to improve the service you offer and calls will be returned soon.
Travel Plans & Budgets
The number two reason cited for not attending trade shows is the cost of travel, hotel and meals. Education and networking is vital to the success of your business and setting aside $100 a month for conferences should be considered an investment, not an expense. Most conferences, including LCT East, include lunch each day, and there are many hospitality mixers with food and free beverages provided by sponsors. Hotel rates are always negotiated for attendees and rooms are as low as $69 per night for LCT East. Start a savings account and make monthly or weekly deposits if you need to. The payoff of this savings account will be far greater than any interest the bank pays as you grow your business.
Plan Your Days Before You Arrive
Don’t show up at a conference without a plan. Choose goals in advance. Do you want to learn a better way of training your chauffeurs, or do you want to network with other operators and affiliate managers? Perhaps you need to be inspired by a keynote speaker. Make your own schedule based on your needs and the show agenda. Dress for success, but plan for comfort. Good shoes are a must for all the walking among classes, networking events and vast showroom floors.
Not A Vacation
While LCT conferences are held in exciting partytown places such as Las Vegas, Miami Beach and Atlantic City, you are not on a full-time vacation. Every day is a workday full of opportunities and options. If you get sidetracked gambling late into the night, catching a show or sleeping in, you will miss out. You should treat your conference visit as a business meeting instead of a recreational retreat.
Taking It Home
Once you get home, teach your staff what you have learned. Take notes or record sessions. Conference classes contain many handouts. Make copies and share with others so the company benefits. If you meet people during networking events who might help you develop your business, send them a follow-up email to remind them of who you are and your location. Put new ideas into practical use.
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BIGGEST SUCCESS: Armani’s most recent accomplishment has been working for the 2015 FIFA women’s World Cup held in Vancouver and all over Canada. “We’ve been pretty busy and it’s a big logistical challenge, but it’s been go, go, go,” he says of the work.
BUSINESS LIKES: “It’s never boring. It’s always different and you’re always talking to new people. You encounter all kinds of people from celebrity singers to princes and princesses from foreign places.”
TRIED TECHNOLOGIES: Absolute Styling uses the Limo Anywhere reservation software. Armani says he was one of the first to implement an app-based booking system. “We service a few hotels in downtown Vancouver, and we came out with the Vancouver Limousine App in 2013 for them. I got the idea after the first show I saw Uber introduced. When I came back, I made the app. It’s not as fancy as Uber, but it lets [the hotels] preschedule and people can book within a few hours.”
TRADE SHOW TIPS: “I started attending LCT shows in 2012, which is when I also first heard about the National Limousine Association. At the beginning, you have two or three cars and you’re working your ass off to keep them busy, and you look at these big companies and think how can they sustain it? But then I learned about contracts and affiliate work. If you don’t have them, you can’t sustain business. You can’t rely just on retail.”
BUSINESS ORIGINS: Armani owned an upholstery and custom vehicle upfit shop for many years, and had contracts with many car dealers and retail clients in the area. “We would take apart the vehicle and install the leather, heated seats, and navigation systems. We were installing VHS players in the passenger side headrests way back when that was a big deal. We were a true custom upfit company.”
START-UP STRATEGIES: Armani bought a used limo with a dilapidated interior, knowing he could fix it up. “Then I marketed the limo service to my local business network I had from detailing. I knew a few people that had been coming to our shops, and they knew about my cars and my new service.”
CLIENT TYPES: Armani reports most of his clients are corporate business travelers coming into Vancouver for conventions.
OPERATOR ADVICE: “Gain as much knowledge as you can. If you don’t have enough knowledge, then you won’t know the ropes on legislation and it can lead to problems like buying a car and thinking it will do well, but then having it take a year to get the proper license.”
LESSONS LEARNED: Armani says his biggest mistake was buying an extra stretch limo early for which he had no business. “You should have the business first, and then get the car. That is one mistake a lot of rookies make. Everybody thinks I’ll buy a brand new vehicle and do well, but no. Just having a car does not mean you’ll immediately get new business.”
FUTURE PLANS: Armani is looking to expand into more affiliate work. “We just got the worldwide business a year ago and we’ve started farming out. We have a few clients that are using us wherever they go, wherever they fly. We’ve been getting a lot of steady [farm in] business coming in, so now it’s time we send it back out.”
FASTFACTS
Absolute Styling
Location: Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Founded: 2011
Owner: Lorenzo Armani
Main service region: Greater Vancouver area, Whistler, Canada, and Seattle.
Vehicle types: Sprinter, SUVs, sedans (XTS and Town Cars), an S Class Mercedes, and stretch limousines
Fleet size: 6
Employees: 4
Annual revenues: $500,000
Website: http://ift.tt/1Peje0l
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One of the great things about being a manager is that you can delegate various types of tasks to other people instead of having to do them yourself. This may sound like a rather cavalier statement, but it’s true. As a manager, to do your job efficiently and effectively, you must delegate various types of tasks to your staff. If you don’t delegate, you will be overworked and your staff will be underutilized. In fact, you do a disservice to your staff if you don’t delegate because this inhibits your staff’s ability to learn new things and grow as professionals.
Like all management activities, delegation must be done in a thoughtful, ethical and forward-thinking manner. To that end, consider the following tips when delegating tasks to your staff, contractors, vendors and others.
1. Clearly define what can and cannot be delegated
As a manager, be mindful of what should and should not be delegated. For example, specific tasks may contain proprietary information that should not be shared at your staff’s organizational level. There are also tasks that your team members may not be qualified to perform, thus setting them up for failure. Lastly, don’t just dump unwanted activities onto your staff to get them off your plate. Your team will eventually figure this out and it will hurt your credibility as their manager.
Delegation is a powerful tool to maximize your team’s productivity, enhance their skill set, help them grow professionally and free you up to perform higher level tasks. All that said—make sure that you are delegating the right tasks for the right reasons.
2. Create a prioritized delegation plan
Now knowing what to delegate, your next step is to develop a plan outlining what tasks should be delegated to which staff member. When determining who gets which tasks, you should consider the following:
Delegating the right tasks to the right people is not always easy or popular, but if you do it with transparency, fairness, consistency, and for the good of the company, your staff will learn to respect your decisions.
3. Provide clear instructions and define specific expectations
There is nothing worse than being delegated a task, not given instructions on how the task should be performed, not told what is expected, working diligently to complete the task, and then being told it isn’t what they wanted. Give specific instructions as to what needs to be done and your expectation of the ending result. This combination of instructions and expectations provides the correct delegation framework and establishes criteria as to how your employee will be judged when the task is completed.
4. Provide a safety net
When delegating tasks—particularly if it’s a new experience for the employee being assigned the task—as the manager, you must be willing to provide an appropriate level of management support to help assure success, for both the employee and the task.
A safety net is an environment of help and protection by:
5. Let go and allow people to do their work
If you delegate a task and then micro-manage it to the extent that you have actually performed the task yourself, it’s not delegation. Neither should you totally divest yourself from the delegated task because, as the manager, you are still ultimately responsible for all work performed within your department. The trick is to walk that fine line between being overbearing and non-participatory.
6. Be mentoring and instructive
This step provides direct instruction and advice to the person performing a specific delegated task. This type of task-based instruction is a “learning moment,” namely, just in time training on how to perform a specific task or how to deal with a specific situation.
The level of instruction and advice to be provided should be based on the combination of the person’s specific experience and the task difficulty and political ramifications.
7. Give credit to those doing the work
As a manager, you should adhere to the philosophy of “it’s the team’s success or my failure.” This philosophy causes you to raise the visibility of your staff’s good work within the organization which is motivating them and helps instill loyalty in your staff toward you. This approach also helps remind you that you are ultimately responsible for both your team’s growth and your department’s productivity and performance.
8. Actively solicit feedback from your team
Asking the members of your team if they believe you have delegated the right tasks to the right people has the following advantages:
For those not comfortable delegating tasks to others, be willing to go outside your comfort zone. Your willingness to take this leap will enhance your department’s productivity, enhance your managerial ability, and help your team expand their knowledge and skill.
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Eric P. Bloom is the President and Founder of Manager Mechanics LLC, a nationally recognized speaker and author of the forthcoming book Productivity Driven Success: Hidden Secrets of Organizational Efficiency. He is also a nationally syndicated columnist, certified executive coach, and an Adjunct Research Advisor for IDC. He
is also a past president of National Speakers Association
New England. For more information on Eric Bloom, please visit http://ift.tt/1mZln1y and on Twitter at @EricPBloom.
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To help explain how Uber grew so fast, while illuminating concerns about its company ethics, Cracked.com produced a thorough video called “Why Uber Is Terrible” that explains why Uber has succeeded while being so disruptive.
It outlines how the technology grew among younger riders, and that its model of supplying jobs while delivering low-cost transportation, almost makes it seem too good to be true. And that’s where the video explains why it is too good to be true: While the new technology has disrupted the taxi and chauffeured transportation industries, Uber avoids many regulations that apply to those industries.
The video details how the industries must adhere to specific license, insurance, and background check regulations put in place for safety, and that Uber has yet to be held to the same standard.
The reporter for Cracked.com, Daniel O’Brien, explains specific Uber instances where attempts to screen drivers have come up short, and lists the many reports of inappropriate behavior from drivers, which have endangered the safety of passengers and/or compromised their privacy.
The video concludes that we are at a point in history similar to when businesses started to employ child labor to increase profits. It took educated consumers to demand child labor laws and make society change for the better. O’Brien says society must stay vigilant to point out inconsistencies in service, security and regulations, and make sure that as the on-demand economy expands, quality and safety will not be sacrificed.
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