28/06/2009 by Geoff.

I visited my physio today knowing I was in for a telling off because I’d not been doing my exercises as regularly as I should.

I was not prepared for the wisdom I received! She said “since you agree the exercises are working to make a lasting change you need to practice what works!”

To a business consultant this was like “teaching your grandmother to suck eggs” but she’s right!

Its the same in business - in order to make a change we need to practice the right things not bad habits. 

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23/06/2009 by Geoff.

As we’ve mentioned before there are lots of news letters in our e-mail boxes these days. One that is more valuable than most is the “Fresh Business Thinking” one (http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com).

A recent article on networking written by Dr Ivan Misner (of BNI fame) which promotes the principle of “Givers gain” is worth a read. Just click on this link to go to the article http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/business_advice.php?AID=2398&Title=Become+A+Networking+Mentor

We hope you find it useful.

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14/06/2009 by admin.

John Hill, our financial guru, has just helped a client through a potential aquisition. It didn’t come off but he shares his experience with us below: 

Why would anyone want to acquire another company? It could be a quick way to increase turnover and market share and possibly, thereby, removing a competitor? The process is a minefield of legal and financial requirements.You will need a solicitor and accountant who are experienced in mergers and acquisitions, and they don’t come cheap. It will be an expensive operation, and some proportion of the fees will be payable in advance.The process can take a long time and involve many meetings and could fail at any time, but will probably end up in some solicitor’s office late at night with loads of coffee and sandwiches haggling over some comparatively minor clause in a frequently rewritten sale document. If you see an opportunity; seek plenty of advice; sleep on it; take more advice, then go for it. Good luck!!

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07/06/2009 by Geoff.

Some of us are old enough to remember the time and motion man with his stop watch who operated in the work study department. Rather surprisingly we recently had a client ask about WS which caused us to dredge the depths of our memories.

We’ve operated in these environments and on the plus side WS information provides valuable information for estimates but unfortunately was to often used for the basis of a time based incentive scheme. Since the employee spent most of his time doing a task they soon found a way to do things more quickly, milk what was supposed to be an incentive and hence the incentive scheme fell into disrepute. By the way we tend to view incentives as making up for poor management! But the right ones do have a place in successful companies.

In more recent times what we can sell thankfully comes into the picture. As a result we tend to talk about the output of cells, flexibility of people and the throughput of a unit. Having said this we still have to do estimates and have a view of what resource we need to fulfill orders (on time in full) - in this respect WS techniques are not dead.

How many of you check actual times against estmates? 

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