Making More Money (Workbook): Simple Strategies for Improving Cash Flow and Profitability

Making More Money
Simple Strategies for Improving Cash Flow and Profitability
Woodland Park Research Group, LLC
PO Box 122, Woodland Park, CO 80866
Abstract
This workbook accompanies the workshop and is designed to help you identify an assortment of
strategic and tactical opportunities for improving your business. The exercises in this workbook
will help you discover a number of specific ways that you can improve your organization’s
financial success.

© 2014 All Rights Reserved. 1
Making More Money
Thank you for taking time to attend this workshop. By now you are already thinking about a number of
ideas that came to mind during the presentation. The following exercises will revisit the topics from class
and give you the opportunity to apply those topics to your particular business situation.
Improvement is about helping you make more money—it’s not about change for the sake of change. Many
organizations try to apply the tools of improvement to things that don’t make a difference—like shuffling
deck chairs on a sinking ship. Real improvement gets to the root of organizational problems and addresses
those problems with lasting solutions.
The principles of improvement apply to every kind of organization—regardless of size or structure. There
is no organization anywhere which can’t benefit from improvement. As my late friend and mentor Bill
Conway used to wryly say, “The normal state of everything is all screwed up.” This statement is
axiomatically true because we tend to accept “screwed up” as the normal state of things. But it doesn’t
have to be that way.
Finding waste usually involves a significant change in mindset—and a willingness to question the way we
do things now. To paraphrase a famous quote from Einstein, we can’t solve our problems without first
changing the way we think. Or to use Bill Conway’s expression, we can’t do improvement unless we “get
our squash right.” With that in mind, the exercises in this workbook are designed to help you uncover
areas where significant improvement is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. You may find
opportunity in places you never would have expected.
To get the most out of these exercises, my one word of advice is take your time. Give yourself time to
think about your business in a different way, and continue to peel back the layers of the onion as you
begin to see waste and opportunity in a new way.
Let’s get started!
J.R. Dickens

EXERCISE 1: Seeing waste that’s always been there
Answer the following questions:
1. How much time do you spend doing things over because they weren’t done right the first time? What
specific forms of rework are recurring problems?
2. Value-added work is defined as the work the customer is paying you to do, provided that you do it right
the first time. What other kinds of work (besides rework) are non-value-added? How much time/cost do
these forms of work absorb?
3. The next question is the most broad in scope for identifying waste: What is the difference between the
way things are now, and the way things would be if everything was right?

EXERCISE 2: Product and process defects
Defects and errors are the primary source of rework. The following questions will help you begin to
identify sources.
1. Make a list of the most common types of defects and/or errors that occur in your product and/or
process. At what point in the process are these defects/errors showing up?
2. How do you currently find defects/errors? What happens if defects/errors escape your attention and
end up in the hands of the customer?
3. How well have you identified your customers’ requirements and integrated these requirements into
your processes in a way that is measurable?

EXERCISE 3: Process speed
Many businesses (especially manufacturing businesses) have a tendency to produce too much, too soon.
The following questions will help you identify areas where you may be making the right thing at the wrong
time or in the wrong amount.
1. Inventory in any form is a sign of broken process. Look at the amount of inventory in your pipeline—
raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods—and quantify these in terms of dollars. This is money
that is not working for your company. What can you do to shorten the “cycle time” of your process?
Usually this will involve shortening the lead time for incoming materials and reducing the delivery time of
finished goods.
2. Similarly, look at the time lag between your performance of a service and the income generated by that
service. How much money are you waiting to collect at any point in time? What steps can you take to
shorten the time required to deliver/complete the service and collect payment?
3. Think about how you measure “efficiency.” In most organizations, the idea of efficiency is having all
resources (e.g., people and machines) working at the fastest possible pace. This approach creates more
than what is needed at any point in time, and consumes resources that could be used to provide only
what is needed at that moment. What steps could you take to more closely align today’s work with today’s
demand?

EXERCISE 4: Building relationships through integrity
Trust is the key to building relationships, and all organizations depend upon trust to function effectively.
The key to building trust is to focus on the needs of others. In relation to customers, creating engagement
can be illustrated with the following steps:
 Make it friendly
 Gather information
 Find the customer’s problem and solve it
 Connect...
 ...and reconnect
1. Who is your customer? What are the identifiable traits of your customer? Where can you go to engage
your customer (e.g., media channels, community events, etc.)?
2. What problem are you trying to solve for your customer? How do you solve that problem better than
anyone else?
3. More and more people turn to the internet to answer their questions. How can you use content
marketing (i.e., your expertise) to answer questions the customer may have about the problem they are
trying to solve? (Examples include company website, blog, social media channels, print articles, email
newsletters, etc.)

EXERCISE 5: Innovation
Innovation is, without a doubt, one of the keys to long-term success. Innovation is not about gadgets—it
is about anticipating and driving change that reflects the changing environment you work in. No business
can keep everything the same and continue to be successful forever. Your ability to create a flexible
(“change-ready”) organization will help position you for long-term success, even when you cannot
accurately predict the future.
1. Your assumptions determine your view of reality. What are the assumptions you make about your
business, your customers, your competition? What are the “rules” of the game? Think about what
someone has to “learn” when they are new to your business or industry. This helps us uncover the rules.
Now start asking “why?” to test these rules and assumptions. What would happen if one of your
competitors decided to break the rules? How would that “change the game”?
2. How would an outsider see your situation? Think as if you had no preconceived ideas about your type
of business. What kinds of practices and procedures would you question? What is going on that wouldn’t
make any sense at all to someone on the outside looking in?
3. Sacred cows are policies and procedures that served a purpose at one time or another but have become
obsolete and cannot be questioned. What are the sacred cows in your business/industry?

EXERCISE 6: SWOT/T
This exercise pulls together a number of the concepts from earlier exercises by looking inside as well as
outside your organization, while taking into consideration trends that may impact your business.
1. What are your strengths—the things you do now, and do well? What one thing do you do better than
anyone else in the world? How can you use your greatest strength as a differentiator for building brand
awareness?
2. What are your weaknesses—the things you do now, and do poorly? Which of these are critical to your
success? Which can you outsource to someone for whom it is a strength?
3. What are the opportunities for your business—things you are not doing now, but could benefit from
doing in the future? As an example, think in terms of how you might combine products and services in a
way that allows you to gain more business from existing customers.
4. What are the threats to your business—outside conditions that pose an imminent danger to your
success? Examples include economic conditions, competition, technology, seasonality, and business
interruptions.
5. What are the external trends that might present either opportunities or threats to your business? What
is the general trend of the market in your line of business? How are customer needs/wants changing?
How are needs/wants likely to change in the future?

About J.R. Dickens and Woodland Park Research Group, LLC
I enjoy looking for ways to make things better—which often involves asking lots of questions about the
way things are done now. Each of us operates with an assortment of assumptions about the way things
are, which blinds us to the possibilities that lie just beyond the edge of our assumptions. The longer we
do things a certain way, the higher the probability that we can discover a better way. The process is
ongoing, or else complacency sets in, followed by stagnation. Mediocrity becomes the enemy of
excellence.
My company is built at the intersection of three critical components that every business depends upon:
Excellence, Integrity, and Innovation. Excellence embodies the idea of providing the right products and
services to the right customers in the right place at the right time and the right price. Integrity embodies
the idea of thinking, speaking, and acting according to the principle of building relationships by serving
the needs of others. Innovation embodies the idea of looking past today in order to anticipate the future—
and then taking steps to create the future.
Ultimately, success is not bound up in gadgets—it’s bound up in the way we think about our businesses.
My goal is to help you think differently about your business.
Wishing you the best of success,
J.R. Dickens, CEO
www.woodlandparkresearch.com

Making More Money (Workbook): Simple Strategies for Improving Cash Flow and Profitability

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked (11)

Similar to Making More Money (Workbook): Simple Strategies for Improving Cash Flow and Profitability (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Making More Money (Workbook): Simple Strategies for Improving Cash Flow and Profitability