Evan Duke Enterprises

For those who might be interested in a clear visualization of what services my new business is offering, please feel free to review this trifold brochure, as well as to share it with anyone who you feel might benefit from it.

What does our approach to fractional look like, Part 1 When you engage with the Evan Duke Enterprises services, you're investing in: Leadership: Evan offers top-tier, C-suite caliber leadership, alleviating CEOs and Company Executives from managing department nuances while effectively steering the team toward success. Building an Elite Team: The executive expertise fosters the nurturing or transformation of your company functional strategy and team. By blending proven methods and years of experience, the Executive will chart a path to business success. KPI-Driven Outcomes: No longer will the department or team stagnate in repetitive tasks. Under the Executive leadership guidance, the focus sharpens on tangible outcomes anchored by measurable results. Predictable Success: As an Executive the focus is in the confluence of data, process, and efficiency. This synergy ensures that the business choices you make are not left to chance but rather steered towards foreseeable results.

Developing an Effective Strategic Plan Have you ever been in a situation where things were confusing almost to the point that you felt like you were being set up to fail? What about being in a situation where you saw decisions being made that seemed to be contradictory? Or have you been in a situation where you can't seem to figure out what the endgame of everything is since no coherent strategy seems to be emerging. Most likely, the issue in this case is a lack of effective strategic planning. While it is true you might be getting set up to fail, most likely the ultimate reason is that here simply is no effective long term strategic plan that has been developed. Having a long term strategic plan is invaluable, since it not only will give you objectives about what you are trying to accomplish but also will quickly point out what objectives need to be realized as well as which ones will have little to no long term benefit. You will be able to eliminate contradictory objectives, as well as focus your efforts on succeeding with things that will be extremely useful later on. Developing a long term strategic plan is much more difficult. Not only does it require you studying your growth (to determine what goals are sustainable) but also it requires you to sit down and assess where you want to be and how you can practically get there based on past growth trends. True, improving efficiency will drive down costs and improving marketing will likely grow revenue, but these variables cannot be relied upon to support objectives that are sustainable only in ideal situations. While you should pursue these types of initiatives and improvements, remember that at the end of the day, you need to keep strategic planning as a practical endeavor, not let it become a wish list that quickly becomes unattainable. Don't let this meme happen to you. Develop a methodical strategic plan that is reasonable and it desires to achieve some significant objectives.

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Evan Duke Enterprises Launches Fractional Leadership Solutions for Operations After a career of two decades in multiple industries (entertainment, manufacturing, services, nonprofits, education and retail), the time has come to launch a brand new endeavor. Evan Duke Enterprises will be offering Fractional COO services for businesses in need throughout the upstate region. Currently, we are looking for clients who wish to optimize their business operations in the following capacity: Data & Analytics Budget Development & Controls Strategic Planning Process, policy, and procedure development Operations Optimization Multi channel marketing strategy development and implementation Technological Analysis & Improvements Please feel free to pass this along to anyone you know who is interested in helping their business scale to the next level. I would love to talk with them if at all possible.

Focus on Developing Solutions Ideas can be great. They can be developed and turned into something incredible. If handled properly, they can potentially transform your business into an organization that will be known by all and grow into something that you can be proud of having worked to develop. At the same time, problems are the things that we dread. We wake up in the morning knowing that we have a vexing issue facing us. At some point, we might even think about how wonderful it would be if we could just ignore the problem and it would magically disappear on its own. You might be looking at this post and wonder why ideas and problems are juxtaposed like this. After all, one provides the potential to transform for the good, while the other, if not handled properly, could destroy much. On first glance, it would seem like an oddity that they be mentioned side by side. However, that is not the case. Both of them share one very important thing in common: they are in need of a solution. Good or great ideas require a practical solution to be implemented, while problems require an effective solution to be properly handled. Without a solution, ideas will go nowhere while problems will go everywhere. This meme really does sum things up rather succinctly from the problem standpoint. Unfortunately, no really meme illustrates the problem from the idea standpoint. However, what the take home points from this should be are as follows: if you do nothing, then nothing good will happen. A problem will metastasize like cancer, while a good idea will languish into obscurity, never having the chance to be implemented. Focus on being driven to develop solutions. If you make this your objective, you will be able to address vexing problems as well as find ways to effectively implement your ideas. Anything else will result in complete futility, as well as put you into a very difficult position.

In order for your business to level up, you must first be willing to acknowledge that you are nowhere bear where you want to be.

The Failure to Learn With the arrival of the holidays comes the opportunity to sit and to reminisce on a year gone by. We are given the opportunity to sit and think about the things that went well, as well as the things that didn't. Some of these things might be truly cringe worthy moments that we wish had never happened. What do you do with such incidents? Do you try to study them and see what you can learn so that you do not repeat them? Or do you look at them and quickly point the finger at people who failed and label them as the cause of the problem? Most likely, in many situations, you should do a little bit of both. Sometimes, ineptitude or incompetence truly does occur, and if that is what happened, it needs to be diagnosed and you need to learn from it and the consequences it brings. Never take the credit or the blame that properly belongs to someone else. However, the biggest takeaway here is that you can learn tremendously from failures. Not only you can learn from your mistakes, but also you can learn from the mistakes of others as well. Take these lessons to heart and use them in the future to help guide you in a different path. The picture below is designed to be a humorous illustration of this. Granted, it is not the healthiest item out there, but is it truly a failure? It looks like a really good one time treat that can and should be enjoyed (in moderation, obviously). In short, never view a failure as an albatross. Some could be substantially bigger than others, but at the end of the day, view each failure as instructive in how to not do things. Many of these failures have excellent lessons that can help us be substantially better with the decision making process. In business, all of this is applicable, just as it is in everyday life. Whether it is a marketing campaign, an analytics blunder, or a bad deal that needed to be ended, you can learn from everything. Don't let it go to waste, since the valuable data points here can help you achieve greater success down the road.

Why hire a full time C Suite executive when you can go fractional and save money while growing? Contact us today and we will get you situated with what you need in order to succeed.

The Power of Incremental Progress In a few weeks, the new year will arrive. Many people will likely set resolutions for the new year that focus on self improvement. While many will not be kept, the reason they are not has nothing to do with whether or not they were attainable. It will have everything to do with not having a plan. This picture below illustrates the power of incremental improvement. Many of these goals might seem impossible until you see just how little you need to do on a daily basis. In each case, goals that seem steep really are not. What is required is a simple commitment to doing something on a daily basis. The lesson here, then, needs to be one of not setting attainable goals, but developing a plan that will help ambitious goals become attainable. At the heart of this lies a commitment to incremental improvement. It might see small or insignificant, but over time, it will build into something that will be impressive and attainable. In conclusion, don't set new years resolutions that are easily attained. Set ambitious goals and then develop a plan to get there that is consistently attainable. You will be amazed at what you can accomplish.

How often do you visit your SWOT analysis? The reality is that if your business is growing, everyone of the categories will need to be updated regularly. This will then help you to see the challenges that you need to prepare for as they appear on the horizon.