Profit IdeasAbout Evergreen Consulting II
Brent Grover, President — Evergreen Consulting
• competitive strategy • 2020 Vision • getting started • profit strategy • opinion / commentary • expert interview • management strategies • pricing strategies • industry perspective • Wholesale Distribution Industry • new opportunities for distribution industry
I recently had a chance to sit down with a business friend and colleague, Brent Grover from Evergreen Consulting. Brent is an expert on wholesale distribution who ran one of the most successful companies in his sector when he was younger. He's since then spent the last decade helping other companies become as successful as he was, or in some cases, even more so.
"A lot of the wholesale distribution companies that we talk to are already pretty successful," Brent explained "They are often, but not always, family-owned businesses. However, these usually are companies that, as Jim Collins would say, are good, but maybe they have the potential to be great."
I learned that Evergreen Consulting's process with their clients begins by getting some financial information, doing some comparisons, benchmarks, and so on, to see how the client has done over the years and how they're doing compared to their competition and peers. The conversation often starts with strategy: what the client really wants, where they want to be five years from now or ten years from now, what the owner wants to accomplish during his/her lifetime, and so on, before finally talking about return on investment.
"One example of a real company where we found opportunities to improve the margins," Brent explained, "involved a seemingly tough situation because one of their businesses was a national contract business, and they couldn't raise the price in a very competitive market, and so on. But what we found was that the client wasn't treating freight as a profit center. As a result, they were losing a lot of money on freight when they could have actually been making a profit."
"Freight is just another product. Another example: They did repairs and maintenance on equipment and some light manufacturing. They didn't properly account for the price on their labor, so they were giving away labor, which is another product as well. We also suggested the possibility of add-on charges on invoices, which the client had been convinced he couldn't do. Sometimes you need an outsider to tell you, 'A lot of people do this, and if we show you how, you could do this, too.'"
"Evergreen maintains an ongoing relationship with its clients," Brent went on to say. "We want our efforts to be sustainable, something that is built on and continuously improved. We look at ourselves as consultants and as being informal members of our client's board of directors. We want to teach our clients how to do these things for themselves so they can make their business stronger. If they still need help, and as long as we can add value, we look for a lifetime relationship with them."
I've got to say that the results that we see in Evergreen Consulting's clients are absolutely superb, so I've been delighted to be able to watch over what Evergreen has been doing. The practice of leaving behind people who are capable at maintaining and growing the business based on knowledge that you shared and conveyed to them seems like a solid strategy for success and one that other consultants should hope to emulate.
For more information about Brent Grover, visit: www.evergreenconsultingllc.com