Who Rock Solid Business Development Serves . . .

. . . small business owners who want to work less and earn more.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

 
You are very good at some important aspect of your business but not so good, or just not interested, in other aspects. That is, you’re a super salesman, a creative product developer, a talented design engineer, or whatever, but all that other stuff . . . human resources issues, financial statements, cash flow, administration . . . yuck! They either intimidate you or bore you to tears.

You are so busy working in the business that you don’t have any time to work on the business. Because our clients are small, entrepreneurial companies, they typically don’t have a large, experienced executive team, so the owner ends up wearing lots of hats. As a result, s/he spends a lot of time tending to immediate operating problems and little or no time plotting a longer term growth strategy for the business.

You are profitable but somehow your bank account never has any money in it. Cash is the fuel a business runs on and it needs to be managed carefully. When money is tied up unproductively (in excess inventory or receivables, for example), it’s not available for the truly important things, like payroll.

You’ve done everything you can think of to grow your business, but it stays stubbornly stuck at the same old level. When they come to us, many clients express frustration that nothing they do to grow the company seems to work. They have tried different sales approaches, pricing schemes, and cost structures, but the profit needle refuses to budge an inch.

You’re frustrated because the energy and effort you are putting into the business don’t seem to line up with the compensation you’re taking out. We hear it all the time. “Why am I working so hard for such a small paycheck?”

You are regularly surprised, and often disappointed, when you see your company’s financial results. The owner of a small company needs to have procedures and controls in place so that s/he can quickly and easily see how the company is performing day-by-day and week-by-week. The end of the month is too late! Without such procedures and controls, the business may perform inconsistently or even erratically.

You suspect some of your customers are unprofitable, but you don’t know how to separate the profitable from the unprofitable ones. It’s not always obvious. It’s possible the largest volume customer could be the least profitable. Just ask any Walmart supplier. So it’s vital to understand profitability customer by customer, product by product, and service by service. Without that, the top line (sales) will never track consistently with the bottom line (profit).

Is that you? If so, you’re not alone. Most entrepreneurs get into their own business because they have a passion for a particular activity and they want to pursue that activity their way. But that passion doesn’t necessarily carry over into other activities that are necessary to make the business run smoothly. So those other activities don’t get the attention they need.

In the beginning, you got away with it, didn’t you? You didn’t have many customers, employees, or vendors to worry about. Things were pretty simple. You could do most things on the fly and you didn’t have to spend a lot of time doing all the stuff that you don’t like to do. But as the business became successful and picked up speed, things got a little more complicated, and now all the things you’ve been ignoring are coming home to roost. So now you’re stuck. You feel guilty about letting the work you hate pile up. You know it needs to get done, but you can’t stand the thought of spending your days working on that stuff

If you want to grow your company, you must set up some processes, procedures, and disciplines so things get done in an orderly, structured, and effective way. That’s the bad news. You can’t fly by the seat of your pants forever. The good news is that you don’t have to give up the activities you love and that brought you into your business in the first place. All that stuff you’ve avoided? Yes, you have to make sure it gets done, but you don’t have to do it!