Boost Growth at Industrial Service Acquisitions
June 06, 2023
by a searcher from IESE Business School in Toronto, ON, Canada
I want to speak with leaders at acquired industrial service businesses and learn how you will boost growth. Are you considering performance pay or tweaking variable compensation tied to corporate objectives? Are you considering new technology to align corporate goals with front-line workers? If so, how are you approaching the problem? What tools are you exploring?
from Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, USA
What peaks my interest is growth & strategy. We are conservatively planning to Triple top line in the next 5 years (very reasonable for our situation), by executing a few initiatives.
The biggest tools I would say is building out a learning management system (LMS). Focused on field employees, but will eventually include all HQ staff. We have created an Employee Development Investment Fund that aligns and retains field staff. The fund is similar to corporate structures where they can pull out 1/3rd vested, and it covers other initiatives to build teamwork, but more importantly to build strong leadership internally. I am actually completing the bonus incentive structure for the General Manager this week, but that is tied today to a gross profit baseline, a safety KPI, and the bulk of the bonus can be maximized with the build out of the Operations Manual. Our sales growth involves a new account-based marketing and building out a sales team. We have maintained an internal manual for the last 30 years of all estimating and job processes that has every metric we can think of. We have been working on transferring this to a CPQ with DealHub, but after a few months of complications, we are now building internally as an Excel SQL database. It is very manual at the moment.
We have had some success and failures implementing tech, I can speak more on a call if interested.
I would say the LMS is really the key though to the long term growth as in this industry we find it hard to source, recruit, train, and retain skilled and reliable labor. The main reason we have not grown is we max out at capacity. Never have had a ceiling on sales due to market or competition. This LMS goes for Sales/Estimator rep recruiting as well, as our niche requires knowledgeable problem solving skills with custom job/services. I have found very similar things with other owners I speak to that are trying to sell. their industrial service businesses.
in Portland, OR, USA
Ensuring adherence to basic yet fundamental sales principles is paramount. Pay meticulous attention to cultivating relationships, maintaining a consistent communication cadence, and diligent follow-up – all are vital components in managing a pipeline with a prolonged sales cycle.
This process can be effectively executed by harnessing the power of a small, trusted, and financially viable advisory group. The idea is to foster a system-centric approach rather than depending on the arrival of a "miraculous" Chief Revenue Officer or VP of Sales. Time and again, it has been proven that sustainable success is built on robust systems rather than transient heroics.