CASE STUDY – Narrow miss!

CASE STUDY:?? Discover how this media company almost collapsed due to measuring the wrong things. Yesterday I posted about the “Myth of a bad month” and measuring the right things, effectively using your Business growth Indicators and a Traffic light system (green, Amber and RED)…. to see danger months in advance. We’ll here’s proof Discover how great revenues hid a disaster in the making! CASE STUDY: To give you another example of this, a media company I was doing some work with recently had exactly this issue.

We came in and discovered that they’d never really measured pipeline before. They’d had a pretty good performance last year and the growth was strong, their revenues were strong and so was their profitability. That was really all they were measuring; revenue and profitability. But was this giving them the full picture?

We then put the following indicators in place. We put in pipeline, and a BGI surrounding the percentage of that, which was new business from new clients. ?This quickly highlighted that the fact that their business came from around about twenty different customers but they were very over reliant on three of them, which made up a disproportionately large percentage of their turnover.

Up until that point, they’d never really measured pipeline before and just accepted the business that seemed to be just magically appearing on a month-by-month basis. Neither were they really measuring cash flows

Now, at this point they wanted to grow, and to do so they needed to recruit quite a lot of people. So, for them, cash flow was key. Obviously, you can’t just go recruiting people willy-nilly without knowing if you can afford to pay them or not. We needed to help them to understand pipeline and also the expenditure model to make sure that it would be possible to cash flow the growth moving forward. We also needed to put cash reserves in place to ensure this could happen.

When we did all that, what became evident was that their pipeline for new business was at red, in fact it was virtually at zero. ?Arrrgh! In addition, their pipeline for the next three months was also a red, but they didn’t believe that this could possibly be the case.

As it so happens, it was the case, which provided the point that if you rely on emotions and feeling rather than facts, you can get into deep water very quickly.

Fortunately, based on this information, we were able to execute on a new sales strategy and go after a new vertical market segment and bring new business in.??????????????

Now, this timing was impeccable. In fact, if we hadn’t come in and identified this major issue, the business probably wouldn’t be around today.

The biggest problem was that they were measuring the wrong things and, because they didn’t have a pipeline, they were experiencing problems of cash flow as well.

If they hadn’t started measuring it when they did, what they would have had is a really bad month, finding they could not pay the bills, discovering that there was no more business coming in, and ultimately having to shut the shop.

All of this would have been avoidable had they had their Strategy on a Page in place.

So, there we have it. You now (if you’ve been following my posts) will have your complete? Strategy on a Page – without the need for a team of overpriced consultants! You did it all yourself! You’re now being held accountable either by someone you respect, or you are using the Strategy on a Page software instead, which was created with this purpose in mind and because there is a physical limit to the number of people we can work with at any one time.

I love the software we have created because it is a real help to hold you accountable. Every month, you put your actions in, your BGIs in and you lock them down and there’s no way you can go back in and tinker around with them. The software will alert you to when you need to be checking back in, it will tell you if you haven’t checked in and it will hold you to account electronically. ?Now, it’s not perfect, because it can’t physically kick your ass, but it can virtually, which is a lot better than having nothing.

Of course, in addition to that, and for those of you who prefer to work with a person rather than a machine, we have also got all the Accelerator and Scale up programmes which have given us the capacity to touch a lot more of the scale businesses who wouldn’t be normally be able to access a consultant or a coach.

The next thing to do is to align this to the business and to bring this whole strategy alive. This is supposed to be exciting.? If you look back on your page and you’re not fully buzzed by it, it doesn’t get you out of bed in the mornings, it doesn’t get you excited to do the things you need to be doing on a month-by-month basis, you’re probably in the wrong business, or you’ve written the wrong page.

If that’s the case, you had better go back and address it. We address this alot with our EXIT programmes and scale up, so contact us if this is you

This should be exciting stuff. With all of my clients, when we’ve finished the page, we look back and we just go “Wow! That’s brilliant!”

Now, we need to make sure that everybody in the company is aligned to it. In Chapter 10 (….this FREE Chapter is being released tonight at 10pm) I’ll dive into “Alignment”

--? See a link in the comments

Have a wonderful weekend