Managing in Uncertain Times

Turnaround… Tough Times… Terrible Economy. Call it what you will. In any case it takes a special focus to manage in a down turn economy and be able to emerge positioned to grow. I have managed organizations that required turnaround skills as well as hyper-growth, and there are challenges associated with both. Turnaround management skills require you to improve or stabilize financial results without putting the company in a death spiral.

The best turnaround management includes not only cost cutting, but more importantly increasing or stabilizing revenues. Too many of the companies I have met with in the last two years have waited too long before looking for help and have focused primarily on trying to ride out the storm, only to find out they do not have the cash reserves to make it to the end.

A focus on the following areas is necessary when managing in uncertain economic times and/or a turnaround situation.

Employees – Employees are your most important asset. Your employees have probably gone through at least one round of layoffs and/or seen reductions in their salary/hours. It is difficult in good times to keep employees motivated and even more difficult when they have gone through the turmoil of the last few years. Unmotivated employees can negatively impact customer service, productivity and ultimately profits.

A key area of managing your employee base during this time is communication. In fact, there is no such thing as over communication during difficult times. In the absence of information, your employees will fill the void with what they think is happening, and most times it is untrue and detrimental to moving the company forward.

Customers – Customers are the lifeblood of your business. You cannot risk your top customer’s hearing about any turnaround effort through the grapevine. They can and most likely will hear about any difficult time you are managing from your employees or others in the industry. Be proactive and discuss your situation with key customers. Visit them in person when possible and reassure them that you are focused on emerging a healthier company prepared to serve them well into the future.

This is also the time to review profitability by customer and make the difficult decision of firing those unprofitable or marginally profitable customers. The client meeting is a good opportunity to discuss a price adjustment that brings them in line with your objectives or terminating the relationship.

Partners – Partners may be dealers or Value Added Resellers, joint venture partners, or banking/finance partners. It is necessary that you communicate openly and honestly about your situation along with the recovery plan in place. Be proactive with your partners and present your plan of recovery along with timelines. It is good with this constituency to be very conservative in your recovery plan, so feel comfortable and confident that the company can achieve the results even with any unforeseen issues that may arise.

Leadership – This is the time your company needs you most. Demonstrate confidence in front of your workforce, even if behind closed doors you and your management team are having violent discussions on the recovery plan. Your employees need to see a common front from the management team to confidently follow your leadership and the direction to improve company results.

Leverage the collective strength of your management to provide the focus and direction of the organization. The diversity of skills on your management team is exactly what is needed to prepare for the recovery. Remember, the collective group is smarter than the individual.

Business as usual will never be the same after the economic turmoil of the past few years. Communication and focus on the right areas of your business is necessary to be in the best position as the economy continues to improve. You may be too close to your business to see all the areas that should be addressed, so take advantage of outside help to provide a 360 degree view of your situation and opportunities. This may be your advisory board, contacts in a networking group, or hire an outside consultant to help with your efforts.

Larry Turner is CEO of Roundhouse Advisors, Inc. and has over 25 years experience growing, starting up, repositioning, and revitalizing organizations. Roundhouse Advisors is a consulting practice focused on helping businesses increase enterprise value by managing pain, growth and owner exits. Larry is a consultant, public speaker, and the author of “Owner Exit Planning: Leave On Your Own Terms”. For additional information visit www.RoundhouseAdvisors.com

No Better Time to Prepare Your Company for Sale

You have built your business, planned on selling it and retiring in the next 12 months, but now the economy has forced you to change your plans. Your company is treading water and the last thing you want to do is think about preparing the business for market, when you feel the need to survive the rest of this year. This is a typical story for many company owners over the past few years. Don’t use the economy as an excuse for putting off your plans to sell the business.

Many of the strategies to increasing the value of a business and get it ready for sale can also be used to manage through the difficult economy. Value creation in a business can be done in good and poor economic times, but it does take more discipline when times are difficult. Focus on these four areas to improve your business, make it more attractive when put on the market and emerge a stronger company once the economy improves:

1. Assess and upgrade management. – Take a serious look at your management staff and key employees and identify those positions that need to be upgraded. It is an employer’s market and there is strong talent looking for the right opportunity. The new blood is good for driving improvements in your business today and a key to increasing the attractiveness of your business when it goes on the market.
2. Increasing revenues and cash flows – When it comes time to sell your company, the financial results will be measured compared to your industry’s performance. If your revenue growth/decline is as good or better than the industry, then you have been successful in building the value of your company. - Increasing revenues can be difficult during a tough economy, but you do have the ability to steal away customers from your competitors. Now is the time to get aggressive with programs targeted specifically at this prospect base. Use lower cost marketing programs to make the most of your budget. Some of these programs include PR, telemarketing, pay per click web advertising, search engine optimization and email marketing.
3. Recurring revenue stream – Find opportunities to generate new revenue and more specifically recurring business. A telemarketing firm that I have worked with in the past started a new program that included a database and 50 hours of telemarketing activity from dedicated callers. It turned out that I was thinking of starting a program, but this program was enough incentive to get me to sign up for their services.. Their intent is that the first 50 hours is successful and will generate additional telemarketing. They promoted this to those already in their database through an email blast – very low cost to run the program and successful.
4. Get your books in order – Now is the time to cleanup your legal and financial records. Your legal records will be reviewed by potential buyers and any board meeting minutes that are not up-to-date indicate that there may be other issues in your business that need to be addressed.

The last thing a potential buyer wants to hear when at the negotiation table is something having to do with “normalizing” expenses and cash flows because of what the owner took out of the business. Make those changes now, so you do not need to put yourself in a negative position at the negotiation table. These may include adjusting your salary to industry norm for someone running your business, eliminate cross charges with other companies you have setup to fund some of your interests, cut back on.

At some point, the economy will improve and the acquisition of privately held businesses will heat up again. We are all getting older, and the need to transition a business will not go away. When this happens, you can expect to a large number of businesses come onto the market. Those companies that took the time and effort to get prepared will be the companies that will sell first, and at a better price than those that only survived during the past two years. Don’t let the economy be your excuse to be a slave to your company and delay any retirement hopes you may have.

Larry Turner is CEO of Roundhouse Advisors, Inc. and has over 25 years experience growing, starting up, repositioning, and revitalizing organizations. Roundhouse Advisors is a consulting practice focused on helping businesses increase enterprise value by managing pain, growth and owner exits. Larry is consultant, public speaker, and the author of “Owner Exit Planning: Leave On Your Own Terms”. For additional information visit www.RoundhouseAdvisors.com

The Profit Trap: Cost Cutting Your Way To Profits

Too many companies have relied on cost cutting to hit profit and cash flow targets in the current economy. This strategy without efforts to grow the top line is one that will lead your company into a downward death spiral. Cost cutting can only provide short term gains, with no ability to sustain the results.

Starting efforts to increase sales is a matter of focus and identifying the activities that will result in generating a larger sales pipeline. These efforts can be performed on a tight budget and will provide eye opening information that will help you drive your entire organization. The following areas will get you started on identifying the opportunities and implementing change in your sales teams.

Sales Pipeline

Review your sales pipeline and analyze close rates associated with your activity. The business activity that generated results in the past is not going to drive the same level of sales today. During your analysis, track the number of cold calls made by your sales staff and how many of these result in a follow up meeting. Of the follow up meetings held, how many of these result in demonstrations or deeper discovery meetings? Follow all sales activity until you get to the number of proposals generated and number of sales closed from these proposals.

It is also good to start tracking average sales size and number of sales closed by day / month / quarter. This will help you in understanding the dynamics of your sales process and allow you to focus your sales activity to generate sales needed to grow your top line. By expending the effort to understand your sales pipeline dynamics, you will be in a better position to define what level of activity is needed to operate in our new economy.

Activity

You can expect the sales activity needed today to generate the same amount of sales closed 18 to 24 months ago is going to be a multiple of two to three times your old activity levels. This means that if your sales teams had been 10 cold calls per day to generate your past revenue, then they will most likely need to be focused on 20 to 30 cold calls per day to generate the same level of revenue. Use the information from your sales pipeline analysis to direct your efforts.

You have seen the difference in today’s buying cycle -- .longer sales cycle and the end result is usually a smaller sale. Companies and households are still buying, but at a much more conservative level and more caution when making a decision. Those companies that are increasing their sales activity will get in front of more decision makers and in the end will close more sales.

In addition to using your internal staff to generate activity, I have found outside resources allow you to increase your prospecting activity without the addition of sales headcount. For example, use an outside telemarketing firm to generate appointments for your sales staff. This allows you to leverage your sales team for activities that generate proposals and sales. There are a number of very good telemarketing firms that provide services in small blocks of time. I have used a firm over the past 6 years that is great at setting appointments and charges as little as $1,500 for a 50 hour block of calling time.

Get Started

Your programs do not need to be expensive, and can be as simple as redirecting the activities of your sales organization. Focus on increasing the pipeline to generate more sales activity, which will result in increased sales closed for your organization. By starting with an analysis of your current sales cycle you can understand the new business dynamics and develop a plan for your sales team. Once you have the plan and communicated your expectations, be sure to hold your sales team accountable for generating the activity needed to fill the pipeline.

There are more companies going after fewer dollars, and those that increase activity to meet the new demands of the economy will be those that win more deals. Be one of the companies that emerges from the current recession a much stronger company by building revenues along with your balanced cost cutting efforts.

Larry Turner is CEO of Roundhouse Advisors, Inc. and has over 25 years experience growing, starting up, repositioning, and revitalizing organizations. Roundhouse Advisors is a consulting practice focused on helping businesses increase enterprise value by managing pain, growth and owner exits. Larry is a consultant, public speaker, and the author of “Owner Exit Planning: Leave On Your Own Terms”. For additional information visit www.RoundhouseAdvisors.com

Lessons Learned In a Downturn

In 2009, the recession was technically over due to some modest growth. As the economy continues to become healthy, it is an excellent time to examine the companies that did more than survive during this recession.

During a recent Rocky Mountain Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) Corporate Executive Series breakfast meeting the subject was discussed by three senior executives that were able to improve their business results during this period, including one company managing through a Chapter 11. Panel participants included Anthony Carroll, CAO, Vicorp Restaurants (Village Inn and Bakers Square restaurants); J.D. Johnson, President, Nogren Americas; John Zimmerman, CFO, Tomkins plc. The panelists shared a great deal of information on specific initiatives to improve financial results during the recession, but there were five overriding strategies that each company employed:

Move quickly

Identify issues in your business and initiate changes quickly. Don’t get caught up in gathering and analyzing data, but rather make changes once trends start to appear. Those companies that react quickly in difficult situations (economy driven or self inflicted situations) are those that will have the best chance of emerging quickly and healthy. Moving quickly means there may be mistakes made, but most can be recovered from as long they are not catastrophic mistakes. A business that is not making mistakes is one that is not moving quickly enough and will most likely be left behind.

Communicate the situation to your employees

Provide your employees a real understanding of the situation and what the goal of the company needs to be in the recovery. Your employees are the most knowledgeable about the detail workings of your business, and they are your best resource in resolving problems.

One company that presented at the ACG meeting solicited input from the employees on how to reduce payroll costs. The employees were briefed on the situation and asked for their recommendation on headcount reductions, reduced work weeks, or reduction in salary. The company ultimately had to use a couple of the options, but the employee base was appraised of the decision and appreciated the opportunity to be a part of the decision process.

Increase frequency of reporting

During difficult times it is necessary to have as transparent an organization as possible. The reporting of key metrics becomes critical and each had reporting stepped up drastically. Once company described the increase in their business as “reporting that was done yearly was now monthly, monthly reporting was now weekly, weekly reporting was daily, and daily reporting was many times each day.” Focus your efforts on the important metrics of your business. It may not be possible to increase all reporting, but those that are drivers for your company need to be reviewed more frequently and by all management that can impact the results.

Communicate to your key customers

Your key customers need to be a part of your communication strategy. The communication needs to be more than just a letter from the president. Your key customers deserve face to face meetings to learn of your progress and in times of economic difficulty how you can partner with them to create a stronger relationship.

Initiate revenue enhancement programs

Even in a recession there are ways to increase revenue. Cost containment is a given, but not a cure-all in a poor economy. Companies that focus solely on cost reductions will lag their competitors and emerge from a recession a weaker company.

All the companies on the panel discussed price increases and promotions. Each had their own way of increasing sales, based on their specific industry. Norgren Americas had a strategy of telegraphing price increases well in advance to condition their customers prior to the increase. Tomkins took advantage of the downturn to exit unprofitable businesses and focus their marketing and sales efforts on industries and businesses with growth potential. Vicorp Restaurants refused to play in their industry’s love of coupons.

Summary

These five strategic actions are not new, and I find that they are reoccurring in many of my articles. It was interesting to hear these three senior executives from very diverse industries talk about the same things that I have experienced firsthand in companies I have run over the past 15 years.

Larry Turner is CEO of Roundhouse Advisors, Inc. and has over 25 years experience growing, starting up, repositioning, and revitalizing organizations. Roundhouse Advisors is a consulting practice focused on helping businesses increase enterprise value by managing pain, growth and owner exits. Larry is a consultant, public speaker, and the author of “Owner Exit Planning: Leave On Your Own Terms”. For additional information visit www.RoundhouseAdvisors.com

Boost Sales with Improved Customer Service

We have seen some improvement in the economy lately which means it is time differentiate yourself from your competitors, take some market share and begin to emerge a much stronger company. Customer service is an area that may have been cut during difficult times of recent days. As the economy continues to improve, begin to refocus on your customer service plan to create a differentiator from your competitors.

Many companies have cut customer service levels to a minimum or just below minimum acceptable level to save money over the past two years. This is actually an opportunity your company to stand out. Strong service delivery and customer service are opportunities to win more business from current customers and can be used as sales tools to win customers away from your competitors.

The Situation

A few years ago I accepted the position of President of an IT services business that provided on-site service for many of the large IT outsource and computer hardware companies. On my third day in this position, I attended a business review with our largest customer, Dell. During that meeting I heard that our business was:

1. “Worst of Breed” in every category – Dell stack ranked their service providers in six different areas, and our business was the worst in all six areas.
2. Lagging Customer Satisfaction – The business not only had the worst customer service ratings, but our ratings were bringing down the overall customer service scores.
3. Negatively Impacting Dell Management Bonuses – This was the kicker; not only were we bad, but we were hitting the Dell management in their pocket book!

While this was not the most up-beat meeting I have ever been to, but the Dell management was willing to give us a chance to improve our service.

The Actions

A lot of activity that went into our transformation, but the following areas were the basis of the business improvement plans that we implemented:

• Changed the focus of the business unit – A shift from running as many service calls as possible to a main focus on customer satisfaction along with optimizing their time.
  
• Communicated expectations – In the past, clear expectations were not communicated to all levels of employees. Working with my field delivery leaders, we made it very clear to all levels in the organization what was expected in their daily work and how we expected them to operate.
  
• Held employees accountable for meeting expectations – While there may have been some expectations in the past, no one was being held accountable for their actions and operation. This was one of the critical areas needed in changing the culture in the organization. The front line employees and all levels of management knew what was expected from them and how we would measure their results.
  
• Work with under-performing employees to improve or move them out – There were many employees that showed huge improvement in their activities, but there were some that did not/could not meet expectations. These employees ended up leaving the company on their own or with our help.

The Benefit

While the transformation was a lot of work, the most important question we asked was what was the benefit to our company? When I got to the business, Dell was in the process of pulling their business from the company, which represented about 40% of our revenues and 60% of our activities. It would have shut the business down.

We ultimately turned the situation around. Four months later, during the next quarterly business review we had moved to number two overall and “Best of Breed” in four of six categories. 15 months later, the business won Service Provider of the Year award.

The turnaround in service delivery was critical for our company to secure more business. In the months that followed the quarterly business review, our company was awarded additional business in two growing business units at Dell. This new business was critical to our next strategic direction of moving into higher level services and providing revenue growth with strong margins.

Conclusion

The story outlines a company with poor service delivery and customer service. Your business may not be in a situation where your clients are leaving you, but maybe a competitor has cut their costs too deep and is experiencing problems. Customer service can be a differentiator that your sales organization can use to steal clients from your competitor and secure your own customer base.

Larry Turner is CEO of Roundhouse Advisors, Inc. and has over 25 years experience growing, starting up, repositioning, and revitalizing organizations. Roundhouse Advisors is a consulting practice focused on helping businesses increase enterprise value by managing pain, growth and owner exits. For additional information visit www.RoundhouseAdvisors.com

Manage Change To Succeed In The New Economy

Change seems to be a way of life today, regardless of the economy. Changing regulations, competition and technological advances just to name a few have required businesses to transform their businesses in one way or another on what seems like a constant basis. The days where you could develop a business plan and run it for a number of years with only incremental modifications are long gone. Today’s business must manage change effectively.

The companies that can manage change more effectively are those that will thrive today and going forward. Identifying a need for change can be easy, while implementation can be more challenging. The inertia in a company is difficult to overcome, because you need to change the way people do their jobs. In many cases, change is seen as a threat to your employees because it is a shift in the status quo.

In August of 2001 I took over a business that was losing $6 million on $38 million in annual sales, the last two audits by our CPA firm were disasters, and a large portion of our business was in threat of being closed down by the government agency that regulated our industry. We needed change and we needed it fast! I started working with the management team immediately and set on a path to improve the business. The results included a company profit of $800,000 in the next calendar year, all audit findings by our CPA firm were cleaned up after three months, and we totally turned around our position with the government regulatory agency within six months.

How we did it:

Identify the current status quo and why it needs to be changed -- In my example above it was easy to identify why and what needed to be changed. In another business I ran it was a little more difficult; the company was a small manufacturing business that had fairly constant top line revenues, a respectable bottom line and was well respected in their industry. We found the company’s products and industry perception of their solutions where outdated and being passed by others in the industry. The problem was not an immediate issue, but one of long term consequence of not changing.

Create a vision of what the company can be after implementing change – Create a vision of how the company could look in the future and develop a roadmap to get there. Develop a long term ideal situation that has interim goals that need to be obtained. In my turnaround example, we created a vision of what the company would be over many years, how we would distribute product, how the company would be viewed by external organizations… really defining the direction of our systems, culture and brand. After we created the long term vision, the management team and I set about hitting the tactical items that needed to be addressed.

Communicate with your stakeholders – Communication with your key stakeholders is an important step in the early part of the process, as well as during the implementation. The key stakeholders may be the board of directors, your direct manager(s), your distribution channel, key vendors, your accounting firm, and in some cases regulatory agencies. You cannot over communicate with stakeholders.

Communicate with your employees – Employee communication is the most important part of a change management plan. This is where your discussion of the status quo and future vision of the company becomes very valuable. Regular all-employee meetings allow you to paint a picture of how the company will operate and how the employees will play a role in the transformation, as well as the new company going forward. Your employees are the resources necessary to implement your plan and it is best to communicate with them personally at least once per month in all-company meetings and interim meetings to discuss major changes or milestones. This may seem extreme, but I have found that this frequency of communication headed off larger problems.

Managing change is a difficult process, but can be made easier through these tactics. Keeping focus on the end-game is critical to keep your management team and employees headed in the right direction. I’m not sure there is every really an end to change, but as you transform your organization it is truly gratifying to see what can be done.

By: Larry Turner

Larry Turner is CEO of Roundhouse Advisors, Inc. and has over 25 years experience growing, starting up, repositioning, and revitalizing organizations. Roundhouse Advisors is a consulting practice focused on helping businesses increase enterprise value by managing pain, growth and owner exits. Larry is consultant, public speaker, and the author of “Owner Exit Planning: Leave On Your Own Terms”. For additional information visit www.RoundhouseAdvisors.com

Survive and Thrive in The Volatile Economy

The economy is certainly an issue when trying to run our businesses, but it is possible to implement programs that allow you not only to survive but more importantly thrive. Putting your head in the sand to ride out the recession is a normal response by many managers… Don’t do it! You can rise above your competitors by taking steps to build your business.

The following areas can become the cornerstone of your business strategy to thrive in the volatile economy and emerge a much stronger company than your competitors:

Customer Facing Activity
Customer facing activity is critical to maintaining and growing your revenue. Any initiatives that focus solely on cost cutting will result in continued cuts to match an ever declining revenue stream. During turnarounds and right sizing programs, it is critical to stabilize your revenues in order to build a healthy company.

It is easy to cut the sales and marketing departments in slow economic times, because “they are not closing any business anyway”. While this is true in companies that focus only on cost cutting, it is not true if you concentrate on stabilizing or increasing revenues as an integrated management approach.

The customer service department is another area that is an attractive cost cutting opportunity, but it is also a good place to differentiate from competitors. An example of how you can differentiate yourself with customer service in a downturn:

In November 2001, I received letters from two airlines that I flew on a regular basis and had elite flier status on both. One airline informed me how many miles or segments I needed to maintain my status, and the other airline explained that they understood that many companies had cut back on air travel since 9/11 and was extending my status through the next year. I immediately switched all my future travel to airline #2 and strongly suggested that all my employees do the same.

Focused Cost Cutting
Ignore the impulse to make cuts across the board when going through a cost reduction program. When making cuts, it is important to maintain customer facing functions and focus initial cuts on “back office” activities. Back office functions include accounting, finance, human resources and IT departments – all areas that do not interface with your customers and can be supplemented with outside resources.

Use a tool like customer profitability analysis to identify cost cutting opportunities in the “customer facing” functions. This process will identify those customers that are unprofitable and in most cases suck your organization dry of valuable resources. “Fire” your unprofitable customers, so you can focus on those that are profitable.

Once you have eliminated the activities associated with your unprofitable customers, it is now time to cut costs associated with the “fired” customers in your customer facing functions. Taking this approach allows you to provide a consistent level of customer support and maintain a sales staff to grow your business.

Marketing Spend
It is easy to “go dark” and eliminate your marketing spend to save money. Going dark is essentially putting your head in the sand and giving in to the poor economy. There are a number of studies that have been done to evaluate the effects of marketing spend on the results of a company during and after a recession.

One such study was done by ABP/Meldurm & Fewsmith in 1979 to evaluate those companies that did not cut marketing expenditures during the 1974/1975 recession. They found that companies that did not cut their marketing spend experienced higher sales and net profits during the two years of recession and the two years immediately following than those companies which cut in either or both recession years.

This is due to the cumulative effect in marketing communications. When you start a marketing program it does not result in an immediate impact on sales, exposure or improvement to brand; instead it takes many months of continued exposure to provide momentum. For this reason, it can be easy to cut back on marketing because there may not be an immediate impact on sales, but rather a slow decay.

In Summary
It is possible to increase revenues during an economic downturn, but it takes hard work and a focus on results. Any cost cutting program needs to be paired with a program to stabilize or increase revenues; otherwise you will be forced into the downward death spiral of continual cost cutting. You stand a better chance of thriving in the volatile economy through targeted cost reductions, maintaining customer facing activities and not cutting your marketing spend.


Larry Turner is CEO of Roundhouse Advisors, Inc. and has over 25 years experience growing, starting up, repositioning, and revitalizing organizations. Roundhouse Advisors is a consulting practice focused on helping businesses increase enterprise value by managing pain, growth and owner exits. For additional information visit www.RoundhouseAdvisors.com

ref: “How Advertising in Recession Periods Affects Sales,” American Business Press, Inc., 1979