How renewing trust between founder and employees led to a business turn-around

“He is lying!” – the team’s response was spontaneous. As part of the first phase of our engagement, we asked the team on why they thought their company was making a loss. Such was the lack of trust that the employees were convinced that the MD was lying. “He is claiming that we are making a loss just so that he does not have to pay us a bonus or increment!” This was a family-run distribution company. The founder MD, a well-intentioned honest man, was disillusioned! Long pending outstanding amounts from customers and the complete indifference of his team in following up and collecting payments on time was a major reason for the financial trouble the company was in. But the team had no clue that this was the case.

After a few foundational steps to create a fertile ground, we implemented the #Semcostyle practice of #TeachThemTheNumbers. The financial reports of the company were represented in an easy-to-understand, simple format. Every team member, including the delivery boy, was educated on basics of finance such as the cost of capital in a series of short and interesting workshops with simple everyday analogies. Another Semcostyle practice put in motion was #RhythmOfGovernance. As part of this, a weekly meeting was held where the finance head shared the week’s business performance, including sales numbers as well as liabilities. Team members were encouraged to ask questions and they were answered transparently.

These practices broke perceptions the team had about the financial health of the company. The team realised the importance of timely collection of outstanding amounts. The diligence of constant follow-up with customers and collecting due payments increased significantly. By structuring the team around customers instead of functions and implementing several other Semcostyle practices such as #RewardForResults, #MeetTrackAndChallenge, trust was rebuilt between the founder and the employees.

Employees understanding of the business increased manifold and it was just a matter of months before the company moved out of the red and started making profits.

#ShapingTheFutureOfWork #DrivingBusinessResults #HumanCentric

To learn more about how we help organisations become self-managed, resilient and thus future-ready, click here.

Trichy lies in the centre of Tamil Nadu, so why do we have our warehouse in Chennai, which is the northernmost tip of the state?”
That was the question posed by a young delivery boy in one of the weekly business review meetings of our client.

Our client, a fast-growing rural e-commerce company with operations in tens of thousands of villages across the country, engaged us when they found their decision-making and growth slowing down as they tried to scale rapidly. While ownership levels and growth were high in the early days of the company, things started to stall as they grew to 300+ employees. Functional siloes crept in. Collaboration reduced. Leaders were dragged into solving tactical issues daily.

As part of the engagement, we introduced various practices such as creating cross-functional teams around customers, defining, and implementing a rhythm of governance, identifying Key Performance Measures, simplifying business reports, practicing unfiltered transparency, teaching them the numbers, reducing power distances between and within functions and many more.

A pilot cross-functional team was created for the region of Tamil Nadu comprising of members from all the functions and levels. This team was trained on the basics of self-management and equipped with business reports they understood. The CEO outlined three key performance measures for the team, one of which was Order to Cash cycle time. Not surprisingly, teams on the field were not aware of these measures and their importance to the business until then.

In one of the weekly business review meetings among the cross-functional team, a delivery boy came up with the idea of shifting the Tamil Nadu warehouse from Chennai to Trichy given its geographical location in the state to reduce the average delivery time and thereby improving the order to cash cycle time. The empowered team saw the merit in the idea and quickly implemented the same. The impact on the O2C cycle time was immediate.

This is just one of the many ideas the team came up with and implemented leading to commendable progress towards the key performance measures. All this without the intervention of leadership!!

#ShapingTheFutureOfWork #DrivingBusinessResults #HumanCentric

To learn more about how we help organisations become self-managed, resilient and thus future-ready, click here.