Your business may be unique, but your business problems aren’t

This is a powerful concept.

But when you hear the term “improve your business”, there’s a good chance that you envision something different than what I do. And it’s different for most people because we all come to this point with a different set of experiences and perspectives.

What I would like to do is create some clarity and a shared vision for what the term improve your business means, as I use it in my consulting practice.

It’s a common theme throughout our website and all of our communication materials to improve your business — we say it in a lot of different ways. But that’s the whole focus of what we do. Our mission is to improve the profitability and growth of our client businesses. We measure our success based on the impact we create. And we measure impact based on cost savings in your business, revenue growth of your business, the overall profit improvement of your business and client satisfaction.

So “improve your business.”

Let’s delve a little more deeply into what that means.

In most every business, we find that the employees and the leaders of the business tend to view everything as normal. They’re coming in today, expecting to do pretty much what they did yesterday, and will plan to come back tomorrow and do it again.

This is the way we do it.

This is normal. This is how we’ve always done it.

A business improvement process starts with envisioning what your future might be. And then understanding where you are today and what’s the gap; what’s keeping you from where you are today to where it is you want to be in your future?

Next you need explore the options and assess the alternatives in every functional area of your business. Then you need to select a course of action, develop, test and document those solutions.

It might be necessary to train or re-train your employees in how to do things differently — better, in order to implement that improvement so that you can achieve the benefits.

And finally, monitor and repeat that process for continuous improvement. That’s exactly what’s encompassed when we say “improve your business.”

Think about it like this; If you were building a building, you would engage a team of architects, engineers and a general contractor to make your vision a reality. The general contractor in turn would engage with the steel and concrete workers, the electricians, the HVAC, plumbers, and all of the other trades so that in the end, everything in the building function together as a cohesive system and the building looked and worked like you wanted and needed.

Building a business is no different.

No function in business exists in a silo for all functions must work together.

A good consultant helps you orchestrate the complex business improvement processes throughout all functional areas of your business. So that in the end, everything in your business works together as a cohesive system. You end up with a business that is more efficient, well controlled, more prosperous, and headed toward achieving your true potential in ways that you and your team could not have done effectively while performing your daily operations.

Albert Einstein said problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them. We’re big believers in that; that outside perspective is so important in helping see the issues, and also see how things could be better in guiding the process for improvement.

We also want to make it clear that the big improvements aren’t always about the big things. For example, what would happen if we simply engineered 10% improvements throughout your business? Let’s start with a simple profit engineering model…

Let’s take a company with $10 million in revenue and half a million dollars of annual net income. Let’s make 10% improvements throughout and see what happens. So we begin by breaking down the processes that lead to a given result. The current $10 million of sales may come from 5000 leads with a 25% closing rate in an average sale per customer of $1,000. That’s how we get the 10 million. Let’s work on each of those, let’s increase the leads by 10%, the closing rate by two and a half percentage points and the average sale per customer by $100.

Revenues are now up to 13.3 million. So, let’s reduce those direct cost of goods sold by five percentage points and our other expenses by four and a half percentage points.

Net income has now gone from 5% to 14.5%, that’s a 286% increase in profit by doing nothing more than little 10% increases throughout the business.

It makes a huge difference, and if you’re the owner of the business, that increase in net income increases the value of your business by a huge multiple, in this case, a $7 million increase in the value of the business.

By the way, that’s more than a 10 times return on the investment that would be required for us to get you there. And that’s our goal; is for every client we work with, at least a 10 times impact on what we’re doing.

Simple Profit Engineering Model:

Current Operations

I know that it’s often viewed in business that bringing in outside advisors, consultants or coaches is viewed as a sign of weakness or failure. I’d like to get past that.

Let’s look at what happens with the greatest athletes in the world. Whether they play for the NBA, the NFL or Olympic champions, great athletes always have great coaches. And it’s not because these athletes they don’t have talent.

In fact, it’s because they do.

They recognize that to become the best at what they do they need that outside perspective to help them hone that talent to make it the best that it can be. I believe that’s the same in sports as it is in business. If you believe that you and your team have talent, wouldn’t it make sense to help that talent become the best it can be to help you and your team become champions?

So, what does it mean to improve your business? It means getting you from where you are to where you want to be in your business and in your life.

There is no cookie cutter approach to what we do. There’s a process we follow. Every business is unique, of course, but your business issues aren’t unique — I can promise you that. We’ve seen them many times before.

But getting you from where you are to where you want to be involves a very customized approach, specifically tailored for you, your team, and your business. Wanting to improve your business all begins with a meeting. Let’s have a conversation about where you are today, your vision for where you would like to be and what we might be able to do to help you get there.

Remember, it is likely that you will spend more time at work than any other area of your life so that is why improving your business is so important and also why it leads to improving your life.

We look forward to exploring the possibilities with you so that you can Improve Your Business and Improve Your Life.

Christopher Jones is a trusted advisor to leaders with the ability to align strategy with tactics, drive leadership development and corporate-wide change efforts.