MSP 501 Profile: Guardian Computer on What Vendors Should Do, But Don’t
… an overworked workforce later, requiring overtime to make up for these losses. This can put additional strain on transportation, when required, which has often faced its own issues with disruption during the pandemic.
In the midst of these new challenges, it becomes easy to allow customer communication to fall by the wayside. But offering proper customer relations, expectations and support has never been more critical.
If products or services face delays, vendors need to spend additional time and effort communicating with customers about those delays. That’s in addition to finding ways to make things right. This allows us, in turn, to communicate with our customers about the products, services and solutions we can offer to address challenges they are facing.
Getting a quick response from vendors and keeping the ball rolling, therefore, has been the biggest item on our wish list during this global crisis.
CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2019? How did it do so?
JP: After participating in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program, we recognized that improving our business practices and standards would provide the biggest impact for our company in 2019 and beyond. As a result, in mid-2018, we decided to hire our first C-level process improvement manager.
As a small business, this was a major decision. Without significant growth or an increase in profit margin, the added cost of an FTE would have a negative impact on our bottom line. We knew it would be a challenge to maintain our profit margin at the beginning of developing and implementing process changes.
Although temporary, we initially experienced decreases in our efficiency. Building the confidence and trust of our workforce was a critical step. Our core message was that efficiency and productivity gains would increase profits, and we had no intentions of reducing our workforce. Change is difficult, and we needed 100% cooperation and buy-in from the team to succeed.
Our goals were to increase productivity enough to improve our profit margin by 5% and to have the capacity to add 25% customer growth. We took a hit in billable hours in the fourth quarter of 2018 as we began this endeavor. But in 2019, we were able to reap the benefits of our improved processes and documentation. We also focused on modifying our alert system to make it more efficient with less “noise.”
In the end, we exceeded our goals. That year, we were chosen as one of the top thirty-two 2019 Louisiana Growth Leaders by the Louisiana Economic Development agency.
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