Any salesman knows that FREE stuff sells. What we offer here is a taste of the valuable insight we provide our clients. For a free initial discussion, contact us and we'll go for coffee, or show up to confab with your staff for an hour or two and listen to your story.
HOPE for a stable, peaceful management environment – If your spent most of your time last week going from emergency to emergency, unable to spend your valuable time on those things that would truly GROW YOUR BUSINESS, look over the "success stories" and "what we do" sections of this site. We have helped create freedom for the harried executive, allowing them to anticipate, plan, and advance against their competition.
Early catch of management problems – Good systems build in reliable, repeatable workflow that lessens the likelihood of processing errors leading to the need for management intervention. Exceptions are anticipated and automated workflow rules installed to handle them without management review. Exceptions are monitored and reported to management when rules dictate. A simple example of this would be a purchase order requisition system that doesn’t allow the requisition to be created without the correct job, customer, salesperson.
Lower cost of new customer acquisition – A systematized approach to client contact and management will significantly lower sales costs and increase the consistency of the message presented to all potential customers. If your outward-facing website doesn’t present a clear message of why its important for anyone in your target market space to dive deep into your company’s offerings, it needs to change. If your “customer only” area doesn’t make it easy for them to request services or products, it needs to change.
Lower cost of new employees (“fungible” employees) – Higher automated support for complex business processes (like software that absolutely doesn’t allow bad data entry) allows the business leader to hire less-costly employees to complete complex tasks. Everyone becomes an easily replaceable part of “the system”.
More “salable” company – It is so much more difficult to sell a company that depends on “key” employees than on automated systems. My wife told me the local story of a salon that in the process of being sold without consulting the key stylists. Within a week the stylists had mostly left and the sale fell through. Buyers understand that a business built on “key” employees is much riskier than a business built on documented, well-maintained systems.
More “scalable” company – If you have a business that takes 10 employees to produce results for 10 clients, and you want to grow to 20 clients, you’ll need 20 employees, unless you systematize. In success stories we tell the story of a sales office that went from 35 salespeople supported by 5 staffers to 3500 salespeople supported by 12 staffers. Logarithmic sales growth with linear expense growth means greater and greater profits.
To look big, but act small (agile) – Everyone wants to look like a substantial enterprise to their customers Your customer is actually not as concerned about your number of employees as your ability to support your product and services over the long haul. Good systemization provides a consistent, timely interface between your customers and your organization. In “The Art of War” the author notes that having a bigger army is much less important that bringing a bigger force to bear on a particular skirmish . If you can bring a bigger force to bear at a particular point and time than your enemy, you win. Good systems provide the intelligence and pre-planned battle plan to win in your market space.
To carefully protect your proprietary business processes - Being held hostage by one or two significant employees can be a significant business risk. If critical business process knowledge is in their head, and only in their head, your business is at significant risk. I have a story to tell that’s too private to publish (but I’m willing to tell it, without names, if you take me out to lunch) about a key production employee who left a multi-generational family manufacturing company and started a rival firm. This production knowledge loss created significant anxiety and scrambling to keep the family business afloat. The cost of dealing with a new competitor who knew everything about the family business was exhausting. A story I can tell comes from a friend of mine who is a consultant for an extremely large software services provider (top 5 in world). They created an innovative product stateside. They continued to innovate stateside but outsourced maintenance of old releases and bug fixes to an Indian company. This Indian company turned around and outsourced to a Romanian company. This Romanian company sold all the source code to another Romanian company who relabeled it and began selling it. One day the original top 5 company gets a call at its support desk. The support desk has no record of this customer. The customer reads off the error message and notes that it says to call the support desk. A little bit of probing later and the call desk finds the caller referring to the product with a different name and different manufacturer. The top 5 company does a probe and discovers the whole chain of events. Unable to effectively stifle the Romanian company’s copyright fraud, the top 5 company looses hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales and must include in its call desk some new protocols to avoid supporting the stolen software.
