8:30 – 9:30 AM
Take Charge: Difficult Times Call for Fearless Leadership
Ram Charan, one of the world’s most influential business advisers, has studied successful leaders for 40 years and identified their secrets. According to Charan, leading a company along the path for growth requires a key set of instinctual behaviors developed through practice. In this session, Charan will explain why you should kick your sales force out of the office, how to get closer to your customers, which indicators to watch so you can serve your customers better, and where to concentrate investments for the best return. You should definitely bring your CFO to this session.
Speaker: Ram Charan, business advisor; author, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
9:30 – 10:30 AM
Leading with Hugs: Personalize Your Business for Astounding Results
Jack Mitchell’s family clothing retail company recently celebrated its 50th anniversary of practicing the philosophy of “hugging” customers by hiring the right people, growing with them, and building trust and pride in their actions. In this session, he will share how he maintains the company’s special culture as his business expands and what he does to personalize the relationships developed with his company’s customers. Find out why Warren Buffett said, “I wish everyone at Berkshire would follow his advice ... we would own the world.”
Speaker: Jack Mitchell, Chairman and CEO, Mitchells/Richards/Marshs; author, Hug Your Customers: The Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results and Hug Your People: The Proven Way to Hire, Inspire, and Recognize Your Employees and Achieve Remarkable Results.
11:15 – 12:30 PM
Session 1:
Being Strategic: Building the Castle on the Hill
Every choice a team makes contributes to whether the company attains its goal. But teams can’t make consistently good decisions without the right framework. Erika Andersen has coached executives for 20 years on creating an achievable vision. Hear from her how to be more realistic about your current state, identify obstacles in your path, clarify a vision that inspires and motivates your team, and craft the best strategy to take you there.
Speaker: Erika Andersen, CEO, Proteus International
Session 2:
The Power of Hospitality: How to Build Enduring Relationships
One of the great concepts behind the success of the renowned New York restaurants Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Café is “constant, gentle pressure.” Paul Bolles-Beaven will describe how to apply the appropriate pressure to induce the conduct you need from employees of widely varying backgrounds and to compel them to change without encountering harsh resistance. Through four recessions, Bolles-Beaven has learned the consistent truth that when everybody else plays defense, it’s a good time to play offense by providing better value when others are holding back.
Speaker: Paul Bolles-Beaven, president, core restaurant division, Union Square Hospitality Group
Session 3:
Need Funds to Grow?
Find Financing That’s Right for You, Right Now
In this session, experts in banking, private equity, and venture capital detail which financing options are right for different stages of growth and the pros and cons of each. Also, a self-funded entrepreneur describes how he found cash within his business to build it organically. Learn the real cost of capital and how to pitch your business to banks and investors when you look for outside funding. You will get specific suggestions on how to adjust payment plans to ensure your customers cough up your accounts receivables.
Moderator: Brian Hamilton, co-founder and CEO, Sageworks,
Panelists: Fred Kessler, founder and president, Sales Partnerships; Stan Pratt, founding director, Abbott Capital Management; Richard Saybolt, client development director, Citibank Commercial Banking
Session 4:
Walking in Your Customers’ Shoes
Innovation expert Dev Patnaik will show how companies such as Harley-Davidson, Intel, and Nike have helped employees at all levels connect with their customers—exploring their joys and pains, their needs and desires. Better products and increased sales are the natural results. You will leave this session better prepared to anticipate the challenges and the opportunities in your own rapidly changing marketplace.
Speaker: Dev Patnaik, CEO and managing associate, Jump Associates
Session 5:
Time to Grab Market Share
Tom Searcy has helped clients reap more than $2.2 billion in new business from big fish such as AT&T, Disney, UPS, and Xerox. In this session, Searcy will take you through his Hunt Big Sales model with hands-on workbook exercises. You will walk out with new insights on how to scout, land, and harvest deals five to 20 times bigger than your current average sale. Learn five best practices to gain market share by choosing the right accounts to pursue, developing a sales process that can be replicated, and using effective measurement tools.
Speaker: Tom Searcy, founder, Hunt Big Sales
Session 6:
Should You Stay Small or Go Big in This Economy?
What do you do when your company is too big to be small and too small to be big? Almost every successful business reaches that stage, and when yours gets there, you will face one of the most important choices you will ever have to make as an entrepreneur. Should you become a Small Giant—that is, a great, entrepreneurial company that expands organically and is not turned over to professional managers? Or should you try to make it through No Man’s Land and take the business to a whole different level in terms of size, scope, and influence? Join the authors who literally wrote the books on those two subjects to explore your choices. Your decision could determine whether your company lives or dies.
Speaker: Bo Burlingham, editor-at-large, Inc. Magazine; Doug Tatum, Founding Chairman, Tatum, author, No Man’s Land: What to Do When Your Company is Too Big to Be Small and Too Small to Be Big
Session 7:
How to Advertise the New Old-fashioned Way
Television can be a powerful tool for driving the growth of your business. In this session, Dan Gertsacov explains how Google TV Ads, Google's new AdWords product, helps you target your advertising budget to reach new customers efficiently. Learn how an online store increased direct traffic to its website by 120 percent and converted visitors to customers at twice the previous rate. Hear how a reverse mortgage provider used Google TV Ads to improve website engagement, doubling average page views and tripling average time on the site. You will take away effective strategies for making television advertising work for you.
12:30 – 2:15 PM
LUNCH AND DESSERT IN THE MARKETPLACE
2:30 - 3:30 PM
Fostering Innovation in Turbulent Times
Innovation is less about the what than the how—the process behind generating ideas and bringing them to market. How can you tap the creativity in your employees, customers, partners, and even competitors? Do you have a system in place to guarantee improvements in all of your company’s areas of business? Tom Wujec, a creative genius known for visually dazzling presentations, will address common barriers to innovation. Challenges like risk aversion and lack of coordination stop many business leaders from changing the way they work. Then, Wujec will illustrate how leading companies drive innovation to create better products and services. By using images to make strategies visible and communicate concepts, teams can grasp the dynamics of a business, understand priorities, discover patterns, and see their impact on the big picture.
Speaker: Tom Wujec, a fellow and Principal Consultant at Autodesk, and author Five Star Mind
4:00 - 4:45 PM
Game Plan: How to Outsmart Your Competition
Jim Champy will illustrate how real companies, such as Inc. 500 winners Zipcar and Go Daddy, have implemented the concepts and strategies you have learned at the conference. He will identify eight powerful ways to adapt to and compete in any market, drawing from his research on more than 1,000 high-growth companies and his upcoming book Inspire: Why Customers Come Back.
Speaker: Jim Champy, Chairman, Perot Systems Consulting
4:45 – 5:30 PM
Flat to Fast: Secrets of Fast Growth in Tough Times
Jim Schleckser and Kirk Aubry run the CEO Project, an organization comprised of companies that have achieved profit growth of more than 25 percent each year for the past three years. In this session, Schleckser and Aubry will offer insights gleaned from working with the CEOs of these rapidly growing companies and pinpoint how you can transform your business into a growth machine. They will share tactics for improving margins, increasing recurring revenue, and differentiating product. They will also cover how to assess talent to keep top players and transition out poor performers, how to make sure your systems and processes aren't holding you back, and how to clear your to-do list so you can focus on the big picture.
Speakers: Jim Schleckser, CEO, CEO Project; Kirk Aubry, managing partner, CEO Project
Replacement content
8:30 – 9:30 AM
Break Through! Conquer Challenges to Come out on Top
You will find out how to keep your business growing over the long term—to go from chasing markets to influencing them—with Keith McFarland. McFarland spent five years studying more than 7,000 companies—every company to ever make the Inc. 500. From this extensive data bank, he gleaned a clear set of drivers that pushed these ordinary companies to become extraordinary. You will get a sneak peek at his latest research—outlined in his forthcoming books on constant strategy and the importance of resilience—before it hits bookstores.
Speaker: Keith McFarland, principal, McFarland Strategy Partners; author, The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers
9:30 – 10:30 AM
Survive and Thrive: Growth Tactics from Veteran CEOs
If you think times are tough now, consider that in 1981, the prime rate was 21 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average on its way to 777. Meet three entrepreneurs who weathered that recession and went on to build wildly successful companies. They know what it takes to come out of a downturn stronger than ever. Bring specific questions about your situation and get their advice.
Panelists: Jack Stack, president and CEO, SRC Holdings Corporation; Steve Lipscomb, founder and president, World Poker Tour
Moderator: Bo Burlingham, editor-at-large, Inc. Magazine
11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Session 1:
The Perfect Recipe for Effective Organizational Change
Most people hate change. Devising a great strategy is worthless if you can’t get the people who work for you moving in the same direction to accomplish your goals. Ari Weinzweig and his partners put into effect the Zingerman’s Bottom-Line Change Recipe to align the team on one track. Weinzwieg will show you that the technique works equally well for quick changes (e.g., We are short staffed tomorrow) as for enterprise-wide, long-term changes (e.g., We are opening three new locations in two years). You will learn how to appeal to the emotions of your employees to fuel the same fire that drives you.
Speaker: Ari Weinzweig, co-founder and CEO, Zingerman’s Community of Business
Session 2:
Strengthen -- Don’t Slash -- Your Work Force
Southwest was the one airline after 9/11 that, rather than cut its workforce, reacted by temporarily reducing employee compensation, primarily through foregone bonuses and profit-shares. When the economy began recovering and expanding, the experienced workforce placed Southwest at a strategic advantage. David Lewin often uses this case when illustrating to clients like UPS, Boeing, and Oracle how retaining talent and nurturing it from within can lead to business growth. In this session, Lewin will walk you through developing and attracting top performers during a recession, and the different approaches for companies large and small.
Speaker: David Lewin, Ph.D., Neil Jacoby professor of management, human resources and organizational behavior, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Session 3:
Understanding Your Financials to Unlock Profit and Cash
Brian Hamilton designed this session to be like his Sageworks software, which translates financial data for the layperson. He will help executives unleash the power of their accounting statements. With real-life examples, Hamilton will lead attendees through dissecting income statements to lower expenses and improve efficiency, reading a balance sheet, structuring debt, and preparing good cash flow forecasts to avoid shortfalls.
Session 4:
Grow Your Business Through Customer Love
In 10 years, Mike Faith has taken Headsets.com to $30 million with very little outside funding. Faith attributes his company’s growth to the Customer Love culture he has instilled in the mentality of each of his employees. Accessibility to top managers, real people answering phones, quick response time, and a happy staff all contribute to the stellar customer service his company has become known for. In fact, Headsets.com is able to sell customer service in addition to the core product offering. In this session, Faith will detail the perks that come with employment at Headsets.com and how they pay off in return business, word-of-mouth marketing, and high employee retention.
Speaker: Mike Faith, founder and CEO, Headsets.com
Session 5:
POP! Your Communication
In this interactive session, you will crystallize your competitive advantage, craft your unique selling proposition, and create stop-’em-in-their-tracks marketing messages. Apply these immediately to attract customers, close deals, and align your staff members so they become word-of-mouth ambassadors. Discover why Sam Horn’s dynamic, results-producing workshop was one of the top-rated Inc. 500 Conference programs.
Speaker: Sam Horn, communication consultant; author, POP! Stand Out in Any Crowd and Tongue Fu!
Session 6:
The Knack … When Life Knocks You Down, Get up Again
The knack—a set of mental habits that allows an entrepreneur to deal with whatever comes up—doesn’t come naturally. Successful leaders develop those habits over a lifetime, often by making mistakes, falling down, picking themselves up, and figuring out how not to make them again. In this session, he will identify 10 things he has learned that you absolutely, positively MUST understand to be successful over the long term. Brodsky will be joined onstage by his co-author, Bo Burlingham.
Speaker: Norm Brodsky, Inc. columnist and founder, Perfect Courier, CitiStorage, and U.S. Document Security
Moderator: Bo Burlingham, editor-at-large, Inc. Magazine
12:30 – 2:15 PM
LUNCH AND DESSERT IN THE MARKETPLACE
2:15 – 3:15 PM
Leverage New Media to Compete in the New Landscape
At the intersection of marketing and technology lies the opportunity for smaller companies to compete, even on a global scale. Are you taking full advantage of new social media tools? Do you know which developments lurk on the horizon? In this stimulating session, two successful entrepreneurs will offer practical advice and open your mind to new possibilities as you redefine your company’s digital strategy.
Panelists: Christos Cotsakos, founder, chairman, and CEO, Pennington Ventures; Gay Gaddis, founder and CEO, T-3
3:15 – 4:15 PM
Finding the American Dream
Ping Fu has triumphed against all odds, from surviving a Chinese prison to building the $25 million 3-D imaging company Geomagic. Inspired by speaker Doug Tatum at a past Inc. 500 Conference, she secured $8 million in capital last September, just as the stock market declined. With unsurpassed leadership and resilience, she is driven by the belief that her technology will fundamentally change our everyday lives.
Speaker: Ping Fu, chairman, president, and CEO, Geomagic