Beth Ewen:
bewen@upsizemag.com
dev.divistack.com
by Beth Ewen
HERE ARE THREE lessons I learned at the Upsize Business Builder Awards & Seminar in October, our annual showcase of 30 of Minnesota’s smartest small-business owners.
“If you can conserve first, you can start to accelerate from there,” says Maggy Kottman, president of AirCorps Mechanical.
When she bought the company a few years ago, she started scrutinizing every expense, right down to the toilet paper. “A case of 10 was $12, and I said, that’s just wrong,'” says Kottman.
She’s since moved to bigger game, buying global positioning systems and gas credit cards for her company’s technicians, in order to increase dispatching efficiencies. She did the analysis, finding that if she shaved just five minutes per day from each technician’s time, the system would pay for itself in nine months.
The company did much better, actually saving 15 minutes per day per technician, on 60 percent of the company’s fleet, or $39,000 per year. For a small company, Kottman says, such savings can make the difference between generating profits and not.
The lesson: Little things can add up to a lot. “I tried to put together a mosaic of programs that put together would make a difference,” Kottman says.
“Little things make a big difference” is actually the slogan that Big Ink Display Graphics adopted. It’s a large-format digital printer with 22 employees, whose CEO, Tom Trutna, formed a committee of employees to initially reduce waste.
“We started lean manufacturing methods to get the waste out of the manufacturing stream,” Trutna says. “I met a company that literally got rid of their Dumpster, and I thought if they can do it, so can we.
“So we created an internal team called the ‘green team.’ We started at the front door and through our manufacturing process and ended up at the Dumpster.
“We’re recycling literally tons every month and we’ve gotten interest from customers and employees,” Trutna says. After a year of declining revenue in a tough industry, Big Ink is now growing again.
The lesson: Internal improvements can lead to revenue gains, when they’re in an area that puts your company at the front edge of a hot topic. “It happened a little bit by accident,” Trutna says.
John Risdall, founder of Risdall Marketing Group, makes it sounds simple. “I’m going to talk about liquidity, liquidity, liquidity,” he says. “What do you do to increase liquidity? Get lots of new clients, and make them all happy. We get about a dozen new clients every month.”
But it turns out there’s a method behind his statement. “We have an insanely flat structure,” Risdall says, with 14 presidents at the agency. “Because if you’re the president you have a lot more traction in the marketplace.”
He also hammers home a specific revenue number that the company needs to hit, to accommodate all that growth in employee numbers. “We’ve been growing so fast-our group needs to do double what it did a year ago. We share it every week,” he says about the revenue goal.
The lesson: Relentless focus on a simple message is an effective way to drive growth. “When we get a new client we assemble a team around it,” Risdall says.
Thanks to these business owners for sharing their best practices. For more, read complete coverage of this year’s event and all those ideas, the centerpiece of this issue.
