"...keeping you great"
HEADLINES:
March 17 LIVE Webcast with LEAN expert Guy Parsons -- 11:58am -- 2pm EST (US) -- and available afterwards if you miss it in archived form. Go here to sign-up. The first company in ANY industry that embraces LEAN will dominate their industry -- mark my word.
Doubled Sales, Doubled Call Center Volume, Eliminated Inventory, Made More Money etc -- Nurse Next Door Powers Business using LEAN -- the storm continues to rage in Canada -- another Vancouver-based company, Nurse Next Door engaged Guy Parsons for a set of LEAN initiatives in 2008. Results? Here's the list Ken Sims, co-founder, sent this week:
- We have grown by 100% over the last year / have done it with 22 head office people vs. 30 last year.
- Our payroll and billing accountant's biggest challenge this year -- she is bored/has nothing to do half of her time because her job has become so easy (vs. last year when she had to come in evenings and weekends to get her job done). We are now teaching these LEAN techniques to our franchise partners so they can work on growing the business vs. doing payroll all day.
- 2 years ago, it was a challenge to add 1 new franchise partner each quarter. Now we add 2 per month (can add up to 5 per month without breaking a sweat).
- Our call centre can handle 2x its current volume without adding a single person (which helps us reduce fees to our franchise partners).
- With the elimination of process steps, we are making training of franchise partners / franchise partner's workflow easier (make more money)
- Inventory levels have been pretty much eliminated (our franchise partners do not require as much capital to start / run their business).
- We have reduced waste from a North American industry average of 95% to approximately 90%. While this doesn't seem like a lot, another way of looking at it is we doubled the size of our company (going from adding 5% value to 10% value = 100% gain) before you consider any top line growth.
- Our lean initiatives are a major (but not only) reason why we (and our franchise partners) have been able to thrive in this terrible economic period.
Concludes Sims in his March 9 note "And this is just scratching the surface!" Thanks to Cameron Herold for forwarding this note to me.
BTW, Nurse Next Door Racks up Major Award -- announced on March 3, they were named North America's 6th best midsize franchise system by Franchise Business Review (FBR) on its 2009 Franchisee Satisfaction Awards top 50 list. Congratulations.
Adds Customer Value or it Doesn't -- In a follow-up note from Mike Jagger, founder of Provident Security, who championed bringing Guy Parson up to Vancouver for the EO chapter "The thing we did was divide all of our costs into two columns, things that add value to our clients and things that don't. We have a huge IT investment that we require for our monitoring business, which adds client value. However, our clients don't care who hosts our email... So we cancelled our scheduled server upgrade for our exchange servers and are migrating the entire company to gmail. First year savings on the hardware, software, management and support for that is just under $60k. We've got another great (LEAN) tool now to help us look at the business in a very different way." At your next weekly or monthly meeting make your list.
Chet Holmes On-Demand -- over 1200 executives have dialed into Chet Holmes teleconference on doubling sales in 2009. With his permission, he's allowed us to archive his 30 minute presentation for you to listen to anytime on-demand -- here's the link.
Sales Contest -- and this great idea (of course I loved it) from Samantha Belin with SmartCEO magazine after listening to Chet Holmes teleconference on how to double revenue "I told Craig (our publisher) that he should have a sales contest and the winner can go to the April 21st-22nd Sales and Marketing Summit in New Orleans. :-) We'll see what happens."
FYI, Hotel Room Conference Rate ends Friday, March 20 for our two-day Sales and Marketing Summit in New Orleans. If you're planning to attend, at least make your hotel room reservations before next Friday to get our conference rate. Go to this link and scroll down the right hand column to get the conference rate code and call-in information
Drive Revenue, Eliminate Waste -- Gazelles is doing what it can, during these turbulent times, to bring you the most practical, actionable tools for thriving -- now is the time to pounce on the competition -- out learn, out execute, and out compete them while they are weak. Just keep listening and learning -- and that ONE idea -- that one Black Swan moment -- will arrive. But you have to stay in the game!