How I Use Requisite Organization Principles in My Consulting Practice

Speaker A My consulting practice has changed somewhat over the last eleven years that I've been consulting. And it started off with Steve Flamet, working on talent pool systems for very large companies, and the manager once removed program as well. I did work with Ken Shepard as well, doing strategic plans, working with a large pulp and paper company, assessing hundreds of their people, training for records organization, running three day workshops, restructuring some of their divisions, doing strategic plans for some of their divisions. And I guess my career is moving. What I like to do is to find ways for a company to grow by 25% within one year, even in a flat market. This is what I like doing. So my role right now, I tend to work with smaller presidents, companies under 100 million in size. And by putting in all this arsenal, the strategic planning, the design, the assessment, the structure, some of the HR change program, the performance management, doing sales retreats as well, so that the salespeople understand the strategy and understand how to sell. And when you put all this together, we've had incredible changes happen in these companies where they will grow by 25% or 30% one year after the event. These presidents are very happy when this occurs. For an example, I can't give you the name of the company, but a company grew by $6 million in one year and their margins were 25%. So the owner of this company, it's in the $30 million area, actually made $1.5 million extra on those margins. And that's a lot of money. On top of that, he not only grew sales, but he picked up two points of margins. And this is a company where we did all the work, starting from the strategy to the sales team and so forth. So you can see the power when you put request in with a good strategy, good HR programs, change program, good recruiting, assessing people for cognitive ability, new structure and so forth. Very powerful. And I prefer the smaller companies under 100 million because you can move them faster, you can see the results right away. The reason I like working with smaller companies with 50 to 1000 employees is that the owner or president usually has a longer time span. He's not dictated by corporate office of getting the results in on a quarterly basis and not spend money and so forth. So what we do is work with the owner and his team. We can put them all in one room and spend three and a half day on the strategic planning retreat. Also do the design. We can bring in all a sales team. They may have 15 salespeople or 20 salespeople. So we can do a sales retreat quite easily, and again, get these concepts across. And once the president who's an owner sees what's happening, they're incredible customers. They're the best clients you can have. They'll treat you like royalty. They will try to understand more and more what Requisite is all about. So it makes it a lot fun. If you're working with a larger billion dollar client, it's usually a very specific type of project, like help us assess our talent or put in a talent pool system. And whereas these are still complex, it's not as much fun as working with a small business, small to medium sized business. Okay. One concern I have for Canada is that our governments have allowed our large global companies to disappear. They've all been bought out. Companies like Inco, which was a very large nickel mine company. Niranda Falkerbridge, was bought as well. Stelcor, a large steel mill, DEFASCO, another large steel mill in our resource sector. Alcan, which is a tremendous aluminum company, has been bought out by Rio Tinto, Montreal, which used to be the Polton paper capital of the world. Most of the head offices have been bought out by either American or European pulp and paper companies. So again, hundreds and hundreds of executive jobs have disappeared from the pulp and paper industry. We've just lost Nortel, which was one of the better companies for telecommunications and with tremendous R and D. So if I have a concern for Canada is that our Stratum Seven organization are disappearing, which means that these corporate jobs that pay a lot of money have all disappeared. And if you lose those companies, the R and D goes down because the R and D gets done with the acquirer. I'm quite concerned, maybe HR or the CEOs and the government need to look at what's happening to Canada, how to grow these companies. Again, we have a few companies left, like Bobradier and Rim, the BlackBerry company. But we've lost tremendous amount of companies that have been around for 70, 80 years, multibillion dollar companies. What that means for consulting is that you have to focus in on smaller companies and help them grow in order to replicate these large companies. So it's quite a challenge. But I think Canadians are quite entrepreneurial, and they can pick up on these concepts like Requisite, and these are the things that will bring companies back up to Stratum Six and Seven. So as a consultant, I'm working with level four and five, six companies and having success of growing them by 25% a year. So hopefully in maybe ten or twelve years, they're getting into the billion dollar range. You Sam.