Growth planning in business

Turnaround Your Business: The Garden Rooms Case Study

by Richard Gourlaycompetitive advantage, Dumfries and Galloway, Exit Strategy, opportunity, Strategy, VisionPosted on No Comments

Case Study a Garden Rooms business in Scotland

Turnaround Your Business with Richard Gourlay

A Garden Room

Turnaround Your Business

The owner of a Garden Rooms business in Scotland approached me to turnaround his business. 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. To turnaround your business often external advice and active support is essential, here’s why.

The 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. 

Turnaround Your Business

Revitalising, recreating or jest evolving your business is an essential requirement to become and keep being competitive within your market. Don’t wait until it is too late. The earlier a business leader identifies they could benefit from a strategic refresh the more options and quicker positive change can happen. To turnaround your business with Richard Gourlay then lets have a chat with Richard here now.

Leadership in business is a challenge we can help with.

Have you felt the full power of the Internet Tsunami Yet?

by Richard GourlayBusiness Identity, competitive advantage, content strategy marketing, Innovation, Marketing, opportunity, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled
Has the world moved for you, or did you miss it? The world of business has shifted but many businesses don’t seem to have noticed the great shift in power away from companies to the customer. The internet is not a fixed service, it is growing and evolving rapidly and with it so are the tools and uses it delivers. What was once a way to replace your Yellow Pages has become the most powerful source of information the world has ever seen.  Have you felt the full power of the internet tsunami yet?
We all see the impact of the Internet in every market sector.  We see the growth of online shopping or the growth of smart phones and the online move of insurance and music online.  That shift and the corresponding growths of new consumers are just beginning to be understood, this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The next stage of the internet revolution has yet to be felt.

The Great Paradigm Shift: Internet Tsunami

As our understanding of this shifting paradigm slowly emerges and evolves.  It takes time for its impact to be fully understood and its impacts to be really appreciated. In the same way as the impact of the introduction of domestic electricity which subsequently facilitated the introduction of the radio, which spread communication did in previous generations. So the rise in power of the Internet is more than just our ability to look stuff up and buy consumer goods online.
This paradigm shift has certain key features, which makes the rise of the Internet generation far more dramatic in its impact to business today.
Unlike many previous innovations, the move online has been done in an infinitely scalable way.  Making markets financially accessible to company’s of any size and dimension using low cost everyday technology. The whole plethora of internet software platforms provide total engagement opportunities for businesses to reach specialist or global markets. Rather than being a premium service only open to the super rich, such as the introduction of the car, airline or a global consumer product range. A good idea, service or product can now be provided through the internet instantly. The availability of multiple open software technology platforms, has lowered cost and created universal access by braking down barriers across all areas of a global market.

The Internet is a Global Movement

This global shift, supported by governments and industry to reach and penetrate all and every strata of society and on an almost global reach is a new global phenomenon creating a universal shift.
Whether in New Guinea or Newfoundland, you can get a 3G signal.  Many countries like India and China just leapfrogged the copper wire landline systems of the 20th century through large parts of their country’s moving straight into the 21st century, avoiding unnecessary cost and rapidly accelerating progress throughout their country.  The Arab spring was not achieved by any three letter acronym news agency or Rupert Murdock’s media empire, but by new young mobile online generation who created, sustained and drove the rolling revolutions.

The POWER of the Internet Tsunami

The result of the internet revolution is that the world has made a huge step forward almost overnight.  That has changed more than just the way we buy some products, it has in fact changed the way we think, and act.  This universal overnight movement has also solved the adoption dilemma for new technology.  For companies to achieve a launch of a new product or service they had to achieve a critical volume and this can now be achieved without geographic boundaries.  The internet creates multiple new routes to market, bypassing traditional routes to market, achieving profit without having to invest huge amounts of capital in awareness marketing.
The sign you've been looking for that values matter in business

Internet Empowered Intelligence

This paradigm shift has moved the way we think to such an extent that everything has changed. When in 1906 Admiral Sir John Fisher invented the Dreadnought battleship in 1906, he changed naval world overnight. At the time the Royal navy had 1,000 ships of the line, the introduction of the Dreadnought made them all redundant overnight. Suddenly, to be a superpower it was not the number of ships you had but how many Dreadnoughts you had and a new arms race had begun as every other battleship become redundant.
In the same way, the introduction of always available high speed broadband has made so much of business thinking redundant, not just in the collapse of use of directories such as yellow pages, dictionaries or our communication. Today people have empowered intelligence, the ability to become informed by scanning a QR code, or connecting to a highly rated source they can become more than informed, they can become actively empowered.

Internet Tsunami Continually Evolves 

The internet is now driving people to think and do things in different ways across many age and economic cohorts. Its not just the young buying music or consumers doing their shopping online, although both have delivered huge shifts in culture to these markets.  People’s first mental response to knowledge and decision making is now to click, look-up and become informed.
No-longer relying on our embedded historical mental heritage or through experts’ advice, people are now researching and networking their knowledge and our learning, widening knowledge and creating expert communities on almost every subject matter possible. For example to become an expert on social media you could do an online course or you could click onto Mashable and become an expert within hours. Anyone and everyone can become an expert, exposing consumer and business choice to new forces and opportunities.
You may have heard the old adage that there is more computer power in a simple watch today than on the Apollo 11 spacecraft which took man to the moon. People have at their finger tips more knowledge about companies than even the most informed company is aware off. Users groups, expert forums and review sites empower and drive decisions, in a far more effective way than traditional marketing channels can persuade customers.
In just in the same way that the Arctic Monkeys pioneered the music online community following, rather than through the plugging and playlist approval to get on the radio. Today the same today is true of consumer both in consumer and business markets.
The power of the internet is yet to be fully understood. For some it has been like a Tsunami, just as a record shop or an insurance salesman. To many others though it is an unseen force, they know its there but not what or how it operates and effects their business. But it is and it will. The sooner business wakes up to these changes the better placed they will be to compete without feeling they have one hand behind their back.