Overview of the Situation
The client was a small IT development business, with several long-term clients, but limited business growth over the past few years. They had been involved with several pitches over the past eighteen months without a lot of success. The engagement with us came from the fact that they didn’t know why they weren’t being successful in the recent pitches and didn’t have any feedback as to why they had not won any of the business.
The Problem They Faced
The business needed to grow as they had too much reliance on their existing customer base, who weren’t investing any more than they had in the previous five years. They needed new clients, and to diversify somewhat, within the same industry to extend their service portfolio.
The Causes of the Problem
The biggest challenge the company faced was that the owner and key drive to the growth was working too much on servicing clients by doing a lot of the work themselves. Whilst the clients liked that, this stopped the owner from being able to strategically position the business for new clients. The owner had fallen into a trap of not being able to step back and see how to present the service offering to new inbound prospects.
The Impact of the Problem
There was severe danger in the business as a cancelling client would have had significant impact on the revenue of the business, and whilst that may not have happened, the business needed to spread the risk of their client contracts as wide as possible to not be reliant on one or two existing customers.
The Promise / Plan
Our solutions were designed to:
- Identify what the business was good at
- Establish where the business wanted to go
- Build a realistic model, that could be presented to prospects, to engage them as new customers
- Automate the core client base work as much as possible
The Outcome
For the project, we delivered:
- A full business insight review which highlighted the gaps and the opportunities
- A rounded business presentation that could be edited and used to secure more business
- Strategic skills training with the business owner to enable him to step back more from the day-to-day operations
- The mentoring to support the business secure two new contracts, both worth more than £100,000
“We knew we needed to do something to help us stablise the business and start to grow, and I think we always knew what we needed to do. However with GainMore’s support we were able to unlock the specific tasks and processes and do them in such a way that enabled us to get the success we thought was possible. Clearly being able to view our business independently and offer solid, realistic and commercially-focused advice is how as a partnership, we have been able to increase our turnover.”
