Business Consulting—Nan O'Connor Business Consultant
Business Consulting Scaled for Your Business
About business consulting: most business processes - like Strategic Planning, Blue Ocean Strategy, Rockefeller Habits and Organizational Development - were developed for Corporate America. I scale these processes so that they work for your business, whatever the size.
Business Consulting Processes for Today's Business Environment
As a business owner, I used to hire business consultants to come in and work with us. Ouch! It was expensive - and more than that - took a month of Sundays! I realized early on that they were using processes designed for General Motors or IBM, but not for my company.
I took the best processes I could find - those that big corporations had spent millions developing - and adapted them to be down and dirty for my small business. They were stripped down to just the basics - but had everything we needed to be really effective.
Those are the processes I use today with my business consulting clients. And, now that Corporate America has its eye on lean and mean, they work great for a department or a division of a big company.
Business Planning
Most business owners think that a business plan is only useful when starting a business. Not So! Business planning, every year, is the most valuable time you can spend on your business. It sets your course and keeps you focused. It tremendously increases your chance for success.
I have strategic planning down to a science. Simple. Direct. Effective. It takes one to two days, depending on your company. That's all. And, you walk away with a plan that will be the blueprint you follow all year. It's driven by an Action Plan - because all the planning in the world isn't worth anything without the action to put it into play. This is a living, breathing plan - it will never sit on a shelf.
Best yet, accountability and tracking are built in, so every member of the team leaves the planning meeting knowing what is on their plate and what they will be held accountable for. This planning process creates results - sustained results.
Blue Ocean Strategy
Here’s a difficult truth: your business will become a commodity over time ... the only differentiator being price. Ugly. And it’s likely you aren’t a top-notch marketing strategist. I’ve yet to meet a business owner who is.
For years, I have searched for a process to help ordinary people create good market strategy. At last, I found Blue Ocean. Again, it’s designed for the big guys, but I have adapted it to work for small business. It works even if you don’t have money for market research. It works if you aren’t a genius strategist. It helps you get out of the red ocean of bloody competition and into a new blue ocean where the competition is irrelevant.
Rockefeller Habits
Until you have a management team running your company, you have a job, not a business. I teach you and your team a set of definitive fundamental habits to help you grow your business (the same habits Rockefeller used to dominate his industry). If you would like your business to be highly focused toward achieving aggressive goals, this is the program for you.
Infrastructure Alignment
One of the biggest challenges with both growth and downsizing is how to adapt the infrastructure of an organization to support its needs. This might be systems and processes. It might be roles and responsibilities. It might be the technology to make it all happen.
I work with your team to identify what needs to happen and then facilitate their ability to create their own solutions. Nothing worse than an outside expert imposing their solution, right? As soon as she/he goes away, no one owns the solution and it was all an awful waste of time and money. Working with teams to figure out their own solutions create results that stick. People own what they help create. It's as simple as that!
Team Building
You can't get people working as a team by throwing them a party or doing one of those cute exercises where everyone climbs ropes together. Sure, those things help, but they are never the long-term answer.
The answer is a sustained program of involvement. The best way to get people involved with each other is to get them to work together to solve their own problems. I work with teams over an extended period (three months to one year) to teach them how to get "best thinking" from themselves. They learn up to six different problem-solving and brainstorming processes that they internalize and begin to use on their own.
The payoff is tremendous: problems get solved, solutions stick because they come from the inside, they learn how to think for themselves, and - by the way - they become a team because of the experience of doing it together. Fantastic!
Three Promises I Make All My Business Consulting Clients
- You will never become dependent on me. We will always work in a way that the empowerment and value stays with you after I leave.
- You will learn valuable processes. I’m as much a teacher as I am business consultant. When we work together, you will learn the process we use so you can use it later without me.
- You will receive the value you expect. Guaranteed. It’s always my policy to guarantee every thing I do.
One of my clients, Tresa Kenny of Chemtura, paid me an enormous compliment. She said that I was the only business consultant that her company had worked with who they said good things about for years after I was gone.
