Overview of the Situation
A healthcare solutions business had recently been taken over by a person in their first role as a business owner. They wanted to make an impact and start to grow the operation, making it more successful, both in terms of turnover and profit. They knew that they had a good proposition and product portfolio, but they were not one of the larger companies in their sector and hadn’t had the opportunity to scale before.
The Problem They Faced
The director had real passion to succeed but was both inexperienced and nervous to make significant decisions to move her business to where she wanted it to be. This was somewhat down to imposter syndrome but was also due to her background as an employee rather than as a business owner. Technically, the business was structured correctly, but it needs to grow rapidly to ensure that the income of the business owner (as well as the company profits) was aligned to her needs.
The Causes of the Problem
The biggest challenge for the business owner was the leap to make significant commercial and operational decisions for fear of them not being correct or effective. There was a clear desire but a lack of knowledge as to the right things to do in terms of scaling a business.
The Impact of the Problem
The business had previously, before purchase, turned over around three times the revenue that it did at the time of sale, and had declined mainly due to the previous owner’s lack of foresight in the marketplace. Whilst it could be said that there was only one direction the business could go, there were some huge steps, both financially and professionally that the business had to manoeuvre for it to achieve the goals the director had laid down.
The Promise / Plan
Our plan with the client was to:
- Identify the current service portfolio, and its individual profitability
- Create a marketing strategy that would be implemented across both the short- and medium-term duration
- Review the market to understand what the opportunity was and how competitors were capitalising
- Define the pricing strategy that optimised margins, without being the most expensive in the marketplace
- Deliver ongoing strategy to reduce the workload impact of increased customers on the team through automation
- Get the business ready to tender for seven-figure contracts
The Outcome
The business was extremely pleased with the programme as we:
- Helped them increase their monthly sales volume by 51%
- Increased their annual turnover from £85k to £1.3m
- Maintained product margins, but increased overall net margin by around £330k
- Secured several smaller tenders to build heritage and connection to larger companies
- Created a customer journey programme to enable speed and care for clients without a large impact on resource cost
