Research shows that only one-third of businesses have a formal plan, but the one-third who plan outperform the two-thirds that don’t plan.
Planning helps you maximize your speed by aligning and focusing your people and your resources in a common direction. If you are too busy to plan, that’s actually a great time to leverage your momentum. Planning, with daily metrics to track your progress, is how small companies grow into big companies.
Critical plans to guide your profitable growth and maximize wealth include:
- Strategy development and implementation — to clarify your direction and focus, and to maximize your customer value
- Business plan — to specify the daily operational and tactical actions
- Financing plan — to accelerate your profitable growth with leverage
- Systems — to increase efficiency and get critical information out of peoples’ heads and into a replicable, trainable, documented process
- Risk management — to ensure you identify and reduce probable and reasonable risks
- Contingency planning — to develop action plans for when stuff happens
Strategy Development and Implementation
We help you paint a picture of the future that is untainted by the temporary nature of daily events.
We define strategy as the intentional alignment of your resources and the specific direction and focus of your company to provide value to your customers.
You have choices… low cost, differentiation, or focus.
You can be a low cost provider where you need critical mass in volume and market presence, and a really good management information system to keep track of it all. You can differentiate your company from your competitors. Or, you can focus on a specific niche or target market.
Phil has helped me to focus on parts of the business that are now improving the overall performance of the company. — Ken Pickering, Globe-Elite Electrical Contractors Ltd.
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Most privately-held businesses have strategies that are based on differentiation, focus, or a combination of both. It’s tough for SMEs to be low cost in a big box, internet-priced world.
Some of our services:
- Strategy formulation and development.
- Strategy implementation and execution.
- Strategic key performance indicators.
- Developing a high-speed, high-profit company.
- Making strategy part of your management DNA.
Our experience proves that businesses that formalize their strategy development and implementation can achieve dramatic revenue and capacity growth. Strategy provides the framework for making management decisions and makes it easier to say no to distracting and unprofitable opportunities! Strategy enables you to focus on higher value activities. It’s like a focused laser that can cut steel.
We think differently about ourselves and our business. — Zlatan Fazlagic, Look Matters
If your company is simultaneously pursuing several initiatives without any clear priorities, it may need to re-prioritize based on its strengths and refocus its initiatives. Symco & Co.’s 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.
I know that Phil can strategize and I needed a sounding board…I appreciate his strategic skill set. — Lorne Schnell, Morsky Industrial
Business Planning
We design and implement pragmatic strategies that build your business daily instead of building binders that sit on a shelf.
Symco & Co. helps 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. 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. Symco & Co. incorporates our powerful strategy and marketing planning tools into your own business planning process so you can achieve maximum clarity and direction in minimum time.
A lot of planners work more on the surface. Phil is more specific. He helps you develop your business philosophy, not just a business plan. — Monte Stewart, McCrank Stewart Johnson Law Firm
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Some of our services:
- Business plans to chart a profitable course amidst numerous choices, enhance business value, and strengthen management’s control and confidence about the future.
- Developing metrics and plans for maximizing talent recruitment and retention, enhancing operational capacity and efficiency
- Marketing plans to clearly communicate your unique value points, develop innovative pricing structures that maximize margins, enhance your brand and strengthen customer loyalty.
It forced us all to think in a way that we hadn’t thought before. — Andrew Rathwell, Zapwell Communications
Financing your Business
We provide the access and acceptance to key financial relationships that will provide important resources without surrendering control.
Cash is fuel for your business. Borrowing wisely can help you create even more cash.
Key factors for borrowing wisely:
- Be prepared for success, and think long-term.
- Run your company like a real business.
- Know your numbers: cost per unit, gross margin by product or service line, break-evens, overhead rates, days to cash.
- Prepare budgets or projections and compare actual results to your plans on a monthly basis.
- Match the financing to the type of asset or expenditure.
- Develop a strong relationship with your banker as a strategic partner for your long-term success.
- Explore non-traditional sources of debt financing that can increase your growth while you maintain total control of your business.
Phil has a breadth of expertise and experience that helped us buy a railroad and expand our business. We highly recommend Phil’s services if you need help with growing your business, financing, negotiating shareholder agreements and even creating ownership structures. — Sheldon Affleck, Mobil Grain Ltd.
We help you obtain the right kind of financing for your business and your comfort level. By structuring debt and equity properly, we can accelerate your business growth, maximize business value, and increase your wealth.
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Some of our services:
- Symco & Co. Financing Binder™
- Buying or selling a business.
- Structuring management buy-ins or buy-outs.
- Negotiating with bankers and investors.
- Financial projections and forecasts.
- Business plans.
- Wealth creation and protection strategies and structures.
- Maximizing your business value for transition, succession or sale.
Phil helps his clients – high growth companies requiring unconventional financing – borrow wisely. — Ryan McLean, Business Development Bank of Canada
Entrepreneurs run their businesses from their income statements and cash flow. Yet bankers lend based on the balance sheet, management credibility and overall financial performance. Symco & Co. can help to bridge the gap between what you need as a business owner and what the banker needs to make lending decisions.
Cash is king! More important than the cash is the relationship with your banker who controls the cash. Symco & Co. are experts in banker relationships because we have something in common with bankers. We talk banker talk: EBITA, 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 financial results, cash flows and your management skills.
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 your banker’s confidence and commitment to your business success.
Phil’s work was key in the successful financing of clients’ growth plans. Our clients were able to achieve their financial goals and objectives, and the bank was able to lend into a risk-reduced opportunity. — Doug Yaremko, Scotiabank
Systems to Improve Efficiency
We take information that exists between people’s ears and turn it into tangible systems that improve business performance and reduce risk of relying on key people.
Systems create freedom for your key people to do highly valuable things while ensuring consistent quality and performance from your employees. Systems also maximize the value of your business because they can be replicated and scaled up to accommodate growth.
The best ways to create systems in your company are to:
- Get information out of peoples’ heads and onto paper or electronic documents.
- Develop an organizational chart that shows reporting relationships.
- Have front line people document what they do and how they do it.
- Have managers document their routine information and decision-making processes.
- Develop simple one page flow charts for key information and work flows.
- Assemble all information, electronically or in print, in an organized framework.
- Use the information for training purposes and have both parties, the trainer and the trainee, update and improve the information as they work with it.
The most successful companies are successful because they rely on consistent and efficient systems. — Kelly Ozem, Chartered Accountant
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Some of our services:
- Systematizing management information and processes to enhance real-time decision making and increase business performance.
- Developing one year and five year organizational charts that reflect strategic growth and innovation.
- Helping your people document policies and procedures.
- Creating contingency plans that help to keep the business running during adversity or crises.
Systems support scalable growth by creating documents and processes that can be used for training, monitoring quality, and measuring performance. Systems improve quality, speed, consistency, and help 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, you may feel useful but are probably physically and emotionally exhausted. Stress creates an internal focus on problem-solving instead of an external focus on customers and opportunities. Systems help companies prevent problems and provide resources for higher value, customer-driven work.
Our ISO certifier said that he is amazed that we’re a little company that is run like a big company. The way we’re growing, we will be a big company soon. — Teresa Hensrud, Industrial Scale
Risk Management
We provide clear tools and assessments to identify, mitigate, and accept prudent risk.
Common risks in privately-held and owner-managed businesses:
- Over-reliance on the business owner for major decisions, key relationships and leadership.
- Key operational and management processes are not written down or are not updated.
- Succession planning for key people at all levels of the company.
- Financial resources or financing to pursue unexpected opportunities or deal with short-term changes.
- Computer backup – data, software and hardware.
- Shopping your own business – to experience what your customers do.
- Working with your business advisors – lawyer, accountant, insurance – to ensure you are structured for success and protected from disaster.
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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 therefore reduced family wealth. Symco & Co. helps help you anticipate, manage, and reduce the unique risks endemic to your type of business.
Contingency Planning
Not everything works as it should. It’s not what happens, it’s what you’re prepared to do about it.
How would your business operate without you or other key talent? Symco & Co.’s 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.
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Key steps in contingency planning:
- Corporate signing officers that can enter into legal contracts.
- Authorized cheque signatories that can keep cash flowing.
- An organizational chart that shows reporting relationships and backup positions.
- “Second-in-command” people for all key positions, with the backup person aware of their status and roles.
- An organized list of key information including tax numbers, bank accounts, business advisors and their contact information.
- Off-site computer backup of data and systems that is monitored daily and tested weekly.
- Strong relationships with multiple suppliers, bankers and customers so that you aren’t reliant or economically dependent on any one person or company.
