Success Paths

The Parallel Paths Of Your Roadmap To Success

About Manuel’s Coaching Success Paths

Manuel is a coach who will not just tell you what you need to work on and send you to the gym, he will take you to the gym. He will see to it you learn the core exercises and skills required to be a winner and champion in everything you set your mind to accomplish. His viewpoint on coaching is that it is about helping an individual, team, or an entire company understand and realize their full potential, and then get them to the next level. No matter who or how many are engaged in the program, the journey to the top is about a solid commitment to continuous, incremental improvement.

All of Manuel’s Coaching Programs rely on having some form of roadmap and strategy for success in place. It’s not uncommon to find that the roadmap and strategy for success an organization is working with are outdated, poorly conceived, or non-existent. In these cases, the roadmap and strategy must be built before we can truly get started. A quality roadmap is comprised of one or more legs of the journey which he refers to as Success Paths. Think of the Coaching Program as the scope of who is being coached: an Individual, Team, or an entire Organization, and to what level of engagement.

The Roadmap to Success is just that, a roadmap of how to get you, your team, or your organization from where you are now to where you want to be. It’s the big-picture, long-term plan for becoming who or what you will be tomorrow. Success Paths are the many legs of your journey that individually ensure success in one or more areas that are identified for focus. They are the parallel paths we take that move everything incrementally and continuously closer to the big-picture, long-term goals. The Strategy is the fine details and narrative required to interpret our Roadmap and how we will proceed down each selected Success Path. You could consider the Strategy as the written directions and turn-by-turn that accompanies our Roadmap.

To give you an example: If you are a business owner and your goal is to increase your company efficiency and get back to being profitable, you would start by signing up for the right sized Coaching Program. You and your coach would discuss and build a Roadmap to Success that would include a Service Delivery Success Path and a Finance Success Path. One Success Path may be completed in a few weeks while the other remains in progress. You may even choose to get started on a Career Advancement Success Path to help get you out of the Lead Engineer position and into the CEO seat where you belong.

Getting started with a coach sometimes means that your first several sessions are all about building your roadmap and strategy for success and defining the Success Path you will follow. You cannot begin to really benefit from coaching until you and your coach determine just what it is you would like to change, build, or accomplish. If you want or need to get moving faster on your Coaching Program and get right to work on making big progress, it requires getting familiar with you, your team, or organization in as little time as possible.

For this purpose, Manuel offers the Personal Profile, the Team profile, and the Business Analysis. They are short and focused sessions designed to get to know everything required about you, your team, or your organization that will help you and Manuel to build the roadmap and strategy for success and define the Success Paths in very short order. By performing a Personal Profile, Team Profile, or Business Analysis, every following coaching session can be closer to 100% workout and less about getting acquainted. There is more detail on the Personal Profile, Team Profile, and the Business Analysis on the Coaching Programs page.

Selecting Success Paths is not required to begin coaching or build your roadmap and strategy for success. The Success Paths listed here should be viewed as ideas, seeds for direction, purpose, and benefit. Each Success Path represents just one of many legs of your Roadmap to Success, each intended to address some common life or business goal. Most individuals and companies select a combination of Success Paths together to kick-start the building of their Roadmap to Success.
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Work Life Balance

Learn to embrace the fact that the most important thing you must have for true success and happiness in all aspects of your life is balance. Once you firmly believe this, you can begin to act your way into a new way of thinking about your life and your pursuit of happiness. Many people just cannot stop themselves from moving so fast and working so hard because they falsely believe that it’s the only way to get anywhere. They do not recognize they are not only out of balance, but also out of touch with themselves and likely everything that means the most to them. Recognizing this is only the first step on your Roadmap to Success. You must also learn to define what is truly important and make time for you first.
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Personal Achievement

Get to where you are going in life and become who you want to be. Clarify what you want and align your actions in that direction. Then set the pace and get to work. Find true balance in your life by identifying where it is out of balance and set it right. This is you taking control of everything you can and learning not to let the rest slow you down.
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Career Advancement

Determine your professional trajectory and set your goals. Identify all the requirements, roadblocks, obstacles, stressors, and drags. Then set the pace and get to work. Learn to create successes you can build on and launch even further success from. Develop yourself professionally and generally feel better about your work life knowing you will attain all you have set out to.
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Knowledge Management

We are in the era of the Knowledge Worker, and if you’re in the IT industry, then working with data makes up the bulk of your day in one way or another. Knowledge is information in action, and every business relies on useful and usable data to put into action. But how well does your team actually manage their own data and systems, let alone your clients? Learn how real Knowledge Management works, get the upper hand on your own systems, and then teach your clients what they need to know.
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Online Collaboration

Online Collaboration is one of the most important skill sets your team must have today to be competitive and in the lead. Unfortunately, so many teams and organizations who are IT reliant or even IT service providers have never developed the skills. Learn the tools and cultivate the skills to build documents, programs, or any other content without the requirement for the in-person, all-hands-on-deck meetings. Leverage the technology you work with every day to accomplish major tasks using resources from every corner of the globe, all with minimal time delays and without long meetings.
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Reinventing You

Take stock of who you are now and how you got there. Then begin to paint the big picture of who, what, and where you want to be in your life. Learn the power of clarity and zero-base thinking. These, along with many other tools of success, will redefine anything and everything you want about who you are. Then set the pace and get to work.
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Team Building

Start by properly defining the expectations for the team, and then align team members around business objectives. Build true team unity by setting the standard for open dialogue and transparency in communications. Learn to identify mentors, trainers, and leaders, then cultivate and duplicate their talent by building a true team spirit. Help your team master simple but important skills, such as efficient meeting facilitation, quality communications, and most important, how to cause success.
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Leadership

Develop the leaders and managers in your company by setting a culture of execution, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Set your top people up for success by having them mentored by a seasoned executive who knows what leadership looks like and knows how to cultivate talented, motivated individuals. Starting with a DiSC profile, each leader builds their own Roadmap to Success that will launch them to the heights they aspire. These leaders will in turn learn to mentor others and set their teams up for success at every opportunity.
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Business Basics

Get help with Starting your Business, Developing a Business Plan, defining the Organizational Structure of your Business, developing Mission and Vision Statements, Finances and Accounting, basic Employee and Resource Management, Branding your Business, building critical Business Policies, defining Business Metrics, and much more.
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Reinvent Your Business

Perform a full disclosure, critical analysis of your company from the outside in, and then face the full reality of where your business stands. Learn the power of clarity and zero-base thinking to redefine your business plan, mission, and vision. Align your teams and organization around the new business objectives and strategies. Then set the pace and get to work.
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Business Direction

Get critical mentoring on implementing Managed Services, Cloud Services, learning to master Technical Consulting to your Clients, Building Technology Roadmaps for both your business and your clients, Performing Business Valuation for acquiring Venture Capital or possible Sale of the business, and Turning that Big Idea into Action.
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Financial Clarity

Bring balance to your AR and AP while managing debt and cash flow. Solidify finance and accounting policies that may have allowed AR and AP to get out of line in the first place. Find financial stability and extreme profitability by learning to run your business as if you were seeking venture capital or intending to sell it.
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Service Delivery

To stay competitive, you must continually strive for best-of-breed for your market, and that means defining and streamlining Service Response systems. From scheduling to building best practices, Manuel can show you how to drive rework and duplicate work out of systems and your business. Learn to design work flows and service delivery strategies based on your company’s capabilities, strengths, and preferences.
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Continuous Improvement

Quality starts at the source, and your company should have it at the top of the list if you intend to be best-of-breed in your industry. Manuel believes all systems should incorporate continuous improvement through ownership of process. He can show you how to identify the most important metrics, how to measure them, and how to set high standards that can be verified so you can produce top-quality product. Create a company culture that is set on attaining repeatability and reproducibility in your deliverables.
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Business Turnaround

Sometimes you just need to get your business back on track after a long downhill run. Whether it’s the residue of the most recent economic downturn, or just a string of ongoing problems that have plagued you and your company, this may be when you need a Business Coach more than ever. Your trip to the gym will get you on a steady diet of business and finance basics that will set you on solid ground as fast as possible. Then you will feel like you’re running the business and not like it’s running you.
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Solutions Mastery

The process of selecting, evaluating, and learning any new line of business solution for your business or for your client can become a daunting task. Products such as your CRM, RMM, Blade Server, Microsoft Server, or VMWare all have a required mastery level before you or your client can realize your ROI. Manuel can show you how to master the processes involved and how to design, document, and disseminate quality training programs. Most often, this Success Path is used by MSPs to optimize their CRM and RMM so they can leverage their full potential. The second most common use is for a service provider to master the process of coming up to speed on new hardware or software product offerings they intend to add to their line card.
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Sales and Marketing

Zero in on the right product offerings to round out your line card. Identify, target, and connect with your market within your budget. Develop sales and marketing systems that are right for your business. Construct sales incentive programs that actually work for your business. Learn to focus on business building and client management.
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Systems Strategy

Learn to develop systems for every aspect of your company, from the processes and procedures down to the finite documentation required to manage and maintain them. Start by determining what new systems are needed and how well existing systems are operating. Design your company to be systems dependent, not people dependent. Learn the distinct advantages of the results-based organization that relies on systems, execution, and performance as the backbone of success.
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Resource Mastery

Every service delivery company must master the ability to dynamically expand and contract their workforce with the least amount of cost, time, and effort. Design workforce management that works within your company’s restrictive finance boundaries to build quality interactive teams made up of inside and outsourced resources. Resolve the problem of finding another new project or client but not having the budget to hire more engineers. Small business owners rely on this Success Path to cultivate resources so they can work on the business and not in the business.
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Operations Management

Learn to solve new and recurring business challenges such as product and solutions pricing, change management in critical systems, defining your ideal client, refining your client base, performing regular business reviews, contract writing and negotiation, aligning or realigning client expectations, and product purchasing and management, just to name a few.
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Project Management

Project management is handled differently at every company, and different tools are used throughout the industry, however most projects are sadly inefficient. Most projects blow the time budget, labor hours, deadlines, or all three. Learn to make order out of chaos in every project by building your own internal, efficient process, from sales quoting to retrospective. Every department must have a hand in causing the success of the project, and you can make that success repeatable and reproducible. Manuel can show you how to build a project that flows, is on time and under budget, and uses no special tools.
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System Process Control

If you think Process Control has no place in your business, you need to think again, and hard. Process Control at its simplest is adjusting methods and inputs to align our desired outcome. Those who understand Process Control build closed loop systems that self-correct and allow for superior performance in everything from communications to repeatability and reproducibility. Learn to close the loop and create precise, measurable processes and systems throughout your organization.
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Cultivating Core Competency

To be successful, you must not only have the right people in your company, but you must also play to their strengths. Likewise, you must staff the best talent possible for the core competencies that support what you sell to your clients. These two meet up in what Manuel calls the Core Competency Matrix. Here, you can set the expectations of every employee’s growth within their role while ensuring three-level-deep mastery of the key technologies, tools, and solutions you leverage for your solutions.
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People Process

Every size company must have set standards and processes for managing and cultivating their people for their mutual benefit. It starts with the hiring and onboarding of the employee and continues through a regular and frequent review process. Manuel will show you how to set up training programs to ensure employees are not just engaged in their careers, but also provided cross training of critical knowledge. Establish a Culture and Compass for your business that come from the management and sets the pace for behavior and direction throughout the company.
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Time Management

This Success Path may have the highest Return on Investment of any here. The three biggest profit losses through time are: being interrupt driven, employees not making efficient use of their time, and not capturing all billable time in the system. Manuel can show you how to stop the interruptions and build simple time management practices that are easy to implement, easy to follow, and set the pace for everyone in the company to flow throughout the day, week, and month. In today’s service industry, time is measured in as little as 5 and 15 minute increments, and at the best companies, it is mandatory that it be done in real time. If you are not tracking real time with zero gaps, duplicate entries, or overlaps, from the beginning of the work day to the end, you are losing money. Let Manuel mentor your key people on how to effectively set in place the standards, processes, and procedures required to master this very important skill for everyone in your company.
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Communication Quality

Stop communication failures with your clients and employees before it costs you another dollar. The quality of your communication is in the response; that means when there are misunderstandings due to communication, it is squarely on you. Too many service issues are related to horrible communication because no response was received, no one followed up, emails were lost, calls and voice mails were missed, the most important person was not in the loop, someone wasn’t clear on their part, and biggest of all, an assumption was made that the most important person got the message. Quality communication means mastering the skill of getting the information to the right people in a timely and effective manner, responding to information requests in a timely and effective manner, and verifying, not assuming, that the communication loops are closed.
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Process Mastery

You or your company can master a skill that most people have no idea even exists – Process Control. Process Control is not just for manufacturing and machines, it is for every process you ever touch throughout your company. From Onboarding and Offboarding of clients to employees, products, and network migrations, let us show you the subtle steps to take which will absolutely transform all of your systems almost overnight. Learn how to close the loop on processes and provide continuous improvement through ownership by the people who run them. If you are behind the curve, Manuel can even show you how to make quick progress in building processes, procedures, and work flows for important business functions that are quality from the start.
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Standards and Procedures

Starting with a company standards guide and the basics of documentation management, you must incorporate set standards and procedures with the emphasis on becoming a learning company. Learning companies train their employees in a fraction of the time, conquering new issues with lightning speed compared to those who have nothing in place. Your clients expect you to have some set standard, and they demand that it show in your work product and services. Build and own the most basic standards, the methods to disseminate them, and the ownership of process that provides continuous improvement.
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