Business Owner Case Studies

Successful styling salon - effective succession planning and delegation strategy

Business Characteristics:

• Very profitable but revenues had leveled
• 20 employees
• Successful for 15 years
• Clientele: primarily affluent women
• Business owner was excellent technician, excellent financial manager
• Privately held, family owned
• Grown children beginning to work in company (family owned business, second generation joining the company)

Presenting Pain:

• Having difficulty growing revenues
• No time to work on business; always serving clients and fighting fires; difficulty delegating to others
• Many employee performance problems, which were causing customer service issues and poor employee morale
• Increasing number of mistakes—scheduling appointments, billings/collections, customer service
• Business owner under tremendous personal stress
• Grown children - will they be able to learn and do what they need to in order to take over the business some day?

Client's Objective:

The owner wanted to be able to find the time to bring the business back on course, understand what needed to be fixed, and get advice and counsel from someone he could trust.  Owner wanted to be sure he was making sound decisions when it came to his grown children, especially in the area of delegating to them.

Our Involvement:

Our first step was to work with the client to develop a strategic plan. This plan identified 19 actions that the owner and staff would take over an 18-month period of time. These included:

• Improving the hiring process with job descriptions and documented roles and responsibilities for each employee
• Training several employees and delegating enough work to several employees so that 10 % of the owner's time was blocked out to work on the business
• Developing and implementing an employee performance review process (quarterly and annually)
• Devising and implementing an informal reward program to recognize employees for improving customer service
• Creating development plans for each of the grown children based on defined future roles to begin the process of doing proactive effective succession planning

Once the plan was complete, we continued to coach the owner on a weekly basis to assure ongoing progress and to identify next steps.

Finally, we administered two assessments, a Workplace Motivation Assessment and the DISC Behavioral instrument to help the owner identify his talents and interests and help him decide which tasks to keep and which to delegate to his children, as well as other employees.

Client Investment:

@ $8,000