Improving the Bottom Line by £400K in 8 Months

Our client

A privately owned Passive Fire Protection Compliance company turning over £3m+ recognised it was under-performing in a busy sector and sought support to achieve its potential.

The Challenge

Following a full strategic review, Rathbone Results identified several areas for improvement:

• Company structure – to align people, accountability and improve effectiveness.
• Company operations - efficiency controls required to improve productivity.
• Output – the margin of delivered v sold products and services needed improving.
• Pricing – insufficient profit margins to allow for growth.

How we Helped address the challenge

• Rathbone Results carried out a full strategic review across all departments and functions of the business to get an understanding of where weaknesses lay, and improvements could be made.
• This resulted in a detailed Action Plan, identifying key areas for improvement and development in the short to medium term, including:

Finance

• Review of Business fundamentals, including restructure of financial information to provide greater visibility and focus on turnover targets, profitability, and overhead control.
• Establishment of financial and performance benchmarks, to develop and implement monthly financial reporting.

Pricing/profit

• Redefinition of cost structure and the application of a relevant gross profit to achieve net profit goals.
• Standardisation of project costing plus pricing increase to achieve higher margins, supported by streamlining client proposals and service delivery processes.

Sales

• A proactive key account development strategy to gain clarity over the sales pipeline, key accounts and after sales service levels.

Team

• Reviewed, defined, and implemented restructure of business to achieve goals set.
• Provided mentoring for Directors and managers to take more initiative, be more accountable for their parts of the business, have greater oversight across the whole business and work more collaboratively as a team.

The results

• Improving the bottom-line by 400k net profit.
• Putting into place a capable management team that enables the owners to be less involved in the day-to-day business.
• Improving business controls and key processes to give more sustainable future profits.

Conclusion

This quick action resulted in a speedy uptick in revenue, both gross and net margins, putting the business in a strong position for the next phase of growth.

If you are ready to take the next step in unlocking your business potential please get in touch