Rapid business turnarounds

Is the economic climate squeezing profits and cash flow?

Here is the fast way to build resilience and get you back on track.

Right now, the endless shocks, crises, price rises and disruptions hitting the economy may well be forcing a new business reality on you. Perhaps you even need to rethink your business model. Or just get better and smarter at what you already do. Whichever is your priority, our rapid business turnarounds service will help you build resilience into your organization and create sustainable long-term security and prosperity. This briefing describes how we work with firms like you to immediately stabilize the business and then:

• • • Avoid capital restructuring and loss of control
    • Build natural resilience into the system so as to be ‘future ready’
    • Develop strategic capability fast.
    • Double or treble profits within twelve months
    • Improve employee productivity by an average of 35%

Typically, we help you achieve these seemingly ambitious goals:

• • • Regardless of what is going on in your marketplace
    • Without relying on a huge hike in sales revenue
    • Without using extra capital expenditure
    • With no extra employees
    • In a matter of a few weeks
    • And without eye watering fees. In fact our work is always self-funding

The secret to our rapid business turnarounds is our integrated approach

The key factor to a rapid business turnaround is to take a highly integrated approach. This means instead of depending on a few ambitious ideas, we help you plan and orchestrate multiple practical and realistic improvements everywhere all at once. In practice this means that in just a few days you identify, plan, and synchronize between thirty and fifty improvement projects so that:

1. 1. 1. Sales increase without extra overhead costs such as salaries and advertising spend.
      2. Prices improve without losing out to the competition.
      3. Costs reduce without spoiling quality and harming customer satisfaction.
      4. Overheads shrink without creating chaos, bottlenecks and extra stress trying to do too much with too little.

TBD’s secret is to make all of the above four profit drivers (Sales, price, costs and overheads) work for you – at the same time. And we start this process using our unique diagnostic methods. These help you and your team uncover all those hidden constraints, waste, bottlenecks and missed opportunities that hold you back.

Driving multiple improvements builds, growth, profit and resilience

The next step comprises powerful team working that orchestrates the multiple countermeasures needed to improve your productivity and profit. Importantly, the integrated planning avoids unintended consequences, and duplication of effort. You also avoid provoking heated conflict about the way forward. The consistent result is that productivity climbs and profits soar as a result. At the same time, you learn how to adopt these methods, to become more resilient as an organization and future-ready.

Rapid business turnarounds often means making the best of what you already have

In essence, we help you overcome your current challenges by combining the talents and energy of your entire enterprise to maximize the use of your existing resources. In other words the objective is to achieve more with less. How do we do this?

Learning through action

You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it. So, part of our role is to get you and your team to think and problem-solve differently. This way, we help you come up with the appropriate countermeasures to each and every one of your problems. Although major improvements may take time to plan and implement, it is amazing what you can achieve in just a few weeks, or in many cases just days adopting the right approach.

A cascade of improvements trigger the multiplier effect

A key factor, in rapid business turnarounds, is to improve productivity across the board. First and foremost that means comprehensive productivity improvements to each and every profit driver. But also the team planning mobilizes and integrates every business process, sub-system, function and department in alignment with your survival or growth strategy. As a direct consequence you save time, money and energy getting you where you want to go. Generally then, we see that this improved productivity stimulates:

• • • Large numbers of small improvements in all four profit drivers at the same time
    • Maximization of all existing resources
    • Minimal disruption to everyday operations.
    • Development of a fully aligned long term strategy

When done simultaneously, there is an added bonus in growing all four-profit drivers at the same time. And that is, you trigger the multiplier effect. This is where a large number of small incremental improvements accumulate to realize a disproportionate increase in net profit. The example below shows you how.

Four profit driver profit multiplier example

Print company increases business value from £290,000 to £2.46 million. A company with a £5 million sales turnover sets up 25 different performance improvements across the organization. These projects improve each profit-driver simultaneously, without harming any of the others. The result? increased net profit from £72,000 to £548,000.

New capital value: The management action plan orchestrated increased sales, a more self-sufficient management team, and a coherent growth plan. Importantly, the impact of all of these coming together at once, improved the company valuation multiple from 4 to 4.5 times net profit. The result was a new capital value of £2.46m – By the way, that’s eight and a half times the previous value.

Here is how the firm multiplied their profits Seven times

Sales impact: A number of improvement projects improved quality and delivery. These had two major benefits. First the projects stopped so many sales draining away through customer attrition. Second they allowed the sales team to stop troubleshooting jobs through the system. Instead sales people started spending about 25% more time generating new sales. Result: 7% organic growth in sales to £5,350,000.

Price impact: Several improvement projects combined to improve data inputting, pricing, quoting and invoicing. Also, there were less discounts for late deliveries or rejections. Result: 2.5% increase in prices. This added £133,750 directly to the bottom line.

Unit cost impact: Reduced job set-up times, job turnaround times, less scrap, procurement savings all added up to a healthy reduction in variable costs: Result: 5% reduction in unit costs to 35% of new sales volume – £1,837,500.

Overheads: Several projects improved sales order processing and office systems efficiency. Result: 1.7% reduction in overheads to £2,850,000 despite and increase in sales.

“Instead of having departmental rivalry, each department can now see that what they are doing may be causing a problem for other departments. Hence, they are now far more supportive of altering their own ways of doing things to assist the needs of other departments.” Martin Daniel, production director, BAS Fine Art Printers.

Contact us for immediate help

Want to learn more about rapid business turnarounds and how they can help you? Then, contact Jeremy Old today on 0845 0945 819 for a no obligation informal chat. Or email now Jeremy@teambusinessdevelopment.co.uk

You are in safe hands

Jeremy Old has twenty-five years experience as an independent management coach to small and mid-sized enterprises and non-profit organizations. During this time, he has facilitated 56, rapid business turnarounds, strategic change or business improvement assignments. These have been across a broad range of industry sectors. Furthermore, using the Hoshin Kanri approach he yields an estimated average 33 : 1 ROI for clients. He is qualified to MBA level, with a post-graduate diploma in psychotherapy.