Management Structure | Jon Baker
Situation
Jon's client provides services to a number of national and international companies; and had grown their turnover to about £4.5M pa although this growth rate had declined.
This growth had created problems of management structure. The majority of work was being monitored and controlled by the owner; this became increasingly difficult to do resulting in stress, poor management of debtors, very little marketing and an organisation that was overly reliant upon one person.
Moving more supervision to other members of the team created its own problems, as managing through other people often does and the business was struggling with the levels of work and planning of the workload.
Objectives
Improve the structure and leadership in the company so that more work could be handled, with less supervision.
Ensure that planning is improved, so that they are not continuously working extra hours, with the resultant exhaustion of staff.
Reduce debtors and increase the growth rate again, in a controllable manner.
Action
- Create a monitoring process so that only key issues are being reviewed.
- Start developing the first and second levels of management, reducing the number of issues that are escalated.
- Create a planning and control system so that workload is more stable and improve customer liaison to help with this
- Introduce a more structured marketing approach
- Help the owner to create the space to do this and look to the company’s future.
Results
- Monthly turnover increased from £40,000 and now regularly exceeding £65,000
- Planning improvements, longer term planning is now highlighting issues before they occur.
- Shifting leadership focus from day to day management, to long term company prosperity.
- Key operational tasks distributed among the organisation
And so
The client is now able to look further ahead and is starting to focus on developing second level managers and look to the next stages of the company development. With forward bookings in place for over six months, they are able to continue to increase the size of the team in readiness for the next stage of growth.
Jon Baker is a leading member of the Executive and Business Coaching Network (ECBN)
Jon's Website venture-Now