Category: Uncategorized

Gotta Know Your Limitations

To paraphrase the Clint Eastwood movie, ‘A man’s gotta know his limitations’.

What does that mean for you, as an owner of a company?

It means don’t get ahead of your organization’s ability to execute what you want to do.

It’s fine to have buy-in from your organization on your plans (we recommend it), but you might task your organization with more than it can do in the time frame you’d like it done.

An example: in one of my companies, we were adding production capacity, expanding eastward in the United States, and adding English and Australian distributors, and I and my plating manager got the idea for a completely new metal coating process for our exhaust parts on a Friday afternoon.

We were also improving our shipping times, which required a fairly major commitment to more inventory.

I discussed the new pr my partner, who had blessed the idea previously but who had expressed valid concerns about going beyond our capacity, So Monday, I and my partner held an all hands meeting with my staff, front office and warehouse, as well as production. My CFO missed the meeting, but she would have asked me what additional strain I would be putting on our financial resources.

Frankly, I didn’t know, and I admitted as much. My name was on the building, but I discovered it was ok to not know something. At Wharton and Ford, you were expected to know the answers.

So, we kept implementing the other expansion plans, and I started the process of doing market research and actual testing of the parts in the worst climates where we had discrete distributors. I might have otherwise skipped the market research test because the initial response from a couple of key distributors was overwhelmingly positive.

We digested the plans already in the works, and then tested the parts in places like Seattle, Houston (for marine uses) and Denver. All positive.

The tests took about six months, during which time our competitors might have found out what we were up to, but they didn’t.

So, we stayed within our limitations, kept the financial wheels on the business and had a very successful product launch.

And the staff was happy, because they didn’t get pushed beyond their limits.

Financially, we added nearly 30% to our sales in a year in the middle of a recession, which we didn’t think we could do, but it worked.

Gotta know your limitations so you can exceed them

 

Home Depot Horror Story

I’ve been looking around for a bad customer service story for awhile, and Home Depot has provided one.

Back in January, we ordered 14 boxes of wall tile to tile the peeling walls of our garage from Home Depot online.

Tile arrived, but when we examined the packages, about half the tiles were broken, possibly from being thrown onto our front patio for delivery. No one from the delivery service (NDS)  rang the bell and said they had 14 boxes of tile to be delivered, and where would be like it?

Then the wrangling began on the return for the next two months. Home Depot Customer Service actually claimed at one point that they had nothing to do with Home Depot. Meanwhile, our installation is delayed and we’ve got a $790 charge at Home Depot for broken tile.

Finally, an enterprising customer service representative agreed that they whole matter should have been quickly resolved, and took out one of the small Home Depot flatbed trucks and with a female driver, came to our house and loaded the broken tile. Once the store had the tile, they reversed the charge.

Kudos to the employee (Frank) who showed the initiative to take a truck and pick up the tile, but a real brick to the rest of Home Depot customer service for being unresponsive.

As a result, we’ve ordered the tile from Floor and Decor, who has been very accommodative, and we’ll pick it up ourselves.

The morale of this tale is to empower your employees to make decisions in the best interests of the customer.

We hope that Home Depot reviews the recorded conversations of this travesty and fires most of the customer service reps who were involved.

COVID Comotion

We are sitting down here in Arizona, land of the free and home of no COVID restrictions and not many masks.

Our governor has been pretty sane about school restrictions too; the state  money follow the child, with the result that there’s a general shift away from public schools towards private and parochial

The coasts and Chicago need to get on board with the new reality, and the Illinois governor or the Chicago mayor should fire the teachers who aren’t in the classroom.

The Supremes are also likely it seems to declare the vax mandate unconstitutional. Enough of the nutty regs. OHSA wasn’t supposed to be in the vax biz anyway.

Unions have a place, but it’s not to be obstructionists.

Why Should Anyone be Led By You?

The title of this post comes from a series of lectures that I and another Navy Captain, Fred Reis, did under the aegis of the Chief of Naval Operations, ADM Frank Kelso.

I was called in by Sen. John McCain’s office, who knew me and my civilian company leadership record, and wanted the two of us to try leadership theories on Navy Captains, many of whom had not evolved their leadership styles since the era of wooden ships and iron men (and proudly in some cases so stated to us).

Fred and I ultimately published a book called ‘Leadership Secrets’, and about 4,000 copies went out to all Commanding Officers in the Navy as well as many middle managers who the Navy thought had potential. It took us three two week tours, plus some admin support, to get it done, but ADM Kelso finally blessed the product and issued a CNO order implementing it.

In addition, we did a one week course for those who wanted more leadership training (including a few hardcore yellers and screamers) who got put in our leadership course, or who faced being cashiered from the Navy.

How these secrets apply to you, as a company owner, is that somewhere around 10 employees, folks might question your leadership qualities and ability, and the ability to demonstrate both is critical to your company going further.

In all honesty, you might decide at 10 employees that’s as large as you want to get, and your golf game needs more attention than your sales curve. Fair enough; I encounter people like you all the time. My Dad, who had started the Heinrich Company, was like this; he’d worked hard since he was 12 or so, and his company provided him and my mother a very nice lifestyle.

But, many owners want to do better by their employees, give them a vision and a career if they chose it.

For starters, you don’t have to keep all your employees happy all the time, but you do need to  listen to them.

If you listen rather than just issuing edicts, and your employees have the feeling that they’re being listened to, you’ll have happier employees, ones that stick around. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s the lowliest warehouse guy or gal, or the production line guy or gal, or your business partner, you should listen.

I often think, in retrospect, that I exercised my 51% ownership of the Heinrich Company too often, and probably had more employee turnover and poorer decisions as a result. We still achieved 25% compound growth rates, and nearly outstripped our financial resources, but we might have done better by listening more.

There are several leadership styles that you can use, such as the command and control (the old Navy model) where everything is written down in orders, to a more modern coaching style of leadership where decisions are reached by consensus.

Personally, I discovered that the command and control Navy way didn’t always work when I was a plane captain of a surveillance plane flying around over Viet Cong strongholds; There were a couple of times when the crew asked to talk over a decision and, after realizing that we had time to discuss it, we did.  And a couple of those people turned up in my commands years later when they found out I was leading a Navy Reserve unit.

You’ve got more time to make a decision on something than you realize. So, take some time. Look for opinions. Wander around on the production line or warehouse floor. Even Alan Mulally, the retired CEO of Ford, used to wander around the Ford production lines. And he was very well thought of by Ford’s rank and file. And he popped up at the Phoenix intro of the Ford Fusion, just talking to the inviteds, no big hoohaa.

Jim Farley, Ford’s current CEO, is much different. For openers, he’s a product guy, having come up through Lexus and Lincoln. But he also turned around Ford of Europe, so he’s got operational chops (no pun intended). And he races Fords of all kinds, which is really different. Farley driving the wheels off a Ford Mach E on the Dearborn test track is a sight. Another sight is Farley asking the Twitteratti of their opinion of a Mach E door handle.

But, both Mullaly and Farley share a common trait: they both work from consensus, although Farley showed a willingness to make major personnel cuts at Ford of Europe while revving up the product side.  Mullaly created the ‘One Ford’ vision to unite the warring units within Ford, which was a major leadership accomplishment, and I know heads rolled over that vision.

Farley and Mullaly also demonstrate a couple of other leadership tenets: leadership is doing the right things  while management is executing on the vision of right things.

We recommend the consensus form of leadership, as long as there’s time to build a consensus. In business, there usually is time, despite one of your sales reps yelling that you should have made a decision on ‘x’ yesterday.

As you become more confident as a leader, you’ll take the time you need to build your consensus and get the buy-in that you need to have successful decision, not just one made on the fly that no one is happy about.

When you have to make a decision, make it. As my wife would say, ‘Don’t sit on the pasture post’.

The key think once you make the decision is execution. You and your team need to execute, and be alert for signs of problems with the decision as you go along.

You might find that there’s a better decision, based on more complete information to be made down the road. Or, you might find that you were just flat wrong in the decision you made.

Don’t waste time agonizing about bad decisions, either. If a decision appears to be incorrect to you, talk to your team and find out what could be better. Don’t be hesitant to admit you were wrong.

You might be right, you might be wrong, but don’t be indecisive.

Lead, follow or get out of the way.

 

 

Who’s on the Bus?

With a little digression into vaccines, which relate to this personnel blog, which will be about what people you need going forward, and some (we hope) good tips on how to find and recruit good people.

If you are growing (and you might decide you want a lifestyle job, so you make enough money to support the lifestyle you want), you will need to hire people.

These people might not do the jobs you formerly did as well as you did them, but having them on board frees you to do other things that are seemingly more important. If you’re doing a lifestyle business, then you might continue doing what you’re doing and be perfectly content.

A convenient way to look at what employees you might have to add is what they’re going do do, how much revenue they can generate (not just in sales, but in even allowing you to do things that are more meaningful to the firm, versus how much the employee is going to cost in terms of pay and benefits. The revenue/cost figure is presumably positive, otherwise, why hire the person?

To give you an example, a client we have decided recently to hire a new person. Their financial calculus was that the person would cost about $50,000 per year in pay and benefits, but the two founders could, through more sales and higher end sales, create another $90,000 in revenue. So, the revenue/cost calculus is $40,000. Now, nine months later, they are about to add another laser cutter and hire another production operator. The calculus is a little different, because the total expenses are $82,000, so the short term benefit is only $8,000, but there is the future benefit of another $40,000. At some point, demand might slow down or the people might be more expensive, but as long as their is a positive profit generator, employees should be added.

It should be noted that, at some point, the $40,000 calculus per employee might be reduced somewhat because a supervisory person has to be hired to look after the operation. This should have a positive return too, because he/she further frees the owners to make more revenue.

We are presuming that you have the financing to hire more people and buy/lease more equipment, but if you don’t you’ll have to subtract financing from your overall cash positive.

And you do a Solutions Forum meeting, either face to face or via Zoom every two months or so to iron out any problems that have arisen, such as maybe not making the best hire and whether to cut said underperformer loose. (The answer is that as long as his/her cash contribution is positive, you keep him her around and look for another, better person and refine your hiring parameters.

When you make the decision to hire, don’t expect to put the ad in indeed.com on Thursday and have someone report bright and bushy tailed for interviews on Friday and work on Monday.

When they show up, you first put them through a DISC test (available on the internet) to find out if they have the ability mentally and emotionally. You might also run them through practical tests, such as running the laser cutter, to see how they do, while making allowances that they should get better by ‘x’ after they start.

All told, if you fire any employee, it will cost you about $15,000 to hire a new person, in terms of training, possibility of firing and management time in getting the person up to speed.

In the present high demand labor conditions, your positive revenue contribution of a new employee might be reduced from where you would like it, but it should still be positive. Don’t be hiring just to be hiring unless you have a burning desire to walk around your plant and see a bunch of smiling (you hope) faces.

KPI’s

Somewhere around five employees, with one or two people in every job function, you can develop KPI’s, or ‘Key Process Indicators’ of what a good employee is and does. Things like attitude, dependability, independent working, creativity and the like could be measured. KPI’s might be different for each positions. You can weight each of the KPI’s in terms of traits you’d most like to see.

And yes, in the current climate, you should use diversity as one of your KPIs. How much weight you give it is up to you, but it does need to be explicitly incorporated.

ARE THE PEOPLE IN THE RIGHT SEATS ON THE BUS?

Again, as you grow, you might find that various people want to do different things from what they were hired for. That’s fine, because personnel satisfaction is key to your success, and not only because personnel might be 30-70% of your total costs.

You have to interview the person and find out why they want to do the new job, and what positive contribution they can make financially that they’re not now making. Yes, you have to be fairly ruthless about it, unless you’ve decided that you’re really running a social welfare agency. You have to make the employee realize that the new job they want may or may not work out, and what the financial consequences of each alternative on their future might be. No sugar coating.

You might also find that a person wants to ‘downshift’ in their corporate career, and take on a job that’s more personally meaningful to them at the time in their life where they are or expect to be going. For example, one of my clients sold his highly successful business because he wanted to focus more on his world class photography, after doing his business for some 30 years. So, he sold a majority of his business to his two sons, who are running it quite well, and he’s photographing things all over the world. One of your employees might want to work less hours for you and more hours for his/her favorite non-profit. That’s fine, too….a greater social good has been achieved.

PERSONNEL RECORDS

OK, no one likes to do or keep them, but it’s a fact of life these days that you’ve got to record all  interactions with your people, because there might be controversy brewing somewhere down the road.

There might be trips to the labor commission to resolve fired personnel grievances, or there might be disputes among people or yourself as to who said and did what to whom. ALL interactions involving personnel should be documented, and the person should sign off on the documentation so they can’t later come back and deny they said or did what they did.

Or, you and a person might come to a parting of the ways. We advocate trying to work things out, but sometimes things don’t work out, and a termination is best for all. Acknowlege the mistake, learn from it and move on. But document that the person is being terminated and why, and have the person sign it, so there’s no misunderstanding.

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

No one much liikes performance reviews, but, in our experience, if they’re handled with sensitivity and objectively (no harsh words), they can actually be enhancing. People find out what they’re doing right, and what they could be doing better, especially in relation to the job they were hired to do.

Everyone deserves to know how they’re doing, and as objectively evaluated as possible. If you’re using KPI’s, as we recommend, the performance review becomes somewhat more routine and more objective, because you’re rating your people against the ideal, whatever that is.

How frequent should personnel be evaluated? It depends on a variety of factors: complexity of job, time on the job, and time to do a review (there are times you just can’t do a review when one is due, but don’t defer it forever) Point out to the employee that you can’t do it right now, and you’ll reschedule it for next Thursday. Reviewer and reviewee should both be comfortable and relaxed when the review is done.

We think quarterly reviews are about right.

Again, employee and employer should both sign the review. If one of your supervisors is doing the review, they sign it. After all, your supervisor is evaluated by his/her superior, and so it goes up the line.

The CEO, by the way, gets evaluated by his Board of Directors, in case some of your more inquiring personnel want to know. Partners should evaluate each other, too, again in a friendly setting, such as and offsite lunch or dinner. Coupling the evaluations with goals for the next reporting period is a good practice that we’ve used and coached.

TURNOVER

That some of your employees will leave is a fact of life. More money, better job, downsizing, the reasons are diverse. Don’t be shocked, but do interview the ones who left to let them know that you valued their contribution (assuming that you did) and wishing them well. Sometimes they will come back after the new opportunity didn’t work out, and all should be forgiven and a personal growth moment should ensue.

There is no ‘right’ turnover number. For stable organizations, it’s probably about 10%.

In high growth situations, it can be higher, because of the demands that will be placed on people; but then again, if you did your initial hiring ratings correctly, there shouldn’t be many surprises. One of my clients just had about 8% of his workforce quit in one week, all of whom are going to a competitor, and all for financial reasons, so he’s got some rethinking of his compensation plans to do.

When I took over my family business, my first year turnover was about 75%, but it was mostly because of moving from a relatively slow growth, almost paternalistic culture to a high perforumance culture. We tried to forster a sense of family, but we didn’t let family get in the way of hitting the numbers. We could do both, because by the end of the first year of my seven as President, we had most of the right people on the bus.

And, having the right people on the bus makes your job a lot easier.

More on Vaccines and the Mandates

Yesterday, a Federal judge reportedly outlawed vaccine mandates as unconstitutional under the first amendment.

We are not surprised.

Not only is it a constitutional violation, it’s certainly a violation of free will, when there’s no clear national emergency posed by COVID 19 or any of the variants.

COVID 19 and the variants are still one percent problems, meaning that 99% of the population is penalized because 1% of the population doesn’t want to get one of the vaccines, with no clear reason for not getting vaxed.

Sometimes, karma strikes in odd ways, such as Aaron Rogers, the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers professional football team, contracting COVID after he was ‘immunized’ with some unknown substance.

As a result, his team loses, might not make the football playoffs and his reputation as a spokesperson is probably damaged. Great thinking, Aaron.

As we’ve said publicly, in our @solutionsforum Twitter account, if you are a public figure, you should get vaxed. Be a good role model and spokesperson.

Since Rogers took some sort of alternative treatment and got COVID, he could perform a public service by saying what he took (assuming it was legal) and don’t do what he did.

Now, since he has COVID 19, he has the opportunity to try alternative treatments, such as Ivermectin, to see if they lessen his symptoms.

Reporting about what happens would be a public service, and might alleviate some the damage his reputation has taken.

Get under center and make the call, Aaron. Take some personal responsibility.

 

 

 

People in Your Startup

The popular image of the startup entrepreneur is Jobs, Gates or the HP guys slaving away in their garage, or back bedroom,  lone wolfs, trying to get their businesses off the ground. They don’t hire people until the business is off the ground.

The reality today is  different. Startups write business plans, raise money and hire people in various disciplines to do functions like marketing and sales, finance and production.

Odds are you’ve worked with the people you’re launching with. And, presumably you’ve got non disclosures in place for all of them, once they have agreed to their compensation package.

You should strive for diversity, but more important, you want the best people you can find for the price you can pay. COVID status can be one of the screens when you’re interviewing people, but that’s about all it should be. The same with Critical Race Theory but, this topic should be avoided,  because it’s so highly charged politically, and you don’t make politics intruding into the workplace.

You do want your people to be socially responsible, which means in this context that they be proud of the company they work for, and your company not engage in socially irresponsible behavior, such as insider trading or overt or covert theft of competitive secrets.

As one of my clients once said, could you discuss your business idea in a cocktail party?

All the employees should be of good character, too, so they don’t engage in socially iresponsible acts, such as sexual harassments. You don’t need a lawsuit to sink your company as it’s getting started, or cost you dearly in legal fees.

Winnowing out bad behaviors, even in your startup, means that you should test your employees for these behaviors, and for Key Personnel Indicators (KPI) which cover teamwork, creativity and various other attributes.

Also, in the COVID era, where more people are working remotely, and probably will for some time yet, you need to test for independence. One of my clients now has 1/3 working from home, 1/3 working from an office, and 1/3 who go back and forth. This seems like a sensible model you can use.

You as the founder need to look inward, too, to ensure that you’re the leader that the company needs. I’ve worked for more than one startup where the founder wasn’t the best person to work for; the marketing positioning was generally sound, but the founder was just difficult to work for. You want to engender loyalty and trust, so you must have those attributes.

One of the areas that is frequently neglected in a startup among people is sales. Your salespeople, or persons should be able to sell effectively and ethically, and should be graduates of one of the sales academies, such as Sandler or Brian Tracy. They should have a proven record of closing deals, too (this is a trait that is often overlooked in sales)….it should be in excess of 25%..

If you have your product or service positioning right, and your promotion is right, sales ought to be relatively easy. You should have an idea of what your sales cycle (the time from sale to money collection looks like so you have enough money to fund sales.

We should also discuss how much space you will need. You will pay a premium if you lease a small space in, say, and Executive Center, but you don’t have much downside risk.

You should allow yourself growing room, but how much may take an educated guess. Your people should be able to help: when I entered manufacturing with one of my companies, I had no clue now much space I needed, but my production manager (and future business partner) did.

We always made sure that we leased from firms that had lots of different properties, because we regularly underestimated how much we would grow. Try to ensure that your lease has options to renew, and relocate. We moved twice in seven years, despite having allowed for growth (we thought) in each of our spaces.

If you need to raise money, you should base how much you need to raise on your worst case business plan (we have advocated doing a best case, a worst case, the odds of each happening, and that becomes the business plans and goals). But use the worst case to raise money, because you never know what might happen. It’s better to have too much money than too little.

As an example when we started the American School of Entrepreneurship, we did so using standard university classrooms we rented from University of Phoenix. It became apparent, with the advent of online delivery methods, that we could actually record the classes and the PowerPoint presentations, put them on a website and there was an international market awaiting. Home run for about three years, until Harvard, Stanford, Penn and Coursera caught on and ran over us.

We recovered our investment, but the change to online needed more capital. We are still discussing how we’re going to reinvent the School; all I will say is that it comes down to people.

So, in reading the last three posts to Entrepreneurial News, you’ve got everything you need to start a business!

 

Starting a Business Part Two: Customer Centricity

When you are thinking about starting a business, you have to go find customers.

You have to market research their buying habits, probably to a focus group to find out what, if anything their don’t like about the current offerings in the market, and generally embrace them.

You have to find out what media influences them to buy, if any (word of mouth still accounts for 70% of a customer’s decision to buy).

We have one client who  is extremely customer focused, and they can’t keep up with demand. Their clients keep giving them more work. It doesn’t hurt that they’re in a rapidly growing industry, either.

We call it end to end customer centricity. Everybody in the organization has as their number one priority to focus on the customer. No one says ‘that’s not my job’, even after you become larger. Everybody takes messages for everybody and everybody answers the phone and emails.

Since most of economic activity is retail, through shops or online stores, we are going to focus on promotion methods that we have found work for retail.

As we said in the past chapter, most businesses focus on price.

That’s not necessarily wrong, if that’s what your customer perceived competition is doing. However, and this is where most companies make a mistake, you should focus on the other promotion elements that seem to be important to customers, such as on time delivery, your ability and friendliness in chasing orders, and service after the sale, even years after the sale. Even service products that you didn’t sell, because that’s one method of finding out what customers like or don’t like about the competing product.

What does the design of your products look like? Kind of average? Again, what do customers think of your designs? Do you even know? Apple, for example, uses its cool designs and ease of use to justify higher than normal prices for its products, and it doesn’t get stuck in commodity hell. Apple also tends to hide its pricing by using bundles of its products with associated services, such as Apple Pay and Apple Wallet (but I have yet to see compelling reasons to put either one of them on my phone, but then I don’t want any of my bank information disclosed on anyone’s network. Just sayin’.

All the other computer makers (Dell, Samsung, Lenovo for example) compete on price on phones, or hide their pricing in deals. They’re sort of stuck in a zero sum game, or a game growing  the growth of the economy.

At the outset, you want to figure out how you’re going to grow at some multiple of overall economic growth.

And, at the outset, you need to ask your future customers if they want or need your product. Wants put you in the Apple camp, needs are less strong. If customers are indifferent to either a want or a need, then you might want to rethink your idea. You can also ask the prospective customers if there is a product out there that they would like to see you produce.

To give you an idea, in my first company we were struggling with polished chrome exhaust parts: although if we did it right, they looked beautiful, were expensive, prone to damage in production, and had a tendency to walk out the door. Our sales of them were doing well, because we were the low cost producer, but the problems persisted. So, we were noodling around these various  problems one Friday afternoon, and our chrome manager said he could do a nickel alloy at less cost that would have 80% of the appearance. So he produced a few parts, we shipped them to key distributors, and the response was off the charts good.

So, be thinking about what you could do that would be similarly disruptive. Your customers should view your product as a want or need, which will make your promotion job easier.

I’m continually surprised at how many companies don’t make it easy to do business with them, either because you can’t reach out and touch them by telephone or email. My wife and I went out to dinner recently at a fish restaurant we’d never seen before and found the prices reasonable and the food excellent. Despite being only two or three months in their location, the place was packed on a Saturday night. It seems like they’re doing most everything right by their customers. Interestingly, the restaurant chain is based in Ventura, not Phoenix.

Maybe you’ve got a bad location. My restaurant had a bad location, which we netralized through excellent word of mouth, but it took three years and $150,000 of losses to get there. Think how you can neutralize a bad location: The magic of the internet or delivery is one help, but poor delivery might mess up your service.

One of the things that I discovered when working for Ford, and still discover is the lack of customer focus by many of the Ford dealers. Ford can preach it, but it doesn’t mean the dealers will do it.

One of the things I’ve always done on my own companies, and frequently advised by CEO clients to do is call into their own companies and test their customer centricity and how easy it is to do business with their companies. The results are often eye opening.

If you are really customer focused, you should have very good word of mouth referrals, which should be about 70% of your business, maybe less in early years, or when you’re rapidly growing.

In the final analysis, your customers will tell you if you’re customer centric, as long as you ask them once in a while.

Don’t Be Afraid to Pivot

I’ve been reading about the INC Magazine 5000 companies, and I’m struck this year how many of them took the COVID pandemic time off last year to review whether they’re in the right business.

Yeah, they were making money, but it seems like they had a sense that they’re not quite hitting it, not quite killing it, either.

What I didn’t notice is that they went out and did some market research, either among their present clients or their future clients to see what they could do better or differently.

I also didn’t see that they looked at their financial resources to whether they could afford to pivot, or they had to bring in more financial resources.

So, if you’re going to  pivot, don’t be afraid to do so, but don’t entrust luck and your good looks to make the pivot a success. Do some research among your present customers and your future customers.

Return the Call!

Those who know Solutions Forum know that we built this company on talking to business owners directly.

In 17 years, we’ve helped about 50 companies solve problems in all sorts of fields. On average, we’ve added about $100,000 of value to the companies who’ve been members, over an average of 18 months.

This value added works out to about 20 times the dues that they’ve paid us.

Not all the value comes from groups, either. About 25% of our business is from one/one clients, where we discuss how we can help them, or we discuss how they can do things better than they are now.

Sometimes, as recently happened to one of our one on one clients, they did what we suggested, and it helped create about $100,000 more sales; they invested about $500 in consulting fees. So, they called us again to help them hire some more people and solve over sales problems.

Even though the two owners are so busy they can hardly relax during the day, they took a couple of hours on two consecutive Monday mornings to talk over what’s going on. One result is they’re going to borrow an person from another client to do invoicing at the end of their day, because they had about $15,000 of unbilled work.  She might do some accounts receivable collection, too. They are also going to hire another machine operator. We know each machine generates about $150,000 in revenue, paying for itself in about a year. But, at some point, they’ll run out of space, wo we’ll deal with that when it becomes a problem.

We have other stories of success that we’ve facilitated.

We never know in advance what’s going to come out of one of our client meetings, whether they’re groups or one/one’s.

The bottom line is, when we leave you a voicemail it’s worth returning the call!

Not returning our call might cost you $100,000.