Business Owner Case Studies

Nationally recognized graphics and printing company

Business Characteristics:

• Very profitable, but with stagnant revenues
• 15 employees
• Successful for eight years
• Business-to-business clientele
• Privately held, multiple partners

Presenting Pain:

• Maintaining current client base, but not growing it
• Lack of revenue growth
• Key partner working more hours than desired
• Key partner wasting time fighting fires
• Key partner spending time on operational tasks staff could be doing, but were not doing - not the best use of his time and talents

Client’s Objective:

The owner and president wished to improve company performance in two key areas: sales and employee performance. Problem was, he couldn’t find time to work on the problems, didn’t know what actions to take, didn’t have an inventory of all the things he wanted to change and improve, and had no one to work with on what to do next.

Our Involvement:

Business Success Tools LLC provided business consulting and coaching to support major shifts in company performance. We started by helping the key partner to create an abbreviated strategic plan. This was a snapshot of how the work was being done today and how it could be done better. The plan generated options for changes that could be implemented within four months. To build this plan, we engaged in the following activities:

• Created inventory of how the business owner was spending time (decisions he made, actions he took)
• Assessed the owner’s strengths
• Determined the best role the business owner should be playing based on value added to the organization
• Defined new roles and responsibilities for other employees
• Developed and implemented training and delegation plan to migrate operational work away from owner and into the hands of his employees
• Changed primary focus to: obtaining new clients, customer service and retaining existing clients

Once the plan was developed, we provided ongoing coaching to the owner in order to monitor progress and to devise next steps.

Results:

• Revenues increased by 3.4% in 120 days without increasing expenses
• The owner closed two new accounts—the company’s second and third largest
• The owner was able to delegate work to his employees, which freed up an average of two additional hours per business day for other priorities
• Employee performance and morale increased
• The president reported spending significantly less time “putting out fires” and more time focusing on growing the business, attracting new customers, as well as retaining existing customers

Client investment:

• Less than $8,000