Attracting and Retaining Talent

We’ve helped organizations in a variety of businesses and industries develop and implement strategies that combine financial and non-financial methods which help people to increase commitment, performance and profitability in their workplaces.

Building a Management Team

The fastest way for someone to get promoted is to develop successors, yet most people are focused on the next rung up the ladder, not the one they’re on. We use an innovative combination a of systems and information to help people increase their performance and responsibilities as managers in order to accelerate individual and business performance. What more organizations don’t always understand is that what holds top people back is a lack of a competent replacement.

Coaching and Mentoring

We enable your managers to develop new knowledge and skills and provide real-time advice to pursue business opportunities. We are your partners on both strategic and tactical issues as they evolve, and provide an immediately responsive sounding board.

Business Planning

We help you to create a mythical creature: The effective, accurate business plan. It’s the process of preparing a business plan that is the most valuable part and we act as a guide and provide proprietary templates and processes that can accelerate your business planning process. Business plans often lack strategic innovation and marketing momentum. Yours won’t. We incorporate our powerful strategy and marketing planning tools into your own business planning process so you can achieve maximum clarity and direction in minimum time.

Business Growth

We’ve developed our proprietary Outrageous Growth Model™ and Business Growth Dashboard™ to guide business owners and managers in achieving dramatic revenue and profitability growth, creating internal cash resources, raising employee productivity, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, improving competitive advantages and developing strategic leadership positions.

Change Management

A well-known geology professor told his class, “Don’t be afraid to use dynamite.” This has become our favorite change process. We have led or initiated successful change projects where the key participants got together, determined their objectives, identified their opportunities, and then lit the fuse on their own change process. Dynamite leads to innovation. We’ve seen change drag on or never happen at all if the goal is to not ruffle any feathers or the initiative isn’t bold enough to get anyone excited about the future. Change isn’t for the meek. Running a two million dollar business is one thing. Running a 20 million dollar business growing at 25% per year is an entirely different thing that requires different skill sets, systems, metrics, resources and, especially, vision and courage. Having to report to a board of directors, or ask them to approve your new vision, requires new and innovative approaches. Change management isn’t an event. It needs to become part of the entrepreneur’s DNA so he or she can adapt and grow, via evolution or revolution, to a new level of leadership and control.

Contingency Planning

How would your business operate without you or other key talent? Our contingency planning services provide structures and systems that will enable others to keep your doors open, enter into legal agreements, pay your employees and suppliers, and protect your business reputation and wealth.

Financial Mastery

According to our research, the number one weakness holding entrepreneurs back from achieving their full potential is a lack of financial knowledge. Combine this lack of knowledge with the problem that your accountant may be too busy preparing historical financial information and tax returns to proactively help you with your future plans, budgets and financing, and you are probably a frustrated business owner.  The problem is a lack of information for you to make decisions. We help you structure your financial statements so they provide you with useful and timely information that shows gross profit by product and service line, measure customer and employee profitability, and understand what generates and consumes cash. If all your revenues are reported in one line, your financial statements can’t possibly help you manage your business. Our services will provide you with leading and lagging financial (and real-time non-financial) metrics that will help you to understand and control your acceleration, speed and direction. If you’ve run out of cash before you’ve run out of ideas, we can help.

Financing your Business

Cash is king! More important than the cash is the relationship with your banker who controls the cash. We are experts in banker relationships because we have something in common with bankers: we are always lunching with them! We also talk banker talk: EBIT, free cash flow, debt to equity, working capital, days interest coverage, risk management, succession planning, revenue diversity, and our favorite, weighted average cost of capital. The biggest factors affecting your chances at obtaining financing are your existing cash flow and your management skills. Entrepreneurs usually run their business by monitoring cash flow and their income statements. Yet bankers lend based on the strength of your balance sheet. Many accountants recommend minimizing taxes yet this hurts your balance sheet and reduces your ability to ability to borrow and grow your business. You need a growth strategy that builds your balance sheet to attract bankers, not a tax minimizing strategy that actually weakens your balance sheet and repels bankers. Our Symco Financing Proposals™ are very thorough and help to increase banker confidence and commitment to your business success. Bankers have told us our financing binders are the best they’ve ever seen and wish all their clients would do this.

Holding People Accountable

In our experience, employees always want more responsibility yet aren’t sure how to ask for it and don’t have all the information to demonstrate they can handle more responsibility. Many businesses are in a catch-22 situation where the employee needs more information but the company can’t produce the information employees need to make better decisions and be willing to be held accountable.

Leadership Development

Leadership is a skill which none of us “naturally” acquires in growing a business. When we do develop it by accident we often don’t realize what we’re doing well so that we can be consistent and teach others. Many business owners use their position as owners to get things done. They lead from the front, by example, often being the first ones to arrive and the last to leave. Although this may motivate the troops, or at least set a high standard, it is physically demanding and emotionally exhausting for many people. Leadership development helps business owners to lead from above, without having to be on the front lines all the time. It helps owners to develop other leaders and real managers who can make decisions, spend money, and hire and fire people.

Life Balance for Busy Entrepreneurs

Many entrepreneurs, it is said, only work half-time: “They work any 12 hours of the day they want.” Having an 84-hour work week may have been a reality during the start-up phase, but business owners who transition beyond this unsustainable work load to become true managers and leaders have built businesses and management teams that support the owner’s life style. True wealth, according to Alan Weiss, one of the top independent consultants in the world,  is ‘discretionary time’ as ‘you can always make another dollar but you can’t make another minute.’

Marketing Mastery

Marketing is much more than sales. It is the most important part of your business because it defines who you are (your brand) and how you provide value to your customer. Formalizing your marketing strategy by identifying all the value your provide to your customer is the fastest way to grow your business. If you do one thing, you need to develop this powerful branding statement that reflects your value to your customers. Marketing creates need, which draws customers do you at little of no cost of acquisition. Pricing based on value of overall service and relationship has a profound impact on the customer’s purchasing decisions and can simultaneously strengthen customer loyalty while increasing margins.

Operational Excellence

Speed, responsiveness and quality are key attributes for any product or service. The operations process that generates products and services needs to match the quality of the brand and marketing that attracted the customer. Businesses that measure speed, responsiveness, quality, safety, productivity and costs and share these with their teams will accomplish several things. First, they increase employee and manager accountability because everyone knows the score. Second, the drive innovation because people will figure out how to do things better and faster now that they know the metrics. Third, it will strengthen the brand because customers can receive better quality at a faster pace, and this can reduce price sensitivity or even increase margins. And, finally, it puts marketing in the driver’s seat to go to key customers and ask, as a strategic partner, what other products or services the customer requires to grow their business.

Projections and Forecasts

Many business owners shudder to hear the banker request for financial projections or forecasts. Yet the banker expects, legitimately, that the owner have a reasonable idea of the future. For large, public companies, the stock market rewards (or punishes) companies who meet or exceed (or miss) their earnings forecasts. Granted, forecasting your profits is the most difficult thing to do in business, but there are processes and tools that are highly effective. Taking a conservative approach is a critical success factor in this area. We help management to do the heavy lifting or preparing useful and accurate financial projections and forecasts. This process is even more effective when departmental managers participate in creating their own budgets that flow up to the projection or forecast.

Risk Management

Small and medium businesses can learn a valuable lesson from large and especially public companies that have clear fiduciary duties to protect corporate and shareholder value by practicing risk management. Business owners face unique risks. For example, the business value may be tied directly to the owner’s continued activity in the business, resulting in high personal goodwill but low value to a potential purchaser and reduced family wealth.  We help you anticipate, manage, and reduce the unique risks endemic to your type of business.

Sale of Business (Exit Strategies)

Most business owners only sell their business once in their lifetime. This is a complicated, significant, emotional and financial decision and process. Business value depends on several factors including controllable factors such as revenue and profit growth, cash flow, management team, customer diversification, competitive advantages, and strategic and operational factors. External factors that may be less controllable are interest rates, currency fluctuations, economic and political conditions, government regulations, technological developments and competitive actions.  The biggest factor affecting business value is whether the owner needs to be there all the time or if the business can run independently. A business with an absentee owner, a management team in place and stable or growing cash flows will be worth significantly more than a business with higher profits but needs the owner’s constant hand holding. The best position to be in position your business for sale when its value is the highest, to have freedom from your time commitments to the business, be generating sufficient cash flow to wait, and find strategic buyers who will compete for to purchase your business.

Strategy Development and Implementation

We define strategy as the intentional alignment and direction of your company in order to maximize customer value and financial returns. Business that formalize their strategy development and implementation have achieved dramatic revenue and capacity growth.  Strategy provides the framework for making management decisions and makes it easier to say no! Saying no takes courage and displays management maturity. If your company is simultaneously pursuing several initiatives, it may need a dose of discipline to refocus its initiatives. Our fastest growing and best performing companies have well defined strategies that generate clear decisions and actions by management. This creates strategic acceleration and momentum that attracts customers, differentiates you from competitors, and continually enhances your brand.

Structuring your Business to Create and Protect Wealth

Accountants and lawyers have several methods to minimize risk and minimize tax. However, these may constrict growth and reduce wealth. The best question to ask your advisors is “How do I maximize my wealth?” We recommend that you consider the potential impact and benefits of setting up separate operating companies, holding companies and family trusts. These structures, when used properly, can save hundreds of thousands or millions in taxes. We work closely with our clients and their professional advisors to develop and implement effective and efficient structures that are properly balanced to meet the personal needs and long term business objectives.

Succession Planning for Owner/Managers

Seven out of ten businesses will transition ownership in the next decade, due to demographics and the retiring of the baby boomers in North America. This surge of businesses for sale, combined with fewer buyers, a weak economy and tighter lending by fewer banks, has the potential to cause a succession disaster. Starting now and building up the value of your business can position you at the top of the businesses for sale or even reduce your need to sell the business at all. Succession planning is a two step process that requires the separation of ownership and management. We’ve stated publicly that the worst position in business is ‘owner/manager’ because it conflicts with itself. The owner has long-term objectives to preserve resources and provide stable cash flows while the manager has short-term objectives leverage resources to maximize profits. These roles are very difficult if not impossible to be performed at the same time, especially by the same person. Separating ownership from management is a critical step for the owner/manager or privately held small and medium business that will dramatically accelerate business performance and value. Even sports teams separate the roles of ownership, management and players in order to have everyone focus on their strengths and maximize performance. It’s not about how many jobs you can do, it’s about which job you can do the best.

Systems to Improve Efficiency

Systems support scalable growth by creating documents and processes that can replicated, trained, enhanced and monitored. Systems improve quality, speed, consistency and help to reduce costs of rework and failure work. Systems are boring, and boring is a good thing. If you are fighting fires and crises all day, this may feel rewarding to be that important, but it is emotionally and physically stressful. More importantly, it creates an internal focus on problem solving instead of an external focus on customers and opportunities. Systems help companies to prevent problems and provide resources for higher value, customer driven work.

Value Pricing

Value pricing is a new concept that applies to most products and services where the price is determined based on the value the customer receives. Value pricing is far superior in most situations compared to low margin pricing based on cost, time, capacity or competitors. Businesses that strategically utilize value pricing consistently show higher margins than time-based or cost-based pricing models. A powerful example in the market today is Apple which constantly innovates and launches new products that generate superior margins. Even in the mature computer industry, Apple’s margins on computers are the highest of all retail computer manufacturers. We have helped a variety of clients to successfully implement value pricing in competitive situations and industries. Learn more…

For additional information on how we can help you grow & transition your business, contact info@symcoandco.com