Get to the point
Once you’re confident in your team members, you have to move them forward, but oftentimes plans and goals get pretty convoluted.
“People really try to write a book on how to get from your office to the parking lot,” Denegri says.
He says that you have to do some reverse engineering to simplify things down.
“Plans can look very sophisticated and complicated, and at the end of the day, we can translate it into a very simple working document,” Denegri says.
One way to do that is to get to the meat of the issue.
“People have a tendency to talk fancy,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve been to the doctor and he will give you a very long and sophisticated term and it scares the living ice out of you, and so you’re like, ‘Doctor — what’s that?’ It’s a bruise. ‘Well, OK, I’m going to leave.’”
In order to stop overdiagnosing the bruises in business, Denegri says you have to get to the essence of what’s important.
“People like to be fancy and make things seem a lot harder than what they are, but the way that my mind works is I can sit through a four-hour presentation, and I’m thinking about what are the three things that are really going to take us there,” he says. “They’re always very simple — simple to identify and isolate.”
He says this is particularly effective when you sit through long, drawn-out PowerPoint presentations.
“When people talk for too long and try to throw too many PowerPoint presentations at me, I go, ‘OK, so at the end of the day, what is it?’” he says. “I think they call it the elevator spiel. When you’re with a sharp mind and you have your 40 seconds with somebody in an elevator, what are we going to do next year? Somebody that really knows, in that 40-second or 60-second elevator ride, he’ll tell you where he’s going to take the company next year.”
For example, Denegri says Campero’s business plan is probably 147 pages long, but at the end of the day, he knows that he needs to focus on driving traffic, franchise profitability and consumer convenience. He says all the rest is extra gravy.
If you’re not quite sure after you’ve read something or listened to a presentation, then don’t be afraid to speak up.
“After a three-hour presentation, I’ll say, ‘Tell me the three things that you really need to happen to get there,’ Denegri says. “Then people will really tell you what they think.”
How to reach: Campero USA Corp., www.campero.com
