1 - Comprehensive Analysis and Planning

As important as it is to know where you want to take your business in the future, it is equally important to establish where you are starting from. Only then can we accurately determine the time and resources necessary to help you reach your goals.

For that reason, we often start by conducting a Business Performance Review, Industry Comparisons, Benchmarking and/or Trend Analysis to establish not only how your company is performing against others in the industry, but also relative to your own past performance. Information revealed in this step will serve as a foundation for goal setting during your Planning Session.

In preparation for your Planning Session, we’ll work with you to complete a simple questionnaire that will highlight the financial, operational, management, marketing, and industry forces that are present or likely to emerge in your business.

The Planning Session

The Planning Session is a comprehensive diagnostic process to determine the current state of your business, to identify opportunities for improved profitability and growth, as well as identify any potential obstacles that might sidetrack your progress.

During the Planning Session we will work with you and your team to review your current business scenario by facilitating a detailed SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) Analysis.

Then we will develop an on-the-spot Action Plan that will integrate your present goals with any new ones resulting from the analysis we do together. This will enable you and your team to go forward with clearly defined and prioritized objectives. This Action Plan will also include measurable benchmarks and create a high level of accountability for those involved with the implementation of the plan.

2 - Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Identification and Monitoring System Development

During this process we will work with you and your team to capture your company’s Cycle of Customer Interaction to identify the Key Performance Indicators that are most critical to your success. We will then establish a baseline of financial and non-financial performance indicators relating to your current scenario. This baseline will serve as a benchmark against which all future progress will be measured.

What it comes down to is this... “What you can measure, you can manage.” By identifying and monitoring the activities in your business that have a direct impact on your profitability you’ll be in a position to reach your goals in a much more controlled and targeted way.

This exercise is designed to identify specific critical indicators, both from your customer’s perspective and operationally, to let you know exactly where your business stands at any given point in time.

This “expert” feedback system will keep you informed about the performance of your company on a real-time basis. Knowing and monitoring these Key Performance Indicators in your business will also give you the opportunity to improve the outcome while the “game” is still being on a daily, weekly or even an hourly basis.

This information also gives immediate feedback to the team about their performance and how they impact the overall profitability of the company. This is a critical step when developing incentive programs for team-wide process improvement.

Amazingly, we have found, “that which gets managed, gets improved”, automatically, when people have meaningful feedback about their performance.

3 - Financial Literacy Training

This next step involves educating your team about the link between the financial realities of your business and their individual and team performance. Financial Literacy Training is an essential element in the development of an entrepreneurial mindset within your company culture.

Many of the companies who embrace this philosophy do so for the purpose of translating traditional financial measurements into meaningful management information for each and every player on the team.

This approach addresses the question on every team member’s mind, “What’s in it for me?” By making your team financially literate and translating financial measurements Into Key Performance Indicators, you’ll find your team will take “ownership” of their performance and contribute to your company as innovators and entrepreneurs as never before.

One of the leading authors on this subject, John Case, explains it this way:

“Execution is where the rubber meets the road. Generals, football coaches and the harried managers of Subway sandwich franchises know the truth: No matter how brilliant the plans, no matter how smart the strategy, nothing gets accomplished unless people execute.”

“In business, execution is what happens (or doesn’t happen) everyday in offices and shops and warehouses and factories, in management meetings and on the sales calls and on the front lines. It’s about what people do on the job everyday. It’s what they think about and how they work together... get people working together productively creatively toward common purposes, without to much lost effort. All the big-picture stuff, the mission and the strategy and everything else, is critically dependent on getting individuals working together.”

4 - Designing and Establishing a
“Report and Reward” System

That which gets measured, gets done. That which gets rewarded, gets done again. Now that we have your team actively involved with helping you improve the performance of your company, we need to develop a company “Report and Reward” System. This system provides feedback to owners, managers and team members about their performance on a real-time basis. Exactly how much and in what form you share critical financial and non-financial information will be unique to your company. This step also leads to the development of a performance-based compensation program.

5 - Monthly – Quarterly Review

Once we’ve established systems to measure, report and reward on the activities critical to your company’s success, we’ll then meet with you regularly to review and advise you on ways to improve your critical numbers.