How does an Olympian achieve a gold medal winning, world record breaking performance and what does this all mean in the world of business?
I have had the great privilege of listening to three Olympians talk about their journey towards success over recent years.
Each of them had clear parallels in how they worked towards those goals:
- Setting out a roadmap of what success looks like – this can be very visual and sets out the ‘milestones’ along the way.
- Based on the roadmap, setting out a clear plan for an allotted period of time breaking down what needs to be achieved within what timescales and how progress is measured along the way (this is the equivalent of breaking down a great big project into numerous small tasks).
- Having the right mindset – understanding that failures are part of the journey and represent an opportunity to learn.
- Surrounding yourself with the right team – having people around you that are prepared to actively challenge your thinking. Having people around you with a growth mindset who are not constrained by existing ideas, rules and conventions.
- Using a motto or a mantra to embed the rules you live by. For example, Adam Peaty uses the phrase ‘Better Than Yesterday’. He knows that the tiniest incremental gain on a previous performance moves him further towards his next success.
Our Corporate Finance team has helped a number of companies achieve their version of success over the years. Based on our breadth of sector knowledge and depth of experience in working with businesses of all shapes and sizes, we have sought to provide the ultimate advisory report that provides a business with all the information and tools it needs to increase both financial and cultural value.
The key areas our report covers are as follows:
- What excellence looks like in their sector (through benchmarking your business against businesses in the same sector).
- Establishing whether the mission, culture and values of the business have been identified, followed by an assessment of whether these critical factors are truly adopted and ‘lived and breathed’ within the business and, if not, why not.
- An assessment of the valuation of the business as it stands and how the valuation would change if the business were able to deliver results at the top end of the sector benchmarking exercise, based on a range of KPIs.
- Assessment of the existing board and what their aspirations are, along with an assessment of the second-tier management and how ready they may or may not be to take the step up to a more strategic position.
- Undertaking DiSC personality profiles for management in order to establish how effectively the teams can work together and how they can recognise each of their strengths and weaknesses to a collective advantage.
- Reviewing customer acquisition strategy, customer onboarding processes and customer reliance in order to improve customer experience and mitigating the risks attached to high levels of customer concentration.
- Assessment of inventory processing, delivery and management in order to optimise re-ordering efficiency and minimising cash and physical space tied up with inventory, thus potentially allowing increased capacity gains.
- Identification of any operational red flags. For example, are growth projections realistic without further investment given the existing capacity and working capital available.
- Professionalising operations – in order to be able to deliver significant growth in the forthcoming periods, the underlying systems, processes and support functions need to be slick. This will further translate into additional value as slicker systems mean fewer manual tasks, fewer errors for corrections and more time attributed to delivering increased sales rather than spending time on retrospective administration.
- A summary of how to be sale ready in 3 to 5 years.
This balanced scorecard approach to the business allows each critical aspect of the business to be reviewed with bespoke actions being identified in each area.
The final outputs of this process are:
- A final meeting to run through the points identified and the potential actions noted.
- Agreement of which actions are most critical and establishing a priority of adoption.
- Preparation of a Gantt chart setting out which actions will be undertaken by when and by whom. We can then, on further agreement, continue to be engaged to ensure accountability of the key parties involved as a lack of accountability is the most common reason why business owners have seen previous plans fail. We can also use this process to embed the adoption of significant KPIs identified that will allow further monitoring of the business as changes are embraced.
This report allows SMEs access to the same quality and breadth of advisory reports that bluechip companies have access to. The differentiating factor of our report is that the assessment process is not a purely numbers-based exercise. Instead, it reviews the business on a ‘root and branch’ basis which allows meaningful change.
If you are tired of delivering similar results year on year and are frustrated by not being able to take the business to the next level, then please do get in contact with Ollie or Hari who will be more than happy to chat through your circumstances on a fee free basis to explain how this product will help unlock the value that has previously been eluding you.
Contact Ollie Newbold or a member of his team for more information by emailing corporatefinance@randall-payne.co.uk or call 01242 776000.
