The End - it took five years to get to this point and it can be summarised by saying our profits today are x15 times greater than when we started. We have enough cashflow reserves to fund the business for 18 months. I'm able to take a lot of time off away from the business to enjoy life and spend time with my family.

That is what the end looks like for this client. So where did it all start.

The business had been operating for 5 or so years before they made a change and the business had not experienced any real growth since the first year or two after it started. To some extent it had stalled and was in decline, the owner was stressed, worked incredibly long hours and wasn't getting ahead.

The business had the following specific issues; negative cashflow on any given day, high staff turnover, angry clients, no sales growth, no marketing and barely a living wage for the founder.

To put the business in context, it was in an industry where there were and still are competitors 20 times the size. The industry was sound and it remains a growing industry albeit a competitive one.

The founder had emersed themselves in books, conferences and a range of other business and personal gowth and learning exercises. The business owner was open to change and had a good capacity to develop and improve. The elements were there, our task was to discover and unlock the intrinsic value of the business.

We get asked a lot, where we start when there is a problem. We always start with people. You might be thinking, wouldn't you start with the problem. You'd sort of be right to think that, but how can we tell if the problem you think, is actually the real problem and for this reason we start with the people. Obviously the owner told us what they thought the problem was and we keep this in mind when we start to talk to the people involved.

It took some time to ask enough questions in order to understand the issues. Speaking and chatting with everyone, even some customers gave us a good starting point.

Related to the where do you start question is the concept of how do you start and what do you start with. Typically there is not just one thing but in this business we started with two things.

The first thing was data. We took the time to gather and monitor the data in the business. This gave us the starting point and some of the insights we needed.

The other first place we started was the customer and specifically sales and sales process. In this case, marketing was almost non existant and at first there was very little budget to get it started, so we focused on sales with a view to working out why there had been so little growth in the business.

We quickly discovered there was no real sales process. Leads were almost non existant, maybe one every 6 months and the sales cycle on these leads was monumentally bad, taking 18 months and going nowhere.

The documents or systems which underpinned selling and onboarding new clients were create anew every time a possible client came on the scene. It took 4 days to send a proposal out. There was no systemisation from the last proposal sent to the next one, it was as though it was invented each time.

Without diminishing the effort and work involved over the next 6 to 12 month, we helped the business owner with the following broad elements.

Clarity about what they sell and how to communicate it to a client and also the team.

Tighten up the sales process from 18 months down to 1 month.

Identify the ideal customer (even though at this stage the product was somewhat rudimatary in terms of presentation)

Develop a robust service offering which was clear and detailed and could be scaled up as needed.

Intiate a quality assurance role in the business. Over time this role expanded, however at the start, having someone review quality and coach for excellence made all the difference.

Started simple yet effective brand recognition marketing in social media groups, this was extremely cost effective and helped attract the early adopters.

These initiatives took about 12 months. It's a journey with ups and downs, swings and round abouts. With commitment and guidance each initative experienced more and more success and we started to see momentum buidling across multiple parts of the business.

There were quite a few challenging times during, yet when there is light, those challenges become meaningful and somewhat enjoyable.

We reached the end of this case study, where we began the story and this particular business contines to grow.