|
£1000 Grant towards Leadership and Management Training
Based in the North West? Are you a leader of an organisation employing less than 250 people? If you are there is a grant of up to £1000 which you can put towards training and development.
Click here to download an information sheet.
Practical Business Support to Suit Your Time and Budget
Does the following sound familiar?
- Increasing competition
- Continual pressure on costs
- Difficult to increase prices
- Difficult to retain good staff
- Continual pressure to improve products and services
- Technology is increasing the number of ways customers want to communicate with you
- You don’t understand the Internet yet more business is being done via the web
- Customers demand faster and better service
- Your internal processes are slow and error prone
As you are already acutely aware change is the only constant in the world of business today.
So what do you need to do to survive?
What do you need to do to grow?
Well there is no shortage of help, no shortage of consultancies looking to apply their latest panacea, shortage of people telling you what you are doing wrong.
So how do you decide what is right for you?
After you have read a number of books on management a lot of it seems like common sense. It is also the case that there are a wide variety of management tools and techniques available to you that will help you fast track a better understanding of the issues.
However, after analysing a wide variety of tools and techniques the following basic principles emerge:
- Clear achievable measurable objectives need to be set
- There needs to be excellent communication with all stakeholders (customers, employees, shareholders, external organisations that have an interest in your business)
- Ongoing and sustained development of your team
- Clear roles and responsibilities
- Good fiscal control
- Time and space to be creative and to work ON the business
So what do you need from a consultant or an outside facilitator? What is going to make a difference to your organisation, to the way you and your team do things?
For a lot of organisations, change can be implemented in an evolutionary way, one step at a time in order to get your team used to the idea that change is here to stay, that is necessary and that they need to get good at it. The goal for you the business owner or senior manager is create an agile organisation capable of changing and adapting as your external environment changes. That way, what you do matches what the world outside wants and will pay for. Clearly different strategies are required if your business is on the brink of failure and that requires revolution and can be a painful process for all concerned.
If change is to be evolutionary then simply a consultant writing a report and letting you get on with it is not going to work as the change required is iterative and it doesn’t take many small iterative steps for the proposals suggested by the consultant to be out of date. This probably explains why most reports from consultants end up in the bottom drawer (never the round receptacle in the corner because you have spent too much money on it). Also, most consultants like to work with top management only. However, for change to be effective, outside facilitators need to work with the whole of the organisation from the cleaner to the chief executive and main shareholders.
So here are some of the things that we think are important at KUB:
- High integrity. In challenging situations all sides will confide with you.
- Ability to work at all levels. One minute you may be helping the MD with strategy and the next it could be helping write a sales letter.
- Take an action centred approach. This means that any documentation that is produced are action reports documenting what needs to happen, who is responsible and by when.
- For groups or teams this may mean action centred learning where each person takes responsibility for their part in the change.
- Somebody who can empathise with your staff. They need to be able to see problems for the perspective of your staff.
Have a large network of experts in their network. This means where a specialist is required one can be brought in at short notice to deal with the specifics of an issue that requires technical expertise.
Have a large range of simple solutions to common problems so that time is not wasted reinventing the wheel.
This is the service that KUB delivers. It is a no nonsense, facilitative approach so that you only pay for what you need in order to make your business more successful (by which ever measure you define success).
Call 0845 053 7417 for a confidential chat at no cost about your business.
About KUB
KUB provides practical business support for small and medium sized businesses in the North West of England. Given that most smaller businesses do not have a great deal of time or money to spend on external help and after many years of experience the best way to make progress in developing and changing a business is to meet once a month for half a day. Each monthly meeting lasts between 2-3 hours and at the end of it a list of actions are agreed that can be implemented by the business before the next meeting.
The benefits are:
- Agreed actions are achievable and move the business forward.
- All areas of the business are covered including sales, marketing, operations/manufacturing, process, IT, accounts and finance.
- There are no reports, just an agreed list of actions.
- We can work with the whole of your management team or just you.
- The process is like a mini board meeting but without the formality.
- KUB is linked in with a number of networks so that if we don’t know the answer we know somebody who does.
- Is very cost effective. As there are no reports and you do the implementation that you have agreed so that the only cost is the time for an experienced facilitator/advisor to meet with you once per month.
- You are in control, you can cancel at any time.
- Free email/telephone support between meetings.
As the initial consultation is free, why not call on 0845 053 7417 and we can discuss and identify the key challenges you face? Alternatively, if you prefer email, contact us on help@kub-uk.net . We are happy to chat through your concerns without cost or obligation.
|
