There’s a recession and it shows no sign of ending any time soon.

Money is tight, consumer spending is shrinking and costs continue to rise.

Just about every news or press report about the economy is perpetuating the theme of ‘more bad news’. What can you do ..?

I recently spent some time with a great team of people who were feeling ‘all of the above’ and plenty more had beset their business and that they really had to make some tough decisions about how they were going to continue to trade.

Without revealing too much about my client other than what they have agreed is within my remit to share it would be fair to say that here was a business that had clearly survived earlier downturns in the economy but had simply not moved forward when times were good.

A common issue, short term-ism. That is in no way meant as a criticism of these very hard working and well-intentioned businesspeople.

In fact I find it quite common when helping and supporting businesses.

In this case, as with SO MANY OTHERS it needed a fresh perspective, some different thinking and then guidelines and a plan to ensure that what we all agreed actually got delivered.

My client ran a very large and high volume wholesale business. They had over 400 colleagues on their books and further access to temporary workers during the course of the year.

Their main issue they told me was profitability. In fact there were several other key areas that they simply hadn’t considered as important enough to address. Again back to short term-ism.

The whole point of this Blog is simply to highlight how straightforward a plan and solution can be put in place.

Rarely has a client lacked the resource that they believed they needed to run a successful business operation.

Accountants, Financial Directors, HR , procurement, works Managers, the list is endless and of course themselves. The directors or partners who after all were the gatekeepers of the whole business.

And yet here they were chatting with me about how they could find a way out of their current malaise.

During our early preliminary meeting I could sense their reluctance to make the decision that an external consultant could offer their business something that they were unable to. When we spoke about the team and who did what their position initially strengthened. “Well I’ve got a really good person who looks at our costs and nothing gets past him’.

‘We run a really tight ship and we’ve already looked at our terms of payment and virtually every line on the P&L account so there’s nothing more that can be done there’. So the conversation continued along the same lines for a further half an hour.

At this point I asked the senior partner a straightforward set of questions. Why had he decided to see me? What were his reasons? And finally was it just to assuage his conscience that in fact he had considered everything possible before making the almost inevitable decision to cut his workforce further?

The answers were predictable. He and his partners had agreed that before making the tough calls, that what they would do would be to talk to a few consultants and to really get a sense check of their business for free and that as this would almost certainly tell them what they already knew that nothing obvious had been overlooked, then their plans to down size and reduce their workforce numbers would, in some way be justified.

The key difference with these clients in the end was though that in reality they were prepared to listen to ideas and hadn’t yet got to the point of dramatic and long term down sizing. They were honest and frank about where they were.

Two weeks later I was in the business. What the detailed solutions were and how they affected the client on a strategic basis remain confidential. But as with so many businesses that over time and with change could and often did not accept that their own talent pool might actually not be well trained enough or in fact good enough to deal with a modern and rapidly changing commercial world.

What I can say in this case was that yes they had plenty of highly paid and hard working colleagues. But they weren’t joined together in their objective to get the commercial success that they all craved.

The reality was that many of them were working in ‘Silos’ independently of the overall aims of the partners. They were in turn perpetuating this culture and narrow minded views throughout the whole business, so that what was being heard, the need for improvement, was being interpreted differently by so many.

There were tough decisions to be made for my clients. There were also exciting and positive ones that they did make and will reap the rewards for in the months to come.

It is always about what is best for a client and the particular business. But often the clients need help to see this.

They don’t always need a highly paid team of financial experts, Accountants and turnaround specialists.

What they need is experience support, guidance and time to implement a plan and strategy that resolves or develops their current position.

When everyone has their ‘heads down’ who is actually making the step change and taking on the challenge to develop and improve?

The answer is usually nobody.

In this case the clients business is already making improvements and WILL go on to become commercially stronger. They WILL deliver their profitability and improve upon it.

But they will also have achieved so much more to the extent that their planned development will mean stability and even growth in their re structured and better run workforce.

What they had was an underperforming business. What they have now is one that will deliver and I believe will exceed their expectations, it’s all in place to do so.

Great people and a pleasure to have been able to spend some time with them.

So why would a brand-new start up venture with all their great ideas, energy and focus need to talk to business consultants?

Very often a new idea is difficult to get off the ground. We all want to be the person or business that finds that ‘gap in the market’. Even when this is the case and a dedicated team are ready to launch this idea onto a eagerly anticipating sector there can be a million ideas and plans to overcome before what started off as the germ actually grows and delivers the rewards to your business and to potential clients.

We offer experience, support and coaching.

For a pre agreed time, usually through half – day workshops, we can visit you or arrange for approved venues to be used and spend quality meaningful time with your senior team  or individuals covering various categories that will help you to either get new projects off the ground or more often to simply support your current business plans and strategy.

We cover areas of real benefit to you such as:

Understanding where your time, resource, people, cash should be focussed  in the future.

An analysis of where business makes the most cash and profit and why

Understanding where your business has issues with talent and where the shortfalls in performance and focus needs to be applied.

Being able to see which parts of your business are delivering the returns expected by you and what to do about it when they are not.

How to highlight and apply planning and focus to poor performing elements of your business

Ensuring that your business has a clear understanding of the sector it is trading in and making you the business of first choice.

Identifying every part of your operation to see what has a limited lifespan and where disposal might prove beneficial.

Understanding the value of procurement to the business bottom line and cash –flow.

Making a plan into a strategy ensuring benchmarks are set and delivered.

Also making the communication of your business and people objectives clear for everyone in your organisation.

Ensuring that your business is positioned to provide optimum commercial success.

Using strategic tools to produce a plan and strategy that is specifically aligned to your business uniquely.

Supporting and coaching your business by reviewing and using constant improvement methods to ensure that your plans stay on track.

Delivering what you set out to deliver, each day every day .

So whether your strategy includes new market growth, developing your existing business, entering new markets or downsizing we can help you and your teams with clear ideas and years of experience.

The most difficult issue in business is usually the most obvious one the “elephant in the room”!

“Where do we start’? Or ‘everything is fine, it’s just a bad quarter..’

Getting around to making the tough decisions is what it takes to get a business performing at it’s best.

Very often the core of a great company already exists. What it takes is an objective and informed view and kick start.

That brings me back to where I started…

So who makes that call? Is a mutual agreement with all the senior partners or board members agreeing exactly on what the strategy should be?

Perhaps the strategy already exists. So why isn’t it getting landed!

Around and around it goes. Sometimes in a balanced way occasionally causing internal friction and rifts.

Perhaps a ‘tinker around the edges’ can get everybody’s buy in.

So it goes from one quarter to the next but the key fundamentals ‘that we all signed up to in last years business plan’ still haven’t been delivered.

An experienced independent business consultancy has each individuals clients best interests at the heart of what they do. Business Solutions will look analyse and make informed decisions on behalf of ALL the stakeholders.

The win bonus is that the improvements in productivity performance and people not only go straight to the bottom line they are also a straightforward return on the companies investment.

The challenge is making the tough decisions in the first place. So why wait?

Here are some links to more infomation:

Business Development and Marketing

How we helped a group of legal specialists become more profitable.