Blog

It's Monday morning and you are returning from an exhaustive one-week business trip while you were battling a flu bug. Your voice mail has ten messages that will have to be answered within the next few hours, e-mail is screaming for attention and you haven't had time to grab a coffee. All of this noise surrounds you but the most pressing issue is to prepare for the meeting that is scheduled with [...]

Read more

After a few years, most businesses establish a set formula for determining their marketing budget, usually a fixed percentage of revenue. But when economic times get tough, it's time to make a few alterations. The mistake businesses make is to simply cut the marketing budget when they experience a downturn in revenue. Big no, no. In an effort to protect their bottom line, they are more likely to [...]

Read more

Too often insurance is considered a "necessary evil" and an overhead that cannot be managed. Periodically it is important to think of the real needs and the benefits that restructuring the businesses insurance can bring to the enterprise. A careful review of the risks in the business may highlight insurance needs that are not covered by the current policies. This may include: Casualty [...]

Read more

North American car manufacturing leaders never truly understood W. Edwards Deming until it was too late. Dr. Deming was the quality guru that North American turned away. Japan believed. Japan prospered. Japanese car manufacturers are becoming the world leaders in one of the world's dominant industries. Is your company at the same tipping point when it relates to sustainability? Is the sky the [...]

Read more

Does someone in your business ever-so-often ask, "Whatever happened to (fill in the name) and how come he doesn't shop with us any more? Several surveys asking this same question were taken through the years by (but not limited to) the American Society for Quality Control, the Harvard Business Review, U S News & World Report -- even the Swedish Post Office titled "Satsa pa kunden" ("Focus on [...]

Read more

Organizational design is ensuring that you have the proper organizational structure to carry out the strategy. The next step is the selection and development of people to work within the organizational structure. With current talent shortages that are becoming more acute every year companies will falter badly if they make too many mistakes by selecting key people who do not posses the cognitive [...]

Read more

In these more challenging times, it is important to assess whether your business has the financial resources to weather the impending storm (or at least an economic slow down). Assess whether each of the sources of financing that is currently being used is likely to agree to an increase in your limit and if there is an increase possible make arrangements for it now. Remember that bankers (and many[...]

Read more

Tony Collier (not his real name) ran a very successful manufacturing organization. He had been in business for 12 years and the business had successfully negotiated some troubling times in the first three years, and in years 7 - 10. For the last two years, business had been expanding quite aggressively, albeit with only two customers. Both these customers were recently purchased by US competitors,[...]

Read more

How can you use key performance indicators (KPI) to measure and help run your business? If you regularly report and investigate fluctuations in the KPIs in your business, you will often find problems sooner & find solutions faster than if you do not use this tool. Also, they are a great method of setting and measuring objectives for improvement by enabling the business to focus on areas that [...]

Read more

In Search of Blue Oceans of Profitability and Growth At a recent conference, Frank O'Dea the co-founder of Second Cup and PROSHRED, described the tremendous growth and profitability that both companies underwent when they stumbled onto blue ocean strategy concepts that were later portrayed in the million copies sold business book "Blue Ocean Strategy- How to Create Uncontested Market Space and [...]

Read more