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So, you’ve weathered the hyper-growth phase of the Business Storm Cycle we call the Tornado, suffered thru the Avalanche phase of shrinking margins, and you’re now in the consolidation phase, looking around at the devastation these storms have left behind and wondering how to begin to put things back together. During the consolidation phase, your job as the leader will be to get your company ready for the next Tornado. The bulk of the work [...]

So – your company has gone through its first Business Storm Cycle, and come out the other side. You survived the Tornado of hypergrowth and booming sales, and all the chaos that created. You experienced the pendulum swing of the Avalanche, your downturn phase where your costs kept rising and your margins were shrinking. Now you’re in your consolidation phase, and making the necessary changes in your people, processes, and IT systems to get ready [...]

So you’ve come through the Business Storm Cycle, bruised but still in business. You know that you need to rebalance and realign your people, processes, and IT. If you recognize yourself in that description and you’re reading this now, you’re probably saying, “Yeah, that sounds great. But how can I do it? What are the steps I would have to go through to make that happen in my company?”  You may have considered hiring an [...]

IT problems affect every phase of the business cycle. The weaker your IT, the faster your Tornado will be over—and the longer your Avalanche will last. It’s vital that you take advantage of the consolidation phase that follows the Avalanche to address your IT issues. If you don’t, you won’t be able to prepare for your next Tornado. You may not even survive. IT is one of your most powerful tools for making your business [...]

Habits are funny things; good or bad, they can be the making or breaking of a person, or even of a business. What’s learned isn’t always easy to unlearn.  My mother, for instance, couldn’t get used to the new arrangement of her kitchen when we moved after years in the same home. Because of that, she wasted a lot of steps and effort trying to do things in the same way that she had in [...]

In business, how can you tell when you've hit the Avalanche transition point? You'll have huge revenue, while margins are lower than expected and falling. This is the number-one indicator a company has hit the deceleration transition. In the back office, you've got too many people doing too many things manually, over and over again. Cleaned-up, scalable automation processes have not been applied. Productivity is a big problem. High growth pushes operations very hard. When [...]

I’m often asked how we do what we do. How do we consult with a company, battered by its trip through the Business Storm Cycle, to help put its people, processes, and technology back together? First, we sit down with all the departments – R&D, operations, production, and the back office – in one big room, to go through every single process they are using in each and every department. We talk about what works and [...]