The motto says it all: The Elite One Percent™.  And it’s about time you gain from the end result of your elite level of commitment: increased market share; robust profits; leadership retention; and, life and career fulfillment.

Jeff Rendel’s Elite One Percent™ (E1™) programs produce elite results and greater levels of commitment from your customers, amongst your colleagues, and in your life.  Connected through his observations, illustrations, and applications are the incontestable essentials: duty; permanence; ownership; responsibility; action; accountability; assurance; trust; and, resolve.

Jeff designs his E1™ programs for keynote addresses, breakout sessions, and half-day workshops.  He can easily expand or combine these programs into full-day events, as well as executive retreats and planning sessions.

You, and your group, benefit from his in-depth study of your industry and of the undertakings in your company.  Your group discovers that he knows them and their concerns.  They receive an insider’s view – from an outsider’s perspective. 

A talented professional, Jeff passes on business and personal “put-it-to-work-right-now” guidance.  Your audience gets timely and timeless examples.  They get challenges that inspire them.  They are prepared to deliver what you want.

E1™ SALES. E1™SERVICE.

Your Customer’s Experience – Will It Win, Wow, or Worry?  The Customer Revolution is in full swing.  A fantastic product or service may bring your customers in the door, but only one factor will bring them back – an outstanding experience.  Every customer touch point offers your company an opportunity to maximize the customer experience.  Strategically investing in and managing the customer experience is a business tool that integrates the entire organization in its desire to connect with your customers.   

In dissecting, designing, measuring, and improving your customer’s experience with your product or service, your company can transform its image and brand, making you more essential – more indispensable – to your customer’s life.  With clearly-defined and well-implemented front line leadership behaviors, the “how” of “wow” is delineated, allowing you to understand and demonstrate your distinctiveness in a jam-packed marketplace.  In a world where first-rate customer service is the expected norm, it’s time to abandon being just competitive and concentrate on becoming a required, central part of life.  Won’t your competitors wish they were you?

Satisfaction: Worthless; Commitment: Priceless – How to Out-Smart, Out-Market, Out-Serve, Out-Sell and Flat Out Do What Your Competitors Can’t.  Set aside the platitudes of loyalty, customers have a simple list of demands: give me what I want, when I want it, and reward me for it or I’ll go somewhere else and get it.  In a marketplace that defines all participants as a commodity, it’s time for your company to become an absolute necessity.  Superior customer service and lifelong commitment hinges on: thorough knowledge about your customers; managing customers as investments; rewarding those who choose you most; and, creating campaigns that increase your customers’ lifetime value to your company.  

Developing customer commitment is much more than conducting satisfaction studies that rarely equal repeat sales or enthusiastic referrals.  Commitment involves a systematic process of: understanding the drivers of customer acquisition, retention, margin, and profitability; customer feedback and knowledge-sharing; rewards and measurable loyalty programs; and, turning customers into advocates.  Find out precisely what your customers want, use that information to generate effective products and services, and watch your customers keep coming back for more.

Beyond the Suggestion Box – How Your Customers Will Redesign Your Products, Services, Processes and Business Model.  It’s no secret – the finest businesses listen to their customers formally and regularly, co-creating value with their customers.  Despite corporate rhetoric, most customers don’t feel at the center of “customer-centric” organizations.  If you really want to know what your customers really want you to know, it’s time to get past lip service and on to some passionate action.  It’s time to appoint your customer King, truly evaluate their feedback, and manage customer issues together.  You may know your product or service best, but your customers know it better.

Equipped with a fresh set of tools, resources, and technologies, consumers are no longer passive observers; they are, in reality, defining and shaping the business setting.  A well-run program, comprised of a cross-section of your customer base, can easily be your most effective sales and marketing tool.  There’s no doubt about it – the process of engaging directly with loyal and passionate customers is a powerful, persuasive marketing weapon.  The results quantify the elusive links between satisfaction, loyalty, market share, and profits.

Successful Sales Cultures – How the Best Build, Manage, Grow, and Support Sales-Focused Organizations.  Fact:  You don’t have the luxury of 24 months to build a “sales and service” culture.  Your customers won’t wait.  If you want a corporate culture that supports team sales and takes sales training out of the training room and into practice, then look to the model of some of the greatest successes from small and large firms.  These companies create sales leaders – sales cultures – with a go-to-the-market strategy that engages customers and decision-makers in conversations that improves your sales function, yielding results for both.  Getting the sale is secondary to making sure the sales process focuses on customer success and prosperity.
 
Every feature of a complete sales culture strategy – sales force organization, hiring, sales manager selection, training, benchmarking, compensation, technology, goal setting, and performance management – requires sales management to be just as strong as the sales force.  With a straight-forward comprehension of the entire process of recruiting, building, and managing a results-based sales and support team, progressive organizations take the guesswork out of sales and greatly increase their chances of finding, satisfying, and retaining the best customers.  The results?  Increased sales, margins, close rates, and company profits. 

E1™ LEADERSHIP

This Isn’t The Company I Came To Work For – Leading Change, Innovation, and the Continuously Evolving Blueprint of Your Enterprise.  Change is here in many forms – new ventures, restructuring, mergers, acquisitions, culture shifts, and more.  Whether it’s creative destruction or disruptive innovation, today’s business environment requires an unprecedented degree of innovation and agility, putting exceptional stress on people’s ability to change.  Most change initiatives fail to deliver their promised value.  Why?  Despite careful management of the operational aspects of corporate change, many managers and executives overlook the human element and how involvement, reinforcement, participation, and communication can make your culture a competitive advantage.  

In the end, your people want to deliver.  Every day, they want to: think and act strategically; own their area of expertise; play a part in decision-making; and, understand the candid reality about their career and business.  In the past, conformity trumped innovation, hardly a breeding ground for great leaders of change.  Aligning corporate change initiatives with your employees’ desires to lead in their own jobs, as well as the needed operational adjustments, increases the success rate of any change.

Individuals Win Trophies, Teams Win Championships – Creating Success and Prosperity in Every Dimension of Your Organization.  When leading teams of experienced and established professionals, executives can meet various tests.  One challenge is nurturing and sustaining a well-coordinated, high performance group able to achieve clear business objectives.  Another contest is building the sort of trust that tears down the walls of corporate culture stumbling blocks and turns internal competitors into enterprise-wide colleagues.  With a precise concentration on improving confidence, frankness, intellectual investment, and reciprocal accountability comes an impressive improvement in performance, separately and as a group. 

The essential skills for effective trust-building leadership – when taught, adhered to, and applied – make a considerable difference in individual and organizational leadership.  Once implemented, they improve your capability to: get people to do what really needs to be done; enrich organizational efficiency; provide focus and purpose for your organization; and, construct a purposeful, unified team – one of the few remaining competitive points of differentiation.

Leadership is Everywhere – Finding, Developing, and Growing Leaders Throughout Your Organization.  Most leadership does not occur at the top of an organization chart or in the executive suite.  In reality, leadership comes from the middle and front line – right where your staff and customers expect it most.  In a world of open communication and flat organizations, leadership is no longer top-down: leadership is up, down, and across organization charts, divisions, and job descriptions.  As businesses compete on the strength of their intellectual and financial capital, a leadership development pipeline in a must.

Developing and managing the leadership talent in your workforce requires a model that integrates individual strengths, performance metrics, and opportunities for growth.  With a requirement for dependable leadership in the all-important positions responsible delivering your company’s vision and mission, leaders must apply their influence upward upon superiors, across to their fellow managers, and down to the team members they supervise.  Invest in the leadership promise of your personnel and reap the benefits of skilled management that is quick to respond to change, incessantly improving, and – without fail – delivering results.

This is MY Company – Building Engagement, Commitment, and an Ownership Culture Throughout Your Organization.  When people become a member of an organization, they are typically eager, loyal, and prepared to be advocates for their employer.  They are very engaged.  From that point, what leaders do shapes the path that employees will take – toward sustained engagement or on the way to the ranks of those who by no means commit or who are actively discontented.

To get to the bottom of this challenge, leaders must cultivate engaged employees who help build your business with their ownership way of thinking.  Leaders must build a dedicated workforce of self-leaders.  Self-leaders: want to understand expectations so they can surpass them; are unsurprisingly curious about their company and their position in it; understand why their roles are meaningful; perform at reliably high levels; use their capacities and strong suits at work every day; work with zeal; and, have an intuitive connection with their company.  Move your organization forward with an enterprise full of leaders who think like owners – at every level.

E1™ ORGANIZATIONS

Happy to Be Lonely at the Top – How to Gain the Lead in Your Industry and Stay There.  What makes a select group of companies the most respected, influential, and profitable businesses in their industries?  How do these companies set themselves apart, steer clear of the peril and unavoidable force of “commoditization,” and prevail – regardless of declining prices, squeezed margins, and daunting competition.  In understanding and applying the well-defined attributes of industry leadership these businesses have refined, your company can do much more than supervise and complement your competition.  Instead, your company can stand out as the most esteemed, significant, and winning enterprise in your industry.

Being in “a category of one” isn’t about one peerless company, innovation, or financial return.  The bottom line is not about brand coolness, business positioning, or staying one step ahead of your competition.  It is about the quantifiable, success-based blueprint – independent of economic cycles or industries – that winning companies follow to produce the unique accomplishments many esteem and desire to mimic.  It’s about being your own best competition.  When your company stands alone, there’s no need to break from the pack or leave the herd.  

Protect Your Capital at the Capitol – The Corporate Leader’s Role in Building Political Influence.  With the future of your business in the hands of elected and appointed leaders – corporate directors, executives, and managers have a duty to develop, nurture and uphold political relationships and influence.  This particular undertaking for leading companies is not about election year politicking and favor-seeking.  It’s much more than writing a timely letter, inundating a lawmaker’s office with calls, or adding a politician as a Facebook friend.  It is about ensuring that your corporate involvement is a standard feature in your state’s and our nation’s capital.  The organizations that play a part in the legislative and regulatory process the most hold the largest role in influencing business policy. 

While lobbyists serve a vital purpose, legislators listen attentively to local business owners and managers who can make clear the effect a given law may place upon their business.  You, the local executive, have influence with your lawmaker that greatly supports and strengthens the work of your industry’s lobbyists.  Your individual participation advances and defends your commercial wellbeing.  Your involvement in lawmakers’ understanding of your business is no longer an option – It’s a responsibility.

E1™ GOVERNANCE

Building Better Boards – Setting the Standard in Corporate Governance.  Exceptional corporate performance is no longer based only on financial measures, but also gauged on investor, employee, customer and community observations of your leadership practices and full Board engagement.  Governance is much more than making decisions to do right or avoid trouble. Governance is about establishing – and maintaining – your company’s reputation and exhibiting the value you create for your organization.

An integral part of your leadership practices, engagement and Board dynamics affects your risk management decisions, organizational functioning, market position, and civic perception.  Equally as important, strong ethics and self-evaluation establish and strengthen your company’s industry standing.  This solid reputation attracts customers, talent, and investors, leading to increased revenue, higher market share, a more committed workforce, and a premium value for your company. 

The Director’s Role in Strategic Planning.  Are you ready to make your strategic planning process an event that’s significant for all parties involved?  Does your strategic planning method – and, perhaps, plan – look pretty much the same year after year?  Has the practice become a routine that’s impossible to differentiate from previous years’ efforts?  Then, get ready for some creative destruction of the strategic planning course of action.

With an appreciation of each director’s broad and “big picture” responsibilities for guardianship of your company, this program explores your function in: creating a mission and casting a vision; gaining knowledge about your company’s strong suits, drawbacks, prospects, and pressures; establishing target goals for management to carry out; and, making certain you receive practical, efficient strategic updates on a routine basis.  While a director’s job is in no way 100 percent “hands off,” this program resolves where directors can be most valuable “hands on.”

Grading Your Board – Self-Evaluation in Corporate Governance.  Now more than ever, governing your organization is a demanding task. To fulfill its responsibilities to owners, Boards of Directors must continually evaluate your organization’s safety, soundness, financial performance, and quality of service — as well as their own effectiveness.  As a result, Boards should engage in an annual assessment to identify what they do well, gaps in necessary skills and proficiencies, and how to improve their governance.

In the “Grading the Board” review and planning process, Boards: recognize the challenges and opportunities facing the company and the Board; develop skills and competencies, collectively and as individual directors; evaluate the mix of expertise and perspectives that directors bring to the Board; plan for Board development and recruitment of future directors; and, review routine functions to ensure that the Board operates efficiently and productively.  Accordingly, Boards can formulate tactics that facilitate their intentional development for the benefit of your organization.  

E1™ LIVING

One Percent Living – Designing and Carrying Out Your Strategy for an Elite Life.  What really separates world-class performers from everybody else?  What truly separates those who, beyond doubt, outclass and those who do not?  Contrary to accepted belief, impressive performance – elite results – isn’t held in reserve for a predetermined few who work exceedingly hard, possess an instinctive ability to excel in a field, and, one way or another, thrive in a dog-eat-dog world.  That only gets you so far.  Those with elite results do so with a well-planned, well-executed strategy that is continuously rethought, reevaluated, reorganized, reengineered, and reinvented.

The E1™ process redesigns the leadership of your life and career from the inside out.  It serves to help you reason, take action, and perform in manners that set you apart – developing particular personal and professional strengths.  These exclusive strong suits take the place of worn-out, ineffective practices with worthwhile behaviors that yield impressive results – elite results making you more valuable, influential, indispensable, successful, and “headed for the top” – in and out of the office.  Where some perceive the next rung on the ladder of success hard to get hold of, you know it is not coincidence.  It is a straightforward result of your thinking, choices, and actions.