Case Study a Garden Rooms business in Scotland
A Garden Room
Background
The owner of a Garden Rooms business in Scotland approached me to help turn his business around. Operating in a potentially growing market designing home garden rooms, such as offices, bedrooms and gyms while also still building home extensions. He was struggling to run these businesses, spending most time running around firefighting and dealing with unhappy customers.
Situation
The owner was trying to run too much at the same time, which put him under: –
- Financial pressures: no real financial model and limited systems in place. With little cost management or operating and margins in place, putting continual pressure of the business’s finances and margin impacts.
- Operational issues: with no operating systems in place each project ran differently, which lead to a wide range of quality and complaint issues, including legal disputes.
- Quality issues: with staff firefighting onsite with suppliers to get components to site on time, impacting upon delivery times, production and cost and quality impacts.
- People issues: of unhappy and unmotivated staff, no one really knowing what they were being asked to do and good staff leaving.
- Ultimately there was little customer focus and significant firefighting, unfinished jobs with a long list of snagging issues to be resolved.
Our solution
Working with the key people we developed a clear business strategy and culture shift for the business, identifying the businesses core value proposition and a customer focused ethos.
This led to a complete process of change and focused team actions to re-invent the business around its core value proposition and improvement plans to redesign out all root cause issues within the business.
Following this process we then developed a customer process map. This identified every customer value added step and supported the customer through the entire process. With a new marketing strategy also in place we were able to improve: –
- Customer engagement and acquisition which led to an improved Average Order Value (AOV) of 55% in one year.
- Ownership of issues by frontline staff to get it right for the customer, reducing snagging and issues to a controlled minimum, with everyone pulling together.
- The development of product improvement and a full product range to support customer retention and conversion, making the business the dominant player within the target market.
This enabled
We worked with the owner developing his business and his skills to lead his business more successfully, providing support and guidance throughout. This was supported by clear business planning with the owner with a full strategic and operational business plan in place.
- Clear success goals shared with the team.
- A forward annual business plan covering every aspect of the business.
- Sales goal setting which supported and underpinned the financial plan.
- A comprehensive financial and cashflow model to ensure the business is cash positive and profitable for the first time.
- The owner was able to positively look at a trade exit strategy from this business.
