What makes a third-party program successful?

Is there some sort of magic that separates the wheat from the chaff?

Why do some programs seem to thrive while others collapse under the weight of angry businesspeople going around the compliance department?

As Tony Robbins says, “Success leaves clues.”

We’ve not only seen but set up and reviewed a huge number of third-party due diligence programs.

From starting them from scratch, updating them when they’ve gone stale, to performing wholesale evaluations with recommendations for improvement, not a day goes by when we’re not engaged in at least one client’s program.

We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.

We’ve seen programs thrive and fail and everything in between.

After all this review, patterns emerge.

We’ve found that there are 7 consistent elements that tell us early on whether a third-party program will succeed or fail. Read them all in this blog post.

Nearly every compliance officer that has brought up the idea of incentives and heard the response:

“Why should we incentivize good behavior? It’s required to work here.”

It can be demoralizing, right?

So, how do we create effective incentive plans that this response is wrong?

Let me show you!

Feeling a little unmotivated?

We’ve all been there. You have an important meeting, and you just feel down. You’re unmotivated, uncomfortable, anxious, angry, sad, or sometimes a mixture of all of four.

When those uncomfortable days intersect with important meetings or presentations, disaster can strike.

So, when you’re just not feeling it when your performance really matters, what can you do?

Spark Compliance’s facilitated training game software, Compliance Competitor, was growing so fast that I was (and still am) considering venture capital to grow it.

Spark Compliance had also been hired by a private equity firm to review compliance at its portfolio companies, and several of our new clients were private equity-owned.

So, in May, I signed up for the Private Equity course at Imperial College London’s executive education program.

It made sense!