Les McKeown - Predictable Success At QuickBooks Connect

Les McKeown, President and CEO of Predictable Success is presenting two sessions at Quickbooks Connect that will give you everything you need to:

  • Rapidly accelerate your or your clients’ business growth goals in 2015.
  • Put in place the people, processes and structures to support that growth.
  • Set yourself apart as a trusted advisor to your clients.

Get specific, inspired advice on how to drive organizations forward from someone who ran a business incubation firm and personally launched over 40 companies.

Les McKeown has fought every business battle. Having started out as the British equivalent of a CPA, he spent the first third of his career as a serial entrepreneur and now is a trusted consultant to virtually every type of leader - CEOs of global multinationals, SVPs of large non-profits, owner/ managers of mid-sized businesses, and solopreneurs of emerging companies.

At Quickbooks Connect Les is going to be running two hands on, working sessions that will rapidly accelerate your ability to guide and advise your clients but also give you a grounded understanding of the growth and development of your own business.

Navigating your clients to predictable success.

Tuesday October 22nd - 2:00 - 3:40

Learn how to not just grow a business, but truly scale it.

As a serial entrepreneur - Les helped start over 40 companies before he was 35 - and as the co-founder of an incubation company that helped launch (and grow) literally hundreds more, he uncovered a pattern few entrepreneurs and business leaders spot: At any point in time every organization - including your business and your clients’ - is experiencing one of seven stages of growth.

Because each stage impacts businesses differently, you can obtain a significant competitive advantage simply by knowing which of the seven stages you're currently in. In fact, it's only by being aware of where you are on the growth cycle that you can truly tailor your strategies (and direct your team) to make optimal decisions for future growth.

Thankfully, the seven stages are hiding in plain sight - once pointed out, most people recognize them intuitively. During the first session at Quickbooks Connect Les will be explaining each of these stages in detail, and how you can take your organization or lead your clients to the peak stage, Predictable Success.

This session is ideal for anyone who:

  • is responsible for growing an organization, a business, a department, a division, a project, a group, or a team.
  • Advises their client’s on how to grow their business.

The key takeaways from the session are to:

  • Understand the 7 stages that every organization/ business goes through and the different way to approach those stages for maximum growth.
  • Know what stage you or your clients are in and the challenges that stage brings.
  • Understand what stage you want to get to. (Hint: There are only 2)
  • Develop a clear action plan to get to the stage you want.

By the end of the session you’ll have a deep understanding of the processes, people and structures you need to put into place in your own business or that of your clients to take it to the peak stage of growth, Predictable Success.

Les’s second session will run hand-in-hand with his first and it’s highly recommended that you attend both.

Accountants as trusted advisors

Wednesday October 23rd - 1:45 - 3:25

How to lead your clients to a whole new level of success

It's frustrating to feel you're knocking on the door of an entirely new level of growth for your business, but that something - something perplexingly hard to put your finger on - is preventing you from breaking though.

Even more frustrating is the realization that all the component parts are there: you have a great product or service, a great team. and a compelling business plan - but they're simply not gelling in a way that produces the scale you want.

Les McKeown says that in his experience as both a serial entrepreneur who has launched over 40 businesses, and as a coach and consultant who has helped thousands of business leaders break through to new stages of growth, the most common cause of this 'growth blockage' is a simple misalignment of key people - one which is hiding in plain sight, and which - with the right tweaks - can be unblocked with relative ease, freeing your business to move on to the next stage in growth.

During his second session at the Quickbooks Connect Conference Les will be explaining this 'growth realignment' in detail, and showing how you can use it to take your or your client’s business to the peak stage of growth - one which he calls Predictable Success

In the meantime, here's a quick summary:

Most organizations that have already achieved success have three types of leader in their senior team:

The Visionary operates at 30,000 feet, is most comfortable working on long-term, strategic issues, embraces change and risk, and needs frequent exposure to both in order to feel satisfied and useful. They are often charismatic, are great communicators, and seek to build a tight, loyal team around them. Visionaries are often (though not always) founder-owners and/or CEO's.

The Operator works at the front line translating the Visionary leader's strategies into action, bulldozes their way past obstacles and is most fulfilled when overcoming problems by devising practical, if improvised solutions. They are uncomfortable with a vacuum, preferring clear direction, and despite being highly motivational leaders, often find it hard to delegate, instead depending on their team to act as self-starters.

The Processor thrives on systems and processes, delivering success and growth by iteration and constant improvement. Risk-averse and skeptical by nature, the Processor lives for data, eschews intuitive leaps of faith and bases decisions only on measurable, objective criteria. Not as naturally gregarious as the other two styles, the Processor will often build a tight team of like-minded individuals who together put in prodigious hours crunching data and running scenarios.

The single most common reason why organizations stall out and don't make the transition to the next stage in growth is that a mismatch develops between these three styles.

In all cases, achieving a calm/focussed leadership style that takes the business forward becomes impossible due to the underlying mismatch between your natural style and the demands of the role.

The answer?

Like so many intuitive truths, fixing the leadership mismatch isn't difficult once you've seen the problem. Les will show the simple, straightforward steps you can take to 'unkink' your growth leadership in your own organization or with your clients - at the Quickbooks Connect Conference.

In the meantime, get to know your own leadership style. This simple free quiz can help.

SynergistQuiz.com

Many of your clients’ organizations suffer from lack of effective teams, or worse, even complete organizational dysfunction. In this session you will learn how you as an accounting professional can play a key, synergistic role that will move your clients from team gridlock into team efficiency, productivity and growth.

The main learning objective of the session is to:

- Understand how to go beyond being a subject matter expert with your clients to being a trusted advisor and partner with your clients.

In order to achieve this objective, attendees will learn:

  • The 4 key leadership styles inherent in every organization (visionary, operator, processor, and synergist).
  • How the 4 roles interact and end up in gridlock or compromise.
  • How to break that gridlock and build the muscle of high quality, team based decision making.
  • How to leverage the four styles to build lasting relationship with clients

Les has taught the Predictable Success methodology to countless organizations across the world including Harvard University, T-Mobile, American Express, Inc. Magazine and Google. He is a sought after speaker and consultant and his sessions regularly get the highest ranking wherever he speaks. The complementary nature of the two sessions he’ll be presenting at QuickBooks Connect make for a great opportunity to learn from a street-smart business owner who’s been through it all.