Hope is Not a Strategy for Success in 2007
What are you doing differently to survive, compete and thrive in the market?
Do you need help to solve some difficult problems? A year ago, a plan to trim costs, implement new systems, and grow the sales force in order to capture more customers seemed like enough. Now many leaders are scrambling for major cost reductions, projects have been delayed, and the best sales people are struggling to land the few customers out there looking for products and services. TPG The Performance Group helps leaders understand their operations and how to achieve efficiency without destroying competitive advantage.
Over the past few years, small and midsized companies grew staff in leaps and bounds to keep up with demand. In today’s market these same companies have found their processes to be less than scalable, their fixed costs to be way too high for volumes, and are undertaking lay offs and other restructuring tactics to cut costs.
Companies whose organizations change so dramatically when the market shifts are at a competitive disadvantage not only because their processes lack scalability, but also because the expansions and contractions of the organization risk the loss of key talent, generate fear and anxieties which harm productivity, and demand too much attention on the part of leaders away from gaining new business. TPG The Performance Group has worked with lenders nationwide whose small and mid-sized operations need to take advantage of improvement opportunities thought by many to be affordable or feasible only in much larger companies.
Regardless of what you believe your ideal headcount needs to be, the fact is your company needs to retain its core competencies, continue to develop talent to perform higher value functions, and remain sufficiently staffed to operate efficiently AND opportunistically in order to seize business wherever you can.
Effective leaders know that their operations need focus, speed, and skill to produce better margins and beat the competition. Focus requires leaders to concentrate their best resources on the work that attracts customers, beats their expectations, and retains their loyalty. Speed requires discipline and quality controls at each stage of production in order to eliminate the costs of poor quality, rework cycles, delays and distraction. Skill building requires access to knowledge, clarity of performance standards and expectations, and reinforcing processes that demonstrate success and which are protected from the destructive forces of fire-fighting day-to-day crises. TPG The Performance Group helps executives create focus, speed and skills through the rapid application of analysis and change management plans based on proven management disciplines in operations strategy, quality improvement & control, IT systems analysis, and project management.
What are you doing to cut costs, improve performance, and win business in 2007?
Let’s take the three objectives in reverse order.
While some executives and managers rose to their present positions only during the recent boom, there are many who remember leading in tighter markets and still more who have learned valuable lessons through these cycles.
It’s time to be disciplined about the marketplace, the types of products and customers you want to bring together and how you go about pricing products, compensating sales and production performance, and executing the sale or servicing of loans. Just in the past twelve months TPG The Performance Group has helped business leaders understand the importance of aligning strategic business goals to the design of products and the employee level commissions & compensation plan in order to stop selling record volumes of loans that do nothing to improve the bottom line and start focusing the talent on selling products that create better results.
At the same time, investments in technology initiatives launched in 2005, 2006 or even this year are under pressure to produce the returns projected during halcyon days gone by. The notion of technology that serves the business as opposed to business operations needing to adopt mental gymnastics to accommodate the technology is never more important than during lean times.
When demand is irrationally high and the pool of borrowers seems inexhaustible, cash flow can enable wildly distorted software driven processes to take root and drain value without much scrutiny. Now is when clear processes, the understanding of their value, and the quantifiable improvements offered by technology need to be developed and implemented. TPG The Performance Group has helped dozens of lenders select the right POS/LOS systems, negotiate better contracts, build better business requirements, and implement solutions that deliver ROI.
Headcount is expensive – but not as expensive as losing business due to a lack of capacity. Fixed costs will cripple a company in these market conditions. You need to make costs variable wherever possible without destroying the core talent of your company. (for more on Talent, check out the last edition on our website) While large companies have adopted alternatives for outsourcing work including temporary workforces, business process outsourcing offshore, and some of the largest even building their own offshore operations, too many small to mid-sized operations have foregone the alternatives of outsourcing in any dramatic way.
Whether you haven’t adopted BPO because you believe the move to BPO to be too complicated, too risky, or unnecessary because the market will turn around or it’s because your company, like others we’ve heard from, has focused exclusively on generating new leads, customers, and loans, you need to consider this very important option. The right BPO plan will enable you best talent to focus on higher value work, your operations to become faster as work gets done in parallel and overnight, and your quality to improve as you define standards, control processes and pay only for the value delivered. All of these benefits are important and can be realized in addition to making your production costs variable and reducing overall costs of origination.
TPG The Performance Group helps small and mid-sized companies adopt BPO without the drain on management resources and risks inherent to long distance processing because we understand the process, we have extensive experience and subject matter expertise, and we serve as the regular stateside point of accountability to clients who use us to move work offshore.
Do you need help to solve some difficult problems? A year ago, a plan to trim costs, implement new systems, and grow the sales force in order to capture more customers seemed like enough. Now many leaders are scrambling for major cost reductions, projects have been delayed, and the best sales people are struggling to land the few customers out there looking for products and services. TPG The Performance Group helps leaders understand their operations and how to achieve efficiency without destroying competitive advantage.
Over the past few years, small and midsized companies grew staff in leaps and bounds to keep up with demand. In today’s market these same companies have found their processes to be less than scalable, their fixed costs to be way too high for volumes, and are undertaking lay offs and other restructuring tactics to cut costs.
Companies whose organizations change so dramatically when the market shifts are at a competitive disadvantage not only because their processes lack scalability, but also because the expansions and contractions of the organization risk the loss of key talent, generate fear and anxieties which harm productivity, and demand too much attention on the part of leaders away from gaining new business. TPG The Performance Group has worked with lenders nationwide whose small and mid-sized operations need to take advantage of improvement opportunities thought by many to be affordable or feasible only in much larger companies.
Regardless of what you believe your ideal headcount needs to be, the fact is your company needs to retain its core competencies, continue to develop talent to perform higher value functions, and remain sufficiently staffed to operate efficiently AND opportunistically in order to seize business wherever you can.
Effective leaders know that their operations need focus, speed, and skill to produce better margins and beat the competition. Focus requires leaders to concentrate their best resources on the work that attracts customers, beats their expectations, and retains their loyalty. Speed requires discipline and quality controls at each stage of production in order to eliminate the costs of poor quality, rework cycles, delays and distraction. Skill building requires access to knowledge, clarity of performance standards and expectations, and reinforcing processes that demonstrate success and which are protected from the destructive forces of fire-fighting day-to-day crises. TPG The Performance Group helps executives create focus, speed and skills through the rapid application of analysis and change management plans based on proven management disciplines in operations strategy, quality improvement & control, IT systems analysis, and project management.
What are you doing to cut costs, improve performance, and win business in 2007?
Let’s take the three objectives in reverse order.
While some executives and managers rose to their present positions only during the recent boom, there are many who remember leading in tighter markets and still more who have learned valuable lessons through these cycles.
It’s time to be disciplined about the marketplace, the types of products and customers you want to bring together and how you go about pricing products, compensating sales and production performance, and executing the sale or servicing of loans. Just in the past twelve months TPG The Performance Group has helped business leaders understand the importance of aligning strategic business goals to the design of products and the employee level commissions & compensation plan in order to stop selling record volumes of loans that do nothing to improve the bottom line and start focusing the talent on selling products that create better results.
At the same time, investments in technology initiatives launched in 2005, 2006 or even this year are under pressure to produce the returns projected during halcyon days gone by. The notion of technology that serves the business as opposed to business operations needing to adopt mental gymnastics to accommodate the technology is never more important than during lean times.
When demand is irrationally high and the pool of borrowers seems inexhaustible, cash flow can enable wildly distorted software driven processes to take root and drain value without much scrutiny. Now is when clear processes, the understanding of their value, and the quantifiable improvements offered by technology need to be developed and implemented. TPG The Performance Group has helped dozens of lenders select the right POS/LOS systems, negotiate better contracts, build better business requirements, and implement solutions that deliver ROI.
Headcount is expensive – but not as expensive as losing business due to a lack of capacity. Fixed costs will cripple a company in these market conditions. You need to make costs variable wherever possible without destroying the core talent of your company. (for more on Talent, check out the last edition on our website) While large companies have adopted alternatives for outsourcing work including temporary workforces, business process outsourcing offshore, and some of the largest even building their own offshore operations, too many small to mid-sized operations have foregone the alternatives of outsourcing in any dramatic way.
Whether you haven’t adopted BPO because you believe the move to BPO to be too complicated, too risky, or unnecessary because the market will turn around or it’s because your company, like others we’ve heard from, has focused exclusively on generating new leads, customers, and loans, you need to consider this very important option. The right BPO plan will enable you best talent to focus on higher value work, your operations to become faster as work gets done in parallel and overnight, and your quality to improve as you define standards, control processes and pay only for the value delivered. All of these benefits are important and can be realized in addition to making your production costs variable and reducing overall costs of origination.
TPG The Performance Group helps small and mid-sized companies adopt BPO without the drain on management resources and risks inherent to long distance processing because we understand the process, we have extensive experience and subject matter expertise, and we serve as the regular stateside point of accountability to clients who use us to move work offshore.
posted by M.A. Fairbank at 10:35 AM
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