Forget the long-winded speeches and pointless anecdotes. Tom Searcy's advice for the new crop of graduating entrepreneurs is short and sweet.

Tis the season for the drudgery of graduations. No offense to the graduates, but most graduations are 90 seconds of interest, (the march across the stage by your child or one of their friends), packed into hours of tedium, often pinnacling with 20 minutes of platitudes in the form of the dreaded "Commencement Speech." With a few exceptions, most of these speeches are just recycled encouragements voiced out to a hot and sweaty crowd which is more excited for the after-party than the graduation itself.

If I were to give a commencement speech to all of the new entrepreneurs of the 2012-2013 graduating class, it would be short and sweet. Here it is:

"Congratulations on getting started in the great adventure of building businesses and realizing your dreams. As you launch out into the world with your ideas, business plans, and market-conquest offerings, let me give you a few words of advice that apply to all entrepreneurs regardless of your business.

First, Always start with your customers--You may be tempted to start with your logo, website, message, pricing, or methods of approaching your market. Resist these distractions. Get clear on your customer. If you really want to build an amazing company, you need to be crystal clear on who your customer is. Where does she eat, shop, walk, visit online, and follow on social media. What does he worry about, pay too much for, and scrimp on as he makes his purchases in life. Always start with your customer. If you feel yourself getting stuck in your growth or having problems in your business plan, don't check your reports and spreadsheets. Go sit with customers.

Second, Revenue can't be delegated--Inventors like to create. Accountants like to count and technology people like to play with new tools. Regardless of your bias, the one part of your business you cannot delegate to someone else is the vigilant focus on generating revenue. No one will be more intimately connected to the need for oxygen than the person who is choking. Revenue is oxygen. It's your job to keep the oxygen flowing.

Third, Build your company like you'll own it forever, create value to sell it tomorrow--There are lots of stories of Silicon Valley teenage millionaires. I love rags-to-riches stories as much as anyone- after all, it is a part of the American Dream. Every step you take in building your business should have the idea that the value you are creating is measurable RIGHT NOW. Every day you have a chance to opt out of your business--to sell it, close it, or change it. That's the great opportunity of being an entrepreneur. If you can't measure the value that a buyer would see in the business, it is very possible you are not building a valuable business. That means that it's not a business, it is a hobby that funds your lifestyle. Businesses have measurable value. Build a company that you love to run forever, but make certain that it is valuable enough someone else would pay to have it.

Fourth, Do your own math--The stories of mishandled bookkeeping, accounting and reporting are LEGION. "I don't understand the accounting side of the business very well..." is an unacceptable approach to running your business. Do your own math and you will understand your business. Of course you need accountants, auditors and bookkeepers- but make certain you do your own math when you look at all of this information.

Becoming an entrepreneur is the path you have chosen. Be forewarned that this is the road less traveled. The destination is limitless--get on the road. One last note, don't travel the road alone. Surround yourself with entrepreneurs who have already gone down the path you are just starting to travel. They love the road and most will be willing to walk alongside you if you ask."

HOW TO TAKE ACTION

Before making the decision to downsize, you need to evaluate your sales efforts. Your real problem might just be a lackluster sales strategy.

Do you ever look around your office and ask yourself, "What are all of these people doing?" You look at your sales and revenues and they are flat or below projections. Your payroll, however, is still disproportionately robust. You start to wonder...Do we really need all of these people?

Before you grab a pencil and start plotting how to "right-size" your business, ask yourself a few questions first:

1) How does seasonality and business cycle affect your staff needs?

2) What does the backlog show the demand to be in the near future?

3) What does the pipeline show for the possible demand in the near future?

One of my great mentors once said, "All business problems are really sales problems." An overstatement perhaps, but it is still something worth considering. Once you have looked at the fluctuations in your staffing demands based upon the questions above, you need to focus on ramping up your sales efforts.

Let me start with a confession--I have made almost all of the staffing mistakes you can make, some of them more than once. I have held onto staff when I should have trimmed. I have trimmed when I should have kept. It took me a while, but eventually I learned the lesson to hire slow and part ways fast when it is clear the relationship isn't a good fit. Assuming you have done the same, that means you have a really strong staff who are underused. This is not a management problem, a scheduling problem, or a lack of commitment. It is a sales problem.

What to do:

You have solved many of your people problems in building a good team. Now go solve your sales problem. You may not be overstaffed overall, just undersold.

The business-to-business market is tougher than ever. Here are three different approaches to improve your sales efforts. Choose the one that works best for your business.

A big shift has happened in the way large companies make decisions. I described it in my blog on "Zombie Apocalypse". Big companies have taken away the purchase power of middle- and higher-level executives in favor of either senior executives or purchasing/procurement buyers. In order to set your growth strategy for this reality, you need to consider the three approaches below and then choose which one to bet on most heavily. Most businesses will need to take a diversified approach in order to cover all their current customers as well as attract new ones, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't put more emphasis on the approach that seems to be your best bet.

Here are your options

1. Get good at selling lots of small sales to many customers.

Companies such as Amazon and UPS have figured out the ratio between volume-and-efficiency necessary to produce customers and profits. For B2B companies, the challenge is shifting your culture to handle service and sales to an efficiency model without losing the high-touch. Some companies have changed focus from high-touch to high-visibility by using online portals for order placing, tracking, and customer-satisfaction feedback. Others have created relationships that are demand-based, so that there are fewer interactions between customers and providers. This drives down service costs and the amount of time employees spend on each order.

2. Become great at winning RFPs, reverse-auctions, and bidding.

This is the sacred cow of many companies, however much they despise them. I should know, I wrote the book, "RFPs Suck!, " which was written for companies navigating the RFP process. For lots of reasons including governance, price comparison, and free market intelligence, companies are relying on these tools for choosing their vendors and suppliers. Often the same tools used in these structured approaches show up as procedural requirements for procurement departments. If you become good at navigating these waters, you can be successful in winning more sizable pieces of business. It is distasteful for many companies who are not good at it. That is what makes it a great competitive strategy for those companies who become good at it.

3. Learn how to reach higher level decision-makers.

Everyone knows that you should target higher-level decision makers. The problem is that your current level is not high enough. In the modern buying scenario, you need to go at least one, if not two levels higher. There is an old saying, "You get sent to whom you sound like." If your sales people are not connecting with the higher-level decision makers it is probably because they are not effectively representing your company's ability to solve higher-level problems. Your sales people's strategies, contacts, and processes that were effective five years ago are no longer going to work. The reason is the loss of both the "knowledgeable buyer" and the trend of stripping middle-level executives of true buying authority.

To be successful in this quickly evolving B2B marketplace, you will need to improve in all three categories. Most companies do not have the resources or people to equally attack all three. It is the job of the CEO to decide which strategy to put the most resources behind. It's a lonely decision and the risk is all yours. The choice can often produce internal conflict when one area of the business is favored over another. However, in stormy waters the CEO has to make the choices and steer the boat.

Here are four common assumptions that CEOs make, and how you can avoid them.

Having been in the CEO role a half-dozen times, I have made a wide variety of foibles, blunders, misguided assumptions, and bonehead choices. Most of the great CEOs I have the privilege to know and work with are self-effacing people who can recognize mistakes along the way.

Employees understand what customers' value. Often in the transactional activity of day-to-day work, the waters become murky as to why one customer has chosen to work with your company. Ask your employees why your customer's choose your company over a competitor. This will provide you the data that is at best incomplete and at worst completely wrong. Transaction data is about accuracy, speed and reliability, which are pure service values. The next level up is about quality, product, and availability. The real value for your biggest customers comes from what problem in their business revenue, supply, and cost chains that you solve.

Customers understand what your company does for them. When a customer chooses your company for a service, it is typically to solve a particular problem or supply a service or product. Over time, you become a vendor/supplier who is favored as much out of habit. Time and again, companies tell me that they meet with long-time customers and are asked to refer another company to help their customer with a problem that the company provides now. It drives owners crazy, obviously. Make sure your customer recognizes all the solutions you have to offer.

Employees understand the numbers. Ask these questions to your employees:

How do we make money?

What is our biggest cost that we control in our service or product?

How do you help make us profitable?

Most employees are taught how to do their job and what the mission, vision, and values are of the company. Rarely are they taught how they impact the sustainability of the business through profit-generation.

Customers understand the numbers. Less: All discussions about price with customers seem to start with an assumption that you can do what you are doing now for less. Customers do not understand your numbers. Heck, they don't often truly understand their own numbers. This lack of understanding shows up in an unreasonable desire to push hard for discounts. I now have an employee speaking with customer's employee about numbers and the only number that each of them understands is the price. How is that conversation going to end?

Keep it simple. When it comes to value, you need to keep the core understanding simple, three points that encapsulate why customers value what you bring. For restaurants it is simple--"Great food, clean place, fast service." For manufacturers it may be "100 percent up time, no waste, just in time inventory." The point is that value starts with the core understanding from the customer's perspective and moves through all of the elements of execution through your company.

Pick the most important number or two and do the math to get there. Dollars per square foot. That became the key number a client who supplies retailers learned to focus their math on. Everything that they did was to either increase the dollars per square foot the retailer could earn in a store location. Most businesses can be boiled down to a few key measures by which their value, costs, revenues and profits can be leveraged. Help your people to know what it is and then how they impact those few numbers with all of the activities they execute.

Communicate with your employees and customers in context of the value chain. By focusing your reports, regular performance reviews, and account conversations on these first two ideas, you expand the knowledge of your customer and create a shared understanding of the integral value you bring. Without this base of understanding, you will become more commoditized over time.

The company's you read about--Zappo's, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and many others-- focus on these building blocks of understanding and do not take them for granted. Smarter employees and customers make for better business.

Insurance may not be sexy, but it is becoming a bigger expense for almost every business. Here are the five common insurance mistakes and how they affect the bottom line.

Recently I had an interesting conversation with a CEO about blind spots in business leadership. In particular, she was discussing the way businesses purchase and manage insurance. She said it was one of her blind spots which she eventually recognized the hard way. With that in mind, I called Dave Dias, a friend of mine from InsuranceThoughtLeadership.com, and asked him what were the most common mistakes CEOs made regarding insurance. Below, he explains the five biggest mistakes:

Delegating Decisions

If a CEO is disengaged at the time of policy placement or when a significant claim occurs, it will almost certainly cost the company money. Consider the example of one CEO who couldn't have been more removed during a sensitive claim-settlement negotiation following a major fire loss. He wasn't conversant on the issues and relied exclusively on his staff. By the time the CEO re-engaged and began asking pertinent questions, the most germane issues had already been negotiated and settled. The financial loss was in the tens of thousands of dollars. His absence was a big miss; the matter would have been mitigated more in his favor had the CEO been more engaged from day one.

Allowing Procedure To Trump Leadership

Overanalyzing an issue "by committee" delays critically-important decisions and costs the company money. One CEO was overly concerned about getting everyone's buy-in for the implementation of a newly formed safety-compliance committee. Because of internal politics it took months to ultimately get the committee moving in the right direction. The long implementation cost the organization thousands because they weren't in compliance when state authorities showed up for an unexpected inspection and faced fines as a result. The CEO could have easily avoided the liability by creating team accountability tied to specific goals and crisp timelines.

Not Exploring New Opportunities

Remaining comfortable with relationships can sometimes lead to complacency and can unknowingly cost the organization big money. One CEO had been deferring to his CFO who had a longstanding broker relationship. The CEO retained an outside consultant to review their best practices and discovered that they were overpaying insurance premiums to the tune of about $1 million a year. The CEO is now directly involved in the hiring process of all significant third-party vendors.

Not Realizing Your Biggest Competition

Most CEOs don't realize that their biggest competition is the rising cost of health insurance. One CEO was able to recapture more than a million dollars of premium savings as a result of placing a higher priority on the cost of health insurance. SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) analyses now include the purchase of insurance premiums as a key business strategy which is being applied at all levels of their organization.

Not Making Risk Your Strategic Partner

Many organizations are paying "retail" insurance premiums when they should be using a financial construct that operates more like wholesale. One company was under the mistaken impression that they were doing a great job of managing their premium costs because of low loss-ratios and claims experience. That naivety cost them about 30 percent of additional savings which could have been realized using the right risk-transfer methodology. The CEO now drives a culture that demands analysis of those risk alternatives into their core process.

As you can see, it pays to be more informed about your insurance decisions. If you want a good resource, go to InsuranceThoughtLeadership.com.

HOW TO TAKE ACTION

By strategically sizing up the competition, you can help take your business to the head of the pack.

"I want to take my company to the next level."

I hear these words from CEOs all the time as they talk about their goals and dreams for their companies. When I push for the details, the conversation tends to get a little murky. It's usually just a recap of how the company has been performing recently. The conversation always ends with a statement of aspiration, "I just know we are ready to really grow."

Certainly, set your goals for the stars. Along the way, however, you need to pass the runner in front of you before you overtake the record-setter at the front of the pack. If you have ever raced, you know the importance of focusing on the racer right in front of you as you look for your opportunity to pass.

What to do:

1. Study the pack

Pick out the market leader. Now pick out the one-to-three competitors who are at the next level ahead of you. Take your ego out of the conversation as much as possible and put your analyst hat on. What separates the pack into their current positions? These layers in the market are often set by what the market values. The question should be, what criteria are being valued by the customers you want and the market-share you want to take? If you can determine those elements, you can plan your company's stepping-stones for growth.

2. Emulate, eliminate, differentiate and overtake

You've done your homework on your competitors. Now look at your company. In the comparison between you and them, what are the characteristics that are making them successful? This is no time for emotional self-indulgence. Focus on what is worthy of emulation, what should be eliminated from your costs and offerings, what truly differentiates them from you, and what it will take to overtake them.

3. Build your race strategy one competitor at a time

There are lots of things to learn from the market leaders. I believe in learning from the best practices of the best players. However, the company who is ahead of you is your focus in the short-term. Market performers have a tendency to cluster around similar components of success. Figure out those cluster formulas.

A word of caution: This set of strategies is about getting your company to the next level, but it is not a plateau. As a CEO, building a strategy exclusively around replicating the successful traits of your competitors will lead to a flattening growth curve. You need to combine the winning characteristics of your competitors with your own unique game-changing strategies. By defining what the next level is, then identifying how to get there, you can give your team a real plan.

HOW TO TAKE ACTION