Focus on Efficiencies

So following on from one of my previous posts about my three biggest lessons I took from 2020 here is the first of the blogs I said I was going to write about each lesson.

Flip back to January & February 2020, the business is flying.

We were 50% up year on year.

We were growing each month and had been through 2019.

March gets off to a flying start as well.

We’ve had fantastic discussions with some of the UK’s best care companies to become preferred training providers.

Things are looking AMAZING for 2020.

Then the lockdown is announced to start 16th March.

That morning was horrific.

The single worst day in my professional life.

Over 200 days of training cancelled and postponed within the first 3 hours.

Me and my brother (who was working as a BDM for me at that time) looked at each other in complete disillusion.

All of our hard work over the past 3 months had just been wiped out.

The company now had virtually zero income in the pipeline.

I had to put the office staff on furlough.

We dialled back our marketing – but did not switch it off completely as others did.

So me and Rich sat there in the now empty office wondering what the hell we were going to do.

The phones were not ringing.

Emails were not coming in.

The website wasn’t generating enquiries.

The single biggest thing we did was that we did not panic.

We didn’t make any rash decisions.

I knew I had a very viable business.

I knew I had enough cash reserves to see us through.

So instead what we decided to do was look at our business.

Look into our operation, our systems and our processes.

What could we improve?

What was leaching man hours?

What was costing us money?

We began to look at this “downtime” as a bit of a blessing.

Yes the business was making horrible operating loses, but I knew when we worked on the above points and once lockdown ended we would be back to business, bigger, better and stronger than before.

I had been trying to implement a new training management system prior to lockdown, but we were simply too busy to get it sorted and implemented properly.

It was in a halfway house of set up, not being used.

This presented a perfect opportunity.

We could take a clean break, stop using the old system and transfer onto the new one seamlessly.

We got this system set up and running and integrated with our website.

We now FINALLY have tracking for our online course bookings, 5 years later!

The system also gave us automation of sending joining instruction emails, booking confirmations with terms and conditions, follow up emails, course specific instructions, certificate expiration emails and auto generated certificates.

Most importantly, every client now had all their staff loaded into their own account within the system so we had a live and secure record of course attendees with details of every communication, date they have attended, what certificates have been issued all in one place – and we can also give the client access to their own section of the system as well.

No more damn spreadsheets!

Not only did this deliver all the amazing things above but it freed up around 20 hours a week for our admin.

Time is money as they say.

The system caused a number of processes to change for the better, some manual processes disappeared completely that were taken over by the systems automation.

Next we looked at our company dropbox folder structure.

It was a MESS.

Years of various staff adding 0’s and Z’s to make folders they used regularly to appear at the top or the bottom to make it easier from them.

Years of “resources” being saved.

Years of additional sub folders being added with nothing in them of note.

Jenna (queen of tidying up) spent a few weeks going through the folders.

Re-naming, deleting, re-organising, re-structuring.

Everything now had a place.

Everything was now in order.

Anything that hadn’t been used for a couple of years was deleted.

It was now super simple, super easy to navigate.

It just made sense.

On the face of it, it seemed like small changes, however the time this saved for the staff using the folders would add up to hours and hours over the year.

Next we looked at our office.

We rent our offices in an old building that’s been used as a town hall, a police station and a courthouse over the years.

The building is a little bit tired and although we had refurbished our training room, we had left our offices as they were.

The carpet tiles in our offices were ancient.

We had a delightful combination of brown and greeny blue.

I hadn’t realised how much they we getting to me until I decided to change them.

We refurbished the entire office, replaced the desks, replaced the carpet tiles, painted the walls.

The staff’s reaction when they came back was worth the expense, having a nice environment to work in cannot be understated.

But we didn’t just make it look nice (which it does!) we also put thought into the layout.

Where do the printers need to go?

Where does everyone need to sit?

Can we move less regularly used items into our storage and archive rooms?

We sat the admin closer to the printer as they use it significantly more than anyone else.

We sat the course advisors closer to our booking boards (we have four 6 foot x 4 foot whiteboards on one wall, each represents a month and is segmented as a calendar where we add the dates we have booked as a visual).

The got rid of all the clutter, we moved all our old course paperwork to a secure archive room.

These adjustments to something as simple as where people sit help make the office more efficient.

I then reviewed how often we had used the training rooms at our head office as we had two.

I originally took the second room on as we we’re delivered 10 day sector based academies in partnership with another training organisation, which had come to an end but we continued with keeping the room.

In hindsight this was mostly my ego keeping the room!

Anyway, I had used both training rooms around 220 times throughout the year.

There are 256 working days in a year.

Conclusion – I had effectively paid for one room, totalling ￡7,500, to be empty for a full year!

I cancelled the lease and sold the equipment we had in there.

The final bit was to change part of our booking process.

This now put the trainer location pre- and post-enquiry at the forefront of the decision on dates.

This hadn’t been happening previously and was resulting in some huge milage and hotel expenditure each year.

Some of these changes might seem minor and insignificant to you reading this.

However, everything combined, the office runs smoother and slicker.

The business operates better.

We finished 2020 around 5% down on sales vs 2019.

Which given we had virtually zero income March, April & May was a truly fantastic achievement from the whole team.

However, the real magic occurred beneath the surface.

The above changes contributed to.

• Reduced hotel and milage expenditure by 40%
• Reduced rent and rates expenditure by 27%
• Reduced our printing costs by 22%
• Reduced general office cost expenditure by 9%

In addition I was looking at employing another admin due to workload and this now isn’t required. This is a further reduction in staff salary costs which I had built into my budget.

We’re not finished yet and are now looking into ways we can make further efficiencies and savings.

Digitising registers, feedback forms, lightweight postage materials for our equipment.

We are now constantly looking at making things easier, slicker and quicker.

Take a step back.

Take a deep breath.

Look at your business operation.

• Can it be better?
• Can it be slicker?
• Can you automate?
• Can you systemise?
• Do you have processes?

If the answer is yes to any of them, sort it out!

The savings we have made from looking internally instead of trying to ram customers in at the top are significant and will remain ongoing.

A saying I was taught from my days at Focus has always stuck with me.

“Sales are vanity, margin is sanity”

All these charges are adding margin to every single order we take.

In Summary

We implemented a new training management system which gave us automation, improved processes, re-laid out the office, altered our folder structure, gave back space that wasn't being utilised and amended our booking process.

Conclusion

The above resulted in significant business operation savings that are here to stay.

How did you use your time in lockdown?