Growing your staff is not something you learn how to do in school. Most small business owners have to learn as they go. This is no easy feat and those first few hires are usually born out of necessity. When your company is growing, your hiring approach is to add staff as you have need. If you are having trouble getting brand recognition, you hire someone to do marketing. If you can’t keep up with orders, you bring on operations help. If you need more sales, you hire a salesperson. This is totally normal. But pretty soon your team is small group of people with a mash-up of different skill sets. There aren’t clear roles of who is doing what as everyone’s position has developed around … [Read more...]
Case Studies on People
Here are Case Studies from Anchor Advisors helping clients improve their management and teams to help them grow. Go back to Case Studies »
Reducing Employee Turnover in a Digital Marketing (SEO) Agency
Employee retention rate is a critical measure in any business. While turnover is normal, there comes a point where losing too much of your talent to other companies should cause concern. Furthermore, even if you realize that your retention rate is far lower than it should be, how do you go about fixing it? Diagnosing what is causing your turnover is no easy feat. Challenge: George and Taylor are partners running a small digital marketing & SEO agency, Digital Third Coast. They realized that their employee turnover was too high and it was costing them. George and Taylor would attract talent and begin to build a strong team with excellent training in digital skills. But just a … [Read more...]
Managing the chaos of growth | Marketing Agency Case Study
You’ve achieved almost everything you dreamed of... Things have really taken off in your business. You land new clients regularly, referrals are coming in, and your revenue is increasing. You’re able to hire and you lead a small team of talent to help manage your growing client base. Everything should be great! But reality sets in. Despite the increase in clients, your profit margins aren’t matching. You can’t afford to bring on more talent to help with the extra workload, but you can’t put it all on the team you have. So you work longer and longer days; twelve hours at the office have become your norm, six, even seven days a week. With each new client, that workload increases, and … [Read more...]
Updating Marketing Strategies and Turning Around a Team | Leadership Transition Case Study
When the digital marketing age is moving faster than you and your team can adapt, how do you know what needs change in order to remain competitive? Paul Metz, Executive Vice President and Partner of C+R Research knew that their marketing strategy needed drastic updates as bigger and better projects were seemingly out of grasp. He knew they were missing critical pieces of the digital marketing puzzle that could take the firm to the next level, but wasn’t sure where to start. Challenge: Because C+R Research had earned a great reputation over its 50 year history they had survived and grown through just referrals and reputation. Yet the partners were worried; progress and growth was not … [Read more...]
Redesigning A Company’s Infrastructure
Mary Cook & Associates was founded in 1986 to provide design service to the builder/developer, golf/resort and senior housing industries. The Chicago-based firm serves clients from around the country. Challenge For two decades, Mary Cook & Associates experienced "unprecedented growth," largely due to a demand for its services in the residential housing industry, says founder and owner Mary Cook. And although the company was able to meet the demand and deliver quality work for many years, there was a problem lurking under the surface, she said. "I didn't invest the time and money in important things like hiring and training, so I was always struggling with personnel issues and … [Read more...]
No Time to Find the Right Employees
Recycling Services (RSI) develops, implements and services office paper recycling programs in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Capitalized with $10,000 in 1984, David Levinson and Michael Finn formed the company to respond to the growing solid waste problem in Illinois by making recycling services available to businesses and the general public. Now in its 25th year, Recycling Services operates a 40,000 square-foot recycling plant located on the southwest side of Chicago, where it processes over 9,000 tons of secondary fiber per month. The company employs 50 people. Challenge As a growing company, RSI needed to hire new staff members to handle existing business as well as to … [Read more...]
Creating the Long-term Plan: Getting There
Background Vox is a customer-experience consulting firm based in Chicago. Using its trademarked CustomerspectiveTM Process, Vox helps its clients provide a comprehensive and integrated "Customer Experience" that drives retention, cross-sales, referrals and bottom-line results dramatically higher. Vox started in 1997 as a marketing communications agency but over time evolved into a firm that focuses primarily on customer retention, an important but often overlooked area in many service-oriented businesses. Vox created a niche in the Chicago market as being "the voice of the customer experience" and quickly found themselves in high demand among Fortune 500 companies. Challenges The … [Read more...]
Regaining Control
The owner of this contracting business had over 25 years of experience, but this year things seemed to be slipping behind. He was spending all his time reacting, putting out fires with customers, employees, vendors, but no time building his business. In fact his crews were all under manned because he just hadn't had time to do any recruiting. The highest priority was staffing, we needed people on the jobs so that the projects wouldn't fall behind. Through a combination of outsourced staffing and a streamlined hiring process he was up to full strength within a month. His sales people were relived and had renewed confidence that the company could deliver work on time. We restarted long … [Read more...]