Maurilio Amorim

Category: business

  • How I Have Assembled an Awesome Team

    We purposely don’t have many sacred cows in the businesses that I run. We adapt and change fast and have become “platform agnostics” so we can server our clients better in a fast-changing business environment. Sacred cows only slow things down and are always self serving. There are three things, however, that we fight hard never to compromise. And if we ever do, we are quickly reminded of their importance and why after all these years, they are still relevant. We call it our 3 C’s.

    These core values are more than just posters on a wall or words on a website. These helped form the DNA of  these businesses and have everything to do with the environment we create internally. We take our time to hire someone at The A Group, so managing them is an easier process.

    hiring a winning team


    C is for Character
    Character is a foundation of any success enterprise. Therefore you cannot have an organization with high ethics if your employees (or customers, for that matter) lack integrity. This should be an obvious one, but you would be surprised of how many people find “gray areas” where there should not be any.

    C is for Competence
    A successful enterprise is formed by competent people who know their job and do it well. As I heard Jim Wright, CEO of Tractor Supply Co say, “If you have a C player, help him to become a B player or set him free.” Without competence your character is only able to keep you in the game for a little while. You will never be competitive with a bunch of mediocre people around you. Leaders who cannot get beyond hiring smarter, more talented people than themselves will stunt growth and lead struggling organizations. That’s specially true of churches.

    C is for Chemistry
    The team must function as a team or the entire organization suffers. In the past I made the mistake of not paying much attention to chemistry with disastrous results. I had competent people who couldn’t get along and the tension in meetings was terrible. I also had to fire a few clients along the way because we just didn’t get along. Every conversation was a push back and every project was a painful exercise in “not screwing up” instead of a partnership into creating something great while having latitude to fail along the way. If there is no trust, grace and collaboration, you might have a mob, but you do not have a team.

    What’s the best or worst team you have been part of? Why?

  • 5 Communication Styles You Need to Know

    I enjoy people. I’m the guy who looks forward to a party to meet someone new as oppose to dreading have to walk in a room full of strangers. Most of the time that I find myself in a new situation, I look forward to making new friends. As gregarious as I am, I have learned that not everyone communicates the same way I do–as a matter of fact there are several different “communication languages” my clients and friends use for their primary mode of communication. Much like the popular “love language” concept where some prefer words of affirmation and others touch or some gifts, these communication styles or languages are key to unlocking the potential in a sales and management relationship.

    communication styles

    If you’re in sales (I believe we are all in sales of one form or another), consulting or ministry , the sooner you figure out the best way to communicate with each of your clients or potential clients, the more you can get done.

    Here’s 5 different communication styles or languages I have categorized over the years:

    1. The Verbal Processor. He wants to talk through all decisions and ideas. There’s a lot of talking that goes on during your exchange with a verbal processor but not form you; it needs to come from him. At the end of a conversation you might be exhausted, but the verbal processor is just getting warmed up.

    2. The ADD. (Attention Deficit Disorder). The sooner you get to the bottom line the better. This person often cannot focus on details and minutia and quickly disengages from you if you’re too detailed. Sometimes you’ll be in the middle of a sentence and they’ll say: “hey, look–shiny.” More than once I’ve had great strategic conversations walking through a mall with an ADD leader. The change in pace and scenery helped him to stay on topic for more than 10 minutes.

    3. The ADD Texter. Yes, some of my clients have such difficulty focusing that they can’t even stand reading through emails, much less sitting through meetings. They love sending and receiving quick text messages even for important subjects. These folks usually love Twitter.

    4. The Mental Processor. They are difficult to read. They might agree or disagree with your point, so it’s hard to keep the discussion moving forward, since there’s usually not much discussion. With this person, you should make your best case and then follow up a couple of days later as they’ve had a chance to think through your proposal.

    5. The Face-to-Face Feeler. Some people don’t do well with phone and even teleconferencing. They need to feel the warmth of a visit and reconnect emotionally with you. For them the success of the project or idea is tied to how they feel about it and about you. I can’t tell how many times I’ve heard “this just feels right” when embarking into a pretty large project where the details were either sketchy or non existent altogether.

    What other communication style have you experienced?

  • Why Non Christians Cannot Lead Successful Christian Businesses

    Christian industry businesses run by non Christians cannot succeed. I know that’s a bold statement, but after years of watching large conglomerates buying Christian music labels, publishing houses, retail stores and failing to make it work, I’m more convinced than ever that a non-believer cannot successfully lead a Christian businesses. Here’ s why.

    Greedy business man and Christian business

    It’s all about the message. Unlike any other industry, the Christian message is key to product development. If you don’t understand, relate, and more importantly, believe in the message, nothing else matters. If the power of the message is not there, then you no longer have a compelling reason to sell your product and you are competing in the same crowded waters as everyone else. Your focus then, has to be on price, packaging and marketing–the product becomes a mere commodity. At this level your uniqueness is gone and you have to do your best to outsmart the big players of in the secular arena.

    It’s also about the audience. There’s a big difference in creating products that you hope people will buy and creating product you believe will change their lives. One is a simple product. The other is a personal mission. The motivations are years apart. Most of the Christian industry businesses have been started by churches, movements, and individuals whose goals have first and foremost been to resource God’s people with music, literature, tools that would enrich their relationship with God. They sprang up from a revival, from a movement that swept across the land, from a vision given to a man or woman to make a difference. Along the way they found a way to monetize their resource and make the organization sustainable.

    The day the focus becomes solely on profitability, market share and the bottom line, the very reason a Christian business has for existing begins to die. The internal culture changes. It has too. The mission that once wanted to resource now wants to sell. The visionary who wanted to enhance the lives of believers is now replaced with the executive who needs to deliver dividends to his stockholders. After all his very job depends on it. And so the culture changes.

    I’m not naive to think Christian businesses don’t face the same issues other business do. No matter your foundation, whether Christian or secular, if you are not profitable or at least sustainable, you won’t be around, period. Good business practices help every one. But if you remove the heart and soul of an organization and replace it with people who don’t believe, understand and cannot relate to the original vision, it will not succeed. And if it does, I guarantee you, it will no longer be a Christian business.

    How do you feel about this? Am I being unreasonable?

  • The Next Level: Do You Have the Right Team?

    “What do we need to do to get us to the next level?” That’s perhaps the one question I get asked the most.  While the answer might include strategies like  better systems, seizing opportunities, new facilities, retooling business or ministry models, they are all predicated on the most important variable of all: the competence of the team.

    next level teams

    As I look back in decades of consulting, I can point to the competence of a team as the key element on taking an organization to the next level. Most businesses, churches or not for profits have gotten where they are in the strength of their current team. In my experience, the next level always requires “next-level” thinking and performance. Good leaders realize that and want to move forward. But unless the team has what it takes to run at a difference pace, the organization will not get unstuck.

    I have sat through many a strategy session where a leader would get clarity on how to move to the next level. In many of those instances, I knew that the team in the room could not go pass where they were. Some members would make the journey by growing to meet their new challenge. Others, sometimes the majority, would not. As a matter of fact, they would usually end up, consciously or unconsciously,  sabotaging the new strategy until it died or they left, or were asked to leave, the organization.

    Early on in my career I would gently walk my clients through these tough personnel decisions. After all, some of those on my not-making list were good people who had been part of the organization for years. In my attempt to soften the blow, I ended up prolonging the pain. Much like pulling a painful band-aid slowly. I have changed my strategy. I find myself being much more direct: “You can get there, but you will not get there with Susan, Bob and Carl. Do you still want to do it?”

    Think about your team. Usually the weakest link at the highest level in the organization will determine how far the organization can go.

    How do you feel about my team assessment approach? Do you prefer the slow and painful or the short, and yet painful method?

  • The Right Stress: Yet Another Reason I’m an Entrepreneur

    We all have stress in our work, but there is a big difference between what I call “corporate stress” and “entrepreneurial stress.” I have dealt with both and I have chosen the entrepreneurial stress. Here’s why.

    stress entreprenuer business

    I hear often from friends who work in a corporate environment about the challenges they face daily. While the size of businesses vary, they all share some of the same dynamics, particularly the personnel, policy and culture dynamics that are beyond their control. While I know that control is elusive at best, entrepreneurs have a simple creed we all live by: we eat what we kill. While that might sound simplistic, it’s ultimate the bottom line for those of us who work for ourselves.

    As a business owner, I cannot blame anyone else for making bad business decisions, or for not moving forward fast enough to take advantage of opportunities. These are usually my decisions, or decisions I make with a small team of executives. We don’t have a board of directors, a group of investors or bankers we have to seek their blessing for every major decision. We don’t have to ask permission to spend more than 25 dollars.

    My friends in the midst of the corporate world have to manage up, down and side ways. They worry about how their boss perceives them, or whether their boss’s boss knows how incompetent their immediate supervisor really is. They worry that their peers perform better or take credit for work they do. They stress over how to lead those who work for them and make sure they meet the assigned quota whether or not that number is based on reality or arbitrarily pulled out of thin air by someone else at the corporate office.

    Sadly, at the end of the day, there’s no security for the corporate worker, even for those who perform well–sometimes specially for those who perform too well. Office politics, budget cuts, re-structuring, or whatever the reason might be, the corporate job stress never subsides. While you might be killing your dinner, your boss’s dinner and village chief’s dinner, you still wonder if your job will be there tomorrow.

    After years of living in the corporate dilemma, I decided that, for good or bad, I was ready to live with the consequences and rewards of my own talents and decisions. I have yet to regret it.

    Which is more your style: managing the corporate or entrepreneurial stress?

  • Without Systems Your Vision is Just a Dream

    Systems, not vision, determine the sustainability of your dream. This has been a difficult lesson for me to learn, but over the years, I have met many a visionary leader whose dreams grew to a fraction of their potential because of the lack of an environment where the vision could thrive.

    Systems vision leadership

    Vision must come first in any organization, otherwise systems tend to get a life of their own and become what we hate the most about government: bureaucracy, a means into itself, a self-preserving, self-entitled nothingness.

    However, vision without systems is like a train without tracks. In a growing organization, sustainability means understanding strengths, threats, opportunities, trends and how to design organizational culture and procedures to address them. I’ve heard someone put it this way: what determines your product is what happens down the hall and not what’s hanging on the wall.

    I’m saddened every time I run into a business, not for profit or church that got the vision part down, but can’t get its systems in place. Unwittingly, they sabotage growth at every turn.

    Take a look at your organization. Do you have systems in place that allow for growth or are they keeping it from moving forward?

  • Innovators Don’t Ask

    I’m convinced you cannot use focus groups to describe a ground breaking idea. I’m usually a fan of research, but not when it comes to introducing a cutting-edge idea or new product into the market. Focus groups might be a valid way to improve on an idea, or a help on choosing new features or services but they fail when they’re are asked to envision something completely new. This morning I read a comment on a blog that drove the point home: “I remember reading an article about the first-generation iPod and thinking: I can’t imagine ever needing one of these. Within months I had purchased one and I never went anywhere without it.” Innovators don’t ask permission. They bet on their instincts and create the experience we cannot live without.

    apple-ipod-nano-touch

    Can you imagine if Steve Jobs had decided to get validation from a focus group before building the first iPod? It would probably never have been built. I can see a room full of people and some market research guy trying to describe an iPod: “imagine you have this device the size of a deck of cards and in it you could have thousands of songs and blah, blah, blah. ” Most people would have said, my CDs work fine, I don’t need another device. Until they saw, touched and used the iPod, the idea of one wasn’t compelling enough to change everything. Oh, and can you see Tony Hsieh, Founder of Zappos.com trying to get a focus group to embrace his online shoe retailing behemoth concept? “That’s crazy. People will never buy shoes online.”  Most people cannot imagine a future; only after they experience it they are able to change their perspective.

    That’s why most entrepreneurs don’t spend a lot of time asking for validation on something truly groundbreaking. They spend their time and resources actually building and deploying their ideas. However, let me say that you can be successful and not be an innovator. I work with a lot of business that take a niche and explore it, that take a product and improve it, or that are good at marketing and selling products and services. But breakthrough companies are not afraid to spend resources on an idea before most people see its value.

    Where have you seen the most innovation lately?

  • Managing the Decline

    “She was hired to manage the decline.” I heard those words over a year ago and they have haunted me ever since. I have lived a life where advance, growth, opportunity, were the words used to describe the next idea, product or ministry. I was hired once to turn a money-losing summer day camp around and within 2 summers we had tripled the enrollment and had enough profit to cause an internal fight on how to spend the excess cash. But I could never imagine being told to manage the decline.

    Typesetter managing the decline

    The more I learn about people, businesses and ministry, the more I run into people who are managing the inevitable death of their organizations, product lines or even entire industries the best they can. These are not lazy or bad people. While some are smart enough to know that the end is inevitable, they are either powerless to change it or don’t have the willpower to pay the price it takes to make the shift towards something new.

    Remember the typesetters of years ago? These were massive machines where fonts were created out of metal and wood and loaded in as a specialized typist created plates for the printing press. Once the personal computer hit the market, the days of the typesetter machine manufactures, typists, film developers, maintenance workers were numbered. Overnight, and entire industry disappeared. Someone managed that decline. Knowing the end was near, but holding down the fort because it was his job to do it.

    I side with the old poet Dylan Thomas as he cried: “Do not go gentle into that good night. . . Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  So I rage. I refuse to believe I’m done. I still want to learn, to grow, to run faster to work smarter, to meet new people and to dream new dreams. While I often congratulate my team on accomplishing so much, I push them toward doing what’s going to make us great tomorrow. Today’s celebration was yesterday’s victory, but we still must win tomorrow’s.

    Please don’t ask me to manage the decline or to maintain the status quo. I’m not that guy. I just can’t do it. I once remember trying to do it. It lasted less than a month: “We either grow or I’ll get fired trying.” I left less than a year later on my own but there were a lot of people happy to see me go.

    Have you ever been put in a position that you knew you were managing the decline?

  • Why You Need Contracts

    I used to think that contracts, or agreements were a sign of distrust and as long as I trusted the person or organization I was dealing with, they were not necessary. After all, early in my business career, I dealt exclusively with churches and ministries. Boy, I was wrong! So wrong. And I had to learn the hard way. When it comes to putting your resources on the line for a person or organization, you cannot be too careful in protecting your assets. You can lose everything if a big project falls through or if it’s not financed. No matter where you are in your career or business development, good contracts are critical to your success. Here’s a few reasons why:

    Why You Need a Contract or AGreement

    1. A contract holds you and the other party accountable to a set of expectations and deliverables. No matter how many discussions you had about the project or how many people have given their opinion, the contract defines the ultimate delivery. During long negotiations, selective memory becomes a problem. A tight contract takes care that.
    2. The person you know and trust might not be around during the execution of the agreement. People leave, get fired, or even die during a project timeline, and the very trusted agent that initiated, understood and saw the vision for your project might not be around. A clear contract will help you manage expectations to whomever inherits the project.
    3. While your trusted friend might have given his word, he, most likely, is not the ultimate decision maker. A superior, board of directors, Elders,  or even a bank might cancel your project, leaving you without any recourse if you don’t have a written agreement.
    4. Your “friend” might not be a friend at all. I know you might have a tough time with the idea of less-than honorable “Christian” leaders. Sadly, there are posers out there who never had any intention to pay for your goods and/or services but know how to win over your affections and get you to trust them. Even with a written contract sometimes it’s hard to collect from these scoundrels. Without one, you might just as well forget it.

    I have been blessed  in that not too many of my clients have reneged on their word or agreements. But I’ve had enough of them falter that agreements are an integral part of my business model. I would recommend having them even for projects for family and friends. I have never regretted having a signed written agreement.

    How do you feel about business agreements with friends? Family?

  • Partners, Lovers & Investors You Should Avoid Like the Plague

    The best way to get out of a bad situation is by never getting into one in the first place. I have been fortunate to have avoided some very bad relationships over the years. These have been both personal (crazy girlfriend) as well as professional (bad business partner). In retrospect, there were signs along the way that have helped me walk away before it was too late. Here are the types of people you should avoid like the plague.

    Bad partnerships

    The Jerk. I remember having dinner with a potential business partner. He was trying hard to court me by having dinner at a very expensive restaurant. Our server made a mistake with this man’s appetizer. Suddenly, the cordial and fun individual sitting across from me turned into a tyrant, throwing a hissy fit over lettuce instead of spinach. The poor waiter apologized profusely and remedied the situation almost immediately. But that was not enough for the Jerk. He still wanted to complain at length to the manager. At that moment, I knew I wanted nothing to do with the guy. Later on I heard he bankrupted several business. He never delivered on his promises.

    The Jealous. She was a lovely girl and very attractive. We went out several times and things seemed to be going well. One day, I found myself worrying about “checking in” several times a day and also feeling guilty every time I talked with another single female. Suddenly I realized that the young lady I was dating had some serious trust issues and no matter how much I tried, her insecurities became a full-time job to manage. I know guys who after decades of marriage, still have to call their wives multiple times a day for no apparent reason than just “check in.” Years later, I’m so thankful that the woman I eventually married is secure enough to allow me to travel the world on my on my “International Man of Mystery” pursuit.

    The Micromanager. Sometimes partnerships are formed where one side brings capital (cash) and another expertize and sweat equity (everything else).  Early on my entrepreneurial career I was offered a lot of money for a piece of my young business. The man wanted to be a silent investor and assured me that I could run the day-to-day operations. I knew this potential investor through another relationship, but not very well. As I spent time with him, I realized that he couldn’t just be an investor. By seeing how he operated his businesses and his own family, I quickly realized the man needed to know everything about, well,  everything. While he was successful in making money, his employee turnovers were horrific. People didn’t stay long and those who stuck around were miserable.  Money is great, but peace of mind is better.

    What other types of people should we avoid?