Birol Growth Consulting Helps Jeffrey J. Morella and the Complete Captive Solution, LLC Grow Quickly and Profitably Toward Long-Term Success.
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Background:
In 1991, Jeffrey J. Morella opened Morella & Associates, A Professional Corporation and has built it into a successful practice focused on meeting the legal and tax planning needs of business owners. Over the years, Jeff’s expertise continued to grow as his clients faced increasingly sophisticated tax, insurance and business planning challenges. In 2005, Jeff began assisting his business clients in creating captive insurance companies as a cost-saving vehicle and to provide more flexibility for their companies.
Then in 2010, as Jeff watched the Federal Government’s punitive tax policies create an ever-increasing burden on the plans and dreams of small business owners, Jeff knew he had to find new ways to bring needed relief to his clients. In response to his large base of business owners’ pleas to reduce their insurance costs and preserve more income, Jeff began expanding his expertise in the captive insurance field of creating alternative insurance structures that reduce insurance costs, as well as provide opportunities for asset protection, wealth transfer, estate and tax planning, and business succession planning. These alternative insurance structures, specifically known as series captives, allowed Jeff to create, build and manage customized, independently owned Series Business Units (“SBUs”) for his clients.
Current Situation:
As Jeff Morella’s expertise and success continued to grow with Series Captives, he knew it was time to spin off this growing practice into a standalone business that could establish and run captive insurance companies under its own brand. But how could Jeff do this? After watching his competitors stumble when trying to run similar businesses as a sideline to their legal, accounting or insurance practices, he was determined to correctly and independently build his business right from the start. But in 2012, as his questions of how to price the services, establish the distribution network and build the business infrastructure mounted, Jeff knew that these decisions called for business growth expertise outside of his legal training, and he needed help now. That is when he called in Andy Birol of Birol Growth Consulting. As Jeff states, “I was impressed by Andy’s out-of-the-box thinking, as well as how quickly he built his business growth practice in Pittsburgh, so I called him in, dumped my files, business challenges and goals on his lap, sat back and watched how he would react. To my delight, Andy quickly grasped, synthesized and framed all my thoughts into four key tactics for us to build my new business.”
Birol Growth Consulting Solution:
Upon his engagement, Andy tore into Jeff’s financial analyses and interviewed his business partners and clients. Andy quickly recognized that while Jeff had created a breakthrough, proprietary approach to providing “The Complete Captive Solution” (a/k/a the new company), without an equally sophisticated approach to marketing, selling, distributing and delivering its value, Jeff could not achieve the results he expected. What specifically did Andy accomplish for Jeffrey J. Morella and his new business, The Complete Captive Solution, LLC (“CCS”)?
Andy worked with Jeff to:
1. Develop CCS’s clear go-to market strategy and its tactics, before designing the organizational chart and key company positions.
- Andy designed the needed roles and responsibilities and defined the COO position and actually identified CCS’s new COO, Mr. Shep Werth.
2. Frame CCS’s marketing challenge as a distribution problem, instead of a demand problem.
- Andy suggested Jeff take his message directly to his ultimate clients, business owners, with the support of their advisors.
3. Andy outlined key sales and marketing tactics and located the resources, people and tools needed to have it up and running in months.
- He simplified the complexity of communicating the details of what a series captive is, who it is for, and how it works best for certain business owners.
- By introducing and overseeing a professional marketing communications specialist, The Karol Company, Andy assured CCS’s messaging was simple, engaging and consistent, starting from its website through its sales collateral and finally throughout actual client proposals.
Client Results:
Within months of Jeff, Andy and Shep establishing its strategy, The Complete Captive Solution, LLC is up and running as a going concern, having secured it’s licensing, established its key business partners and landed its first 10 clients. Sales are on budget and both business owners and their advisors have recognized CCS as the premium provider and clear expert in the emerging field of series captives and how a business owner can best use them.
When Jeff Morella was asked, “What was Andy Birol’s contribution to the genesis of CCS?”, Jeff replied, “Andy Birol took my vision of offering an innovative service and guided me in turning it into a standalone business, built on a strong foundation and driven by clear business principles. This assures it becomes a very strong, profitable business with sustainable growth. Andy’s creativity, business experience and tenacity were the missing ingredients I needed as a lawyer to help me build an independent business. I would encourage any business owner and their advisors to bring Andy into the job or case. His unique style of independent thinking, business judgment and relentless follow-up make him a special breed of consultant. I am fully confident that my dream of building a standalone, sustainable business is being realized and I am proud of the results that CCS has already achieved.”
Drive Your Business Despite Obamacare: Six Steps to Avoid the Pileups.
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
It seems every decade a new “roadside accident” appears to distract you from driving your business down your highway. In the 1990’s it was Y2K, in the 2000’s it was Sarbanes-Oxley. Now, with the help of our government, lawyers, accountants and healthcare experts, Obamacare will be the epic 500-car pileup of the century. Make no mistake; I am not challenging the merits of universal healthcare; just the burden it will place on business owners everywhere.
After attending three healthcare briefings, I am convinced that in addition to the added costs of conforming to the thousands of requirements, Obamacare will require you, as a business owner, to spend time you don’t have, become expert in handling confidential employee health issues you’d rather avoid, and could cost you as much in fees as actually paying for increasing health care benefits.
Or does it have to? Here are six steps you should take to minimize your impact, leverage your predicament, or even exploit the opportunity that Obamacare places on your business.
By now, you’re seeing the impact that Obamacare will have on your choices, costs, and even the type of health benefits you must and can offer. Will you choose to pay the added price tag to your employees in salary, or to companies in premiums, or to the government in penalties? Have you budgeted for your time? For the impact your choices will have on your HR and talent management strategy? Which service providers will you have to hire and trust not just to advise you on the right health care choices but to leverage the impact these choices will have on your overall business strategy? For example:
* How will your workforce change based on what you offer your employees versus what their spouses need and obtain at their place of work?
* If you choose to buy your way out of Obamacare at a cost of $2000 per employee per year, will your workforce become younger and less experienced?
* Will you need to hire a VP of HR instead of relying on your CFO or office manager who is hard-pressed to handle benefits as they are today?
By this point you’re probably thinking up your own list of how Obamacare will change your business. Well, you can either look at your glass as half-empty or half-full. Here are six steps to confront the impact of Obamacare head-on:
1. Revisit your strategic growth plan and look at it from the perspective of how your business relies on its key players, the entire workforce and how your business fundamentally relies on people to get its work done.
How will these three factors change and what does it mean for your businesses success and your ownership plans?
2. Factor in your organization’s Best and Highest Use®. Will your company’s people continue to deliver on what it is good at doing, likes doing, and is valued by your customers and the marketplace for doing? Your firm’s investment in providing personal service will likely increase and you will need to ask your customers to pay more for it.
3. Fundamentally choose whether your company will or won’t be a net benefits provider. Family-friendly companies may want to offer full Obamacare while other companies might pay the higher wages but choose to opt out. Obamacare will impact these decisions more than you may first imagine.
4. Take a hard look at where you as the leader spend your time and energy. Imagine spending more days to reconcile the demands by:
• Meeting with your outside healthcare advisers and providers,
• Making hard decisions in terms of the above three points,
• Communicating the complexities of your decisions to employees who know less and fear more than you do, and
• Building your firm’s internal capability to oversee your Obamacare health benefit plan so it helps your employees and meets your goals.
5. Meet with and ask very hard questions of your existing health benefits providers and advisors. How are they going to step up and meet your challenges as expressed above? In my brief exposure to date, I am very concerned as to how stretched your insurance brokers, benefit providers, and financial experts are going to be as they attempt to meet the demands of their clients. Beyond the revenues they will earn, I question whether they have sufficient staffing or business plans to meet the needs of their clients themselves.
6. Finally, please accept that you and your business can only focus so much on Obamacare. Beyond your employees, you need to refocus on serving your customers, ensuring your operations are delivering and that your administration continues purchasing smart and collecting receivables. Remember, your vendors and your customers will be going through the same pain and suffering in implementing Obamacare as are you.
In the middle of WWII, President Roosevelt created Social Security and health care benefits to incent military spouses to go to work and become the “Rosie the Riveters” who ran our wartime factories. In doing so, Pres. Roosevelt also forced business owners to become healthcare experts; a job no entrepreneur ever sought. Pres. Obama has not just brought universal healthcare and its benefits to the many who need them, but has created the mechanism and requirement to socially engineer all businesses. So, to quote Bette Davis in “All About Eve”, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” Remember this as you drive your company forward down your highway; make sure it’s running well and keep your eyes on the road to avoid the pileups, traffic jams, and detours that are coming.
Running Your Business When You’re Under the Weather
In our hearts we all believe the saying, “Nobody is indispensable in a business, not even the owner.” But whether it’s a really bad flu or a broken leg (I’ve survived both) the worst part is the resulting depression as you are out of commission and recovering. So what does a business owner do when he or she is coping with the damage and the resulting blues? What should you do when you, the owner, are simply knocked off your game? Especially when there’s no one to pick up the slack?
Having survived my share of challenges and watched hundreds of business owners cope with theirs, here’s the progression of what I’ve seen happen when a business owner has a meltdown. In progression, an owner first loses his or her ability to
- Approach new prospects and close new customers, then
- Create new ideas, products and services, then
- Serve and oversee existing customers, partners and employees, then
- Focus on individual projects not involving other employees, customers or partners.
So if you are seeing this in yourself, your partner or another owner what should you/they do?
- Don’t fight it. Get the help and take the time you need to heal.
- Use the time to dream and question. If you are really knocked for a loop, your self-doubt and anxiety at some point will emerge and fester. Take advantage of the opportunity to look at all sides of what you are doing and why. Just don’t make any decisions until you are feeling better again.
- Control what you can and can’t do and know the difference. By nature we owners are control freaks. Getting sick is living proof we aren’t in charge. Rely on your faith, loved ones and the healing powers of sleep. Do nothing for a change.
- Count on your reputation, talents and value. Mortgages will get paid, payrolls will be made and most clients will accept your delays based on your good reputation. The ones who won’t aren’t worth keeping for the long term.
As you start to heal, re-engage back into your job in the reverse order of the above 4 steps. Start first with your routine, individual tasks and then progress back to creating new value and selling it to prospects. Misfortune, sickness and the general stress of running your business will eventually take its toll, throw you for a loop and require you taking some time off. Consider it a forced vacation and enjoy your time off, even it is costing you a lot in the short run.
Your Piece of the Marcellus Pie: Three Signs Your Dessert May Be Ready.
Filed under: Business Growth, Marcellus, Marcellus Shale, Pittsburgh
At this point, you know where to point your business to put food on your table. You know your core customers and target markets and can read the signs that tell they will or won’t buy more from your firm. For example if you:
- Sell technology to early-stage companies, you’ll pounce on those who get venture backing.
- Are in the building trades; you study the Dodge reports to see which owners and contractors are bidding jobs and work to get approved as a small or minority-owned business.
- Target the federal government, you are GSA and military-spec approved and watch what Congress is funding.
But now there’s all too much talk about the Marcellus and Utica Shale opportunity. If you’ll think of your core business as your “steak” consider the emerging energy sector as your “dessert.” While it won’t sustain your business it would be a very nice way to supplement your main “course.” So, what are the signs that its time to pounce? How do you approach this trillion-dollar segment especially when your services or products aren’t a neat fit with what gas drillers, landowners or energy companies buy?
First, here’s a quick review of Shale Gas 101. Watch and mimic the owners who are successfully targeting energy industry suppliers — and those who supply their suppliers, for example, trucking companies and those who supply their trucks. For more of a brush-up, visit www.marcellusshaleboom.com.
Here’s the next step: Learn the key signs when your business should pounce on its Marcellus or Utica opportunity? With gas prices down and environmental concerns up, what are your leading indicators that now’s the right time for your business to enjoy its just Marcellus desserts? Here are three signs (of many) that I’m seeing that might apply to your business.
1. Find Your Catbird Seat. Medium and small technology firms who can aggregate content and deliver it over the cloud are thriving. By exchanging information between “Tier 1’s” (CONSOL’s) and their Tier 2 and 3 suppliers, these firms are adding value in the safety, environmental, HR and any other field where compliance and record keeping is imperative.
a. Your Sign to Watch For. Watch for where and how the Tier 1’s are creating MSAs (Master Service Agreements) to manage their vendors. How can you become their go-between?
2. Hype Where’s The Pipe! Despite the apparent slowdown in drilling and gas prices, midstream pipelines are being built and furthermore, Hart Energy’s Marcellus Midstream Shows grow each time they come to Pittsburgh.
a. Your Sign To Watch For. Constructors announcing pipeline projects that move gas from local stockpiles to consumers can mean business for you. Watch what’s happening in your target markets. Pipelines create countless follow-on projects and potential work for your firm. The more piping that is sold, the more likely Tier 2 and Tier 3 shale gas-related businesses will bloom for you to approach and close.
3. This Isn’t Your Father’s Gas-Guzzler! Look who’s converting their oil or coal operations and vehicles to natural gas! And coal plants are closing or converting to LNG along with schools and residences. With impending new regulations for green trucks and the need to scrub diesel trucks, more and more gas is being used for local consumption. In rural areas, there is a kit being sold to convert a vehicle into a “hillbilly hybrid”
a. Your Sign To Watch For. Look for coal-related businesses. They need your help in “converting” their businesses to serve gas-fueled customers. Remember, conversions for consumption means the gas opportunity is growing regardless of the low price of gas because businesses are using LNG here and now.
Understanding the leading indicators of how the shale gas opportunity can benefit your business may not be critical to putting food on your table. After all, if your core business has survived this long, it’s likely to prevail regardless of whenever the local shale gas industry matures. But if you look forward to dessert, then consider put some of your “energy” into learning what signs point to your firm’s growth in the energy business.
Legacy Lessons from Rock Legends
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Recently I lived the dream of every rock music fan: For four and a half days my friends and I sailed on the MS Legend Of The Seas alongside 27 classic rock bands who played nonstop on three separate stages. And sailing with 3,400 like-minded baby-boomer fans alongside our rock heroes created an instant community relishing the soundtrack of our lives.
What did I see, listen and learn from bands whose prime passed 30 years ago? Seeing rock leaders sustain their talents and keep performing for their fans inspired me to consider how business owners can do it too. If you wonder how you can keep on thrilling your next generation of customers, who like, rock fans may not even have been alive when you first got started, here are my five lessons and implications for your business along with some great concert photos courtesy of my friend Vickie Sullivan.
1. Keep your band performing like the headliners they once were. Paul Rogers of Bad Company, Free and The Firm struts and delivers a great show as if he was at Madison Square Garden.
- Implication for you. Passionately believe in your business’s value and keep delivering it powerfully and perpetually.
2. Ensure your band always has an inspired front man. When Foreigner’s leader Mick Jones replaced his lead signer Lou Gramm with young Terry McDermott, he saved the band and added decades to its life.
- Implication for you. When your business leadership requires you to replace founding members with energetic stars, put your business’s needs ahead of its past.
3. Love your core fans and they will create the next generation. The Marshall Tucker Band are the masters at drawing their audiences into their music. After hearing their leader Doug Gray tell their story, you want to sing his band’s praises as much as their songs.
- Implication for you. Your business undoubtedly has customers who care for you above and beyond just what they buy from you. Remember them and you’ll see cheerleaders you didn’t dream you still had.
4. Assume it’s all about you and you can lose your legacy. We can accept that our idols are getting old, but cannot listen to them live in their past instead of connecting to us in our present. Watching Black Oak Arkansas’ self-indulgent behavior onstage was off-putting.
- Implication for you. Double-check your business isn’t banking on its history but is building on its current successes to serve its customers in the future.
5. Classic fans know your band; new audiences want your hits. Rolling Stones’ saxophonist Bobby Keys, surrounded himself with a fresh young band and delivered his timeless songs like “Brown Sugar,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” “Whatever Get’s You Through The Night,” and “Delta Lady” as if he was still playing with Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Joe Cocker.
- Implication for you. Project your business legacy and value forward through new channels and voices. Your voice will be recognized as the founder as it carries on loud and clear!
For many of us, the music of the 70’s and 80’s is the soundtrack of our lives. As I watched Bachman and Turner sing “Taking Care of Business” it stirred me to recall my loves, triumphs, and challenges and then to think about you, my clients and your needs. As they play their hearts out in their later years, let’s be inspired by their legends and lessons as we EXTEND our business legacies!
Marcellus Is Waiting for Your Technology
Filed under: Business Growth, Marcellus, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
With all the hoopla about the Marcellus Shale, no one has talked about the role technology has played in making Marcellus a reality. It’s time someone did.
The fact is, without technology, the opportunities Marcellus has spawned would never exist. In all the talk about the cracking technology that drives natural gas extraction, we’ve overlooked that cracking came as a monumental, technological breakthrough.
But more to the point. It’s now time to hone in on how you can inject your technology into the Marcellus opportunity. And the best way to do this is to understand Marcellus not as a single, monolithic opportunity, but as three tiers of opportunity—direct, indirect, and induced. Look at it this way and you can find a way to inject your technology into serving this emerging-energy marketplace on your terms.
Let’s first take a look at how you can target the tier-one, direct opportunity, admittedly the riskiest of these three tiers.
In a recent conversation with the heads of supply-chain management for Seneca, Chesapeake and Range Resources, they all insisted that new vendors must first address a proven need they already have and then fill out a Master Service Agreement (MSA) before they can do business in the energy sector. Generally, a Master Service Agreement specifies generic terms like payment terms, product warranties, intellectual property ownership, dispute resolution, and the like.
They further emphasized that those vendors who stand the best chance of successfully entering the Marcellus market will:
- Focus on their Best and Highest Use (BHU). This means concentrating on what they do best, what they like to do, and what a market values and pays them for.
- Build on their customer base and not try to be a total-solution provider
- Avoid trying to grow too fast, if doing so risks jeopardizing their service levels.
- Under sell and over deliver.
One of the speakers also let it slip that if you’re going to serve the energy industry, you have to be ready to work at three in the morning, if needed, and to be on call and on-demand as if you’d been hungering for months to secure the piece of business you land
This tells me that an opportunity can exist for you to be ready to breakthrough with your disruptive technology if and when another vendor slips. That’s when you’ll most likely be able to leapfrog over any existing MSA and serve a client who needs you and will work with you.
Nonetheless, if you insist on going after the big boys, then keep reminding them of FUD–Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The more you convince a purchasing agent of the downside of not solving their problem by going with your services, the more likely you are to appeal to their inclination to avoid personal career risk.
Next time, I’ll discuss the less risky opportunities in the indirect and induced tiers, where more opportunities exist for your technology.
Microseeps Enters New Markets To Spur Revenue Growth With Help From BGC
Filed under: Business Growth, Marcellus, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Background
Since Microseeps (microseeps.com) started in business in the mid 80’s, the company has specialized in providing niche, analytical services to the environmental and energy industries. These analyses have required technology and understanding not provided by the standard regulatory-compliance environmental lab.
Over the last 20 years, however, these analyses have become requisite procedures for determining biodegradation, effectiveness of remediation efforts and source-material determination. In fact, many of analytical technologies Microseeps uses have been integrated into federal and state environmental regulations.
The Challenge
Microseeps faced the challenge of bringing top-of-mind awareness about the advantages of its analyses to a broad regulatory, industrial and geographical customer base.
The Birol Growth Consulting (BGC) Solution
Andy Birol of Birol Growth Consulting (birolgrowthconsulting.com) helped Microseeps conduct field, market and internal company research and analysis. Following this, Tom Hill, Owner, launched a direct-marketing effort with online and off-line tactics to engage with state-approved laboratories across the quad-state, Marcellus shale footprint.
“This was a big step for our company to aggressively market to a specific, target prospect,” said Hill. “We’re excited to introduce this effort. Andy guided us to discover how we could follow our Best and Highest Use to enter this market, and take the right steps to grow our Marcellus business.”
As a first step, Andy helped Microseeps evaluate the current and future potential of its current and primary customer base–the environmental and energy markets. Customers in this market sector comprise other, environmental-testing labs and environmental and energy-consulting firms.
The study revealed a two-fold, market potential for Microseeps to tap, consisting of:
- Environmental-testing laboratories, with a market potential of $67.4 million, and
- Environmental and energy consultants, with a market potential of $324.8 million.
The second step involved developing a market strategy to expand use of the company’s analyses within its current client base and to broaden its industrial and geographical base.
Microseeps started by focusing on marketing to existing clients. This entailed reviewing how clients used the company’s analyses and dividing them into single-analysis users, single- project users, key labs and federal projects. The company segmented them further into users of compound specific isotope analysis (CSIA) and non-users.
Email, letter and phone dialogs, targeting 25 to 50 clients at a time, now outline the company’s services and its value. Microseeps tracks these efforts to evaluate their effectiveness and to monetize its successes.
The company also maintains an outbound, email marketing campaign to provide education and technical information to support the use of Microseeps services. This effort supports creating top-of-mind awareness of its services.
To round out these efforts, Microseeps has developed a shale-gas campaign replete with brochures, letters and emails targeted to prospects—laboratories and consultants– that service shale-gas development.
All of these campaigns will provide an opportunity to introduce chlorine, vapor and shale-gas isotope products as they come online.
Major Role for Inbound Marketing
Microseeps maintains three active websites. Microseeps.com functions as the primary site for the company and its services. Insituation.net is its technical and educational blog. And Marcellus-testing.com generates information on the shale-gas marketing website.
With the expansion of social media and growth in education and outreach to clients and prospects, Microseeps plans major updates to its websites in 2013. Website redesigns will focus on gathering information from the education and understanding activities of Microseeps services. Current outbound marketing campaigns will support these redesigns.
Results to Date
Thus far, Microseeps has taken advantage of low-hanging fruit, owing its Sales and Customer Service/Customer Care departments. In November 2012, the first, full month of its new marketing effort, the company generated over $40,000 in new business from existing clients. To date, sales from the shale-gas sector–Marcellus, Utica, Baken, Barnett and other shale plays– have resulted in sales of $100,000 annually.
These early results demonstrate that a focused effort had a hefty sales impact and gave management the confidence to start creating more proactive initiatives.
“With a great year behind us and our new Marcellus and other initiatives under way, I have high confidence that the coming years will continue to be some of Marcellus’s best,” said Hill. Andy Birol has been of great help not just in terms of developing our Marcellus initiative but also in helping us to refocus Microseeps on creating profitable growth for years to come. I look forward to a positive ROI on his and our efforts for years to come.”
Ten Real Examples of Western Pennsylvania Companies Making Money on Marcellus – Part Two
Filed under: Business Growth, Marcellus, Profitable Growth
In part one of this two-part series, I recounted how five companies have thrived and grown by serving companies that serve the Marcellus Shale industry. Read on to learn about five more.
Interstate Pipe and Supply, a wonderful Butler, Pennsylvania– based distributor of plumbing and water piping has boosted its business simply by following the growth of its non-shale-gas customers. These customers are growing because of the Marcellus boom.
For every dollar spent in the direct construction of natural gas pipelines, companies are spending many dollars to develop water and sewer systems for subdivisions and for septic, commercial and other piping infrastructure.
Interstate sets a wonderful example of how your customer’s growth can boost your own businesses profitability.
Campos, Inc., located in downtown Pittsburgh, is the region’s leading provider of consumer and B2B insight for corporate clients.
The firm has helped large companies learn about how customers and Western Pennsylvania consumers understand and feel about the shale-gas boom and the firms operating in this space.
By teaching those interested in the shale-gas boom, Campos has become the go-to expert and brings added first-hand knowledge and insight to those firms interested in entering this market space.
Constant Contact, the newsletter-based online marketing company, has made a concerted effort to bring experts such as myself in front of their audiences. As such I have learned to follow companies and do business with those specifically interested in reaching out to audiences I speak to.
Constant Contact shows how fruitful it is to provide local audiences with information on Marcellus to help them make money.
Jamestown Coatings Technologies, in Jamestown, Pennsylvania is a specialty-coatings company with technologies that attract firms whose metal products are challenged to perform to higher levels under harsh conditions found in the energy sector.
Michael Walton, the fourth generation of his family to lead the firm, has done a wonderful job of focusing and adapting to changing environments to make sure his family business continues to grow as it sees fit and to remain independent.
Multiple Western Pennsylvania chambers of commerce and small business development centers like the Sharon, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland Chambers and the Riverside Center for Innovation have invested in speakers like me to educate and inform their members.
They’ve learned that charging for educational programs reaps far more value than offering knowledge for free. Doing so ensures greater commitment of their members to growing their Marcellus businesses.
It’s easy to see that companies of all kinds are starting to grow their businesses through the Marcellus shale, even if they have no specific knowledge of the shale-gas industry.
What distinguishes them is their courage and forward-thinking approach to growing their business.
So what’s holding you back?
Run, Fix, Grow and Prepare to Sell: Your Questions to Answer to Realize Your Business’s Success
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Is your family business or privately held company doing better today, but not as well as it did before the recession? Have the low prices business buyers offered for your company derailed your retirement, exit or succession plans? You’re not alone. Many of my clients have faced similar situations and had to choose between the unacceptable and the uncertain.
They could unacceptably settle for less and sacrifice the value of their firms and the legacy of their ownership. Or, they could accept uncertainty, decide to refocus their efforts back to running, fixing, growing and preparing their businesses to be sold.
If you and your firm face this choice, and wonder what’s involved with choosing uncertainty, here are the questions my clients answered as they chose to run, fix, grow and prepare to sell their firms.
The first step to successfully reignite your company is to commit to more actively running it. Regardless of being the leader, do you need to increase your personal commitment to running your business? Given your company’s track record, or your latest take on its prognosis, what personal sacrifices must you make to reassert yourself as the leader of your business? Refocusing on running your business for further profitable growth starts with rolling up your sleeves and getting back to basics.
Does your company need some internal repair before it can really grow? Are your costs too high? Is your culture unsupportive? Are your sales, marketing or service efforts failing? What key disciplines do you need to demonstrate to show you mean business? Do you need to change your people or change people?
Does your company have the real potential to grow? Do you feel it when you watch your staff, talk to customers or see your competitors growing and taking your share? Is your firm focused on its Best and Highest Use®?
If you’re interested in creating organic growth, many ways exist to do this. The truth is, your marketplace may have punished your business but it has probably created new opportunities as well.
Do you need to reposition your company in the eyes of buyers and business brokers before you can fairly sell it? Do you need a better story to tell about the improvements you’ve made and the opportunities you can seize now?
If your company is in play or you’re getting ready to sell it, what does your organization need during the transition? Who is advocating for your company’s customers, employees, suppliers while the players are bargaining for their share of the sale?
After reviewing these questions, please know that your best decision is to make a decision. It’s now time to address the key factors to run, fix, grow and prepare your firm for sale. If you can’t see yourself doing so, then sell your business for what you can get for it. The owners I know who choose neither path suffer the most.
But if you’re ready to get down to business about your business, call me at (412) 973 2080.
Ten Real Examples of Western Pennsylvania Companies Making Money on Marcellus – Part One
Filed under: Business Growth, Marcellus, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
The only thing more authentic in Western Pennsylvania than doing business with locals is our love of hunting and the Steelers. And when it comes to something new like Marcellus and positive proof that the shale-gas boom is generating results for businesses, it’s important for me to talk about companies you know, buy from, or whose owners you live next to.
So let me invite you, in Part One of my Dynamic Business column and in Part two in the next issue to review ten of my client companies making money because of the Marcellus Shale gas boom. Doing so will reveal ten different ways to create growth for your company.
General Products and Supply Inc., based in Export, Pennsylvania and known as a custom formulator and industrial supplier of cleaning supplies, has learned how to balance its energy-based, customer growth while serving its current, non-energy customers.
Creating separate efforts to serve these two markets has given General Products the stability and independence that results from diversifying customers across two, separate markets.
First Niagara Bank recently debuted a Marcellus Shale Roundtable series featuring exclusive content in an intimate, owners-only environment. First Niagara knows that owners need help to develop and implement growth strategies with the support of a peer group and expert advice.
Microseeps, a Harmar, Pennsylvania based specialty laboratory, offers advanced tools for groundwater testing. The company has grown its business by selling to direct, indirect and Tier 3 companies.
The customers of Microseeps want to know more about the efficacy of the groundwater in the land they work on or live on. They also want to be aware of any impurities in the groundwater and the sources of these impurities.
Microseeps has done a terrific job of becoming the go-to third party by setting technical standards to help define water quality for their customers.
Menard USA, in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, operates as a specialty subcontractor that provides ground-improvement services through its continuous modulus columns. These columns enable more efficient use of steel foundations and ultimately, the land itself. 
Menard USA has branded and differentiated its business to grow its margins. Specifically, the company has developed a series of educational Geo–Seminars to demonstrate to prospects and customers how their products outperform pilings.
WK Thomas, a construction-services firm in Butler, Pennsylvania has done a remarkable job of studying customers’ buying habits and of refocusing its offerings and services to meet new demand.
WK Thomas has grown its business dramatically by understanding that their steel-building business attracts companies interested in quickly erecting buildings to establishing physical presences in Western Pennsylvania.
What sets these companies apart is the ability of their leaders to recognize the value of serving companies directly involved in Marcellus drilling.
