Our Helping Hand Initiative
At Redflank we have a sincere desire to help businesses improve. On billable engagements, this typically means helping a large corporate deliver a critical project. Through our Helping Hand initiative though, us Redflankers are only too happy to volunteer to help deal with the typical issues that dog the smaller business. And what a pleasure and a privilege it is to provide such assistance to small to medium businesses. Anyone who's spent any time with a smaller enterprise will understand how uplifting it is to experience first hand the passion and energy of small business owners and managers.
Making a difference to smaller businesses
We take great pride in the simple, practical assistance we provide to small business owners through our Helping Hand initiative. What this means is that we offer our services free of charge to small businesses struggling to meet their revenue or profitability targets. We sit down with small business owners and managers, working with them to figure out what drives their business, and where things may be falling apart. It's really gratifying applying our business understanding and change delivery skills to help come up with pragmatic solutions that can be implemented simply and effectively. In the end, we hope the small business owner or manager is able to benefit from better business performance. And for us at Redflank, it's an opportunity to make a difference where South African business needs it most. Not to mention the opportunity to refine our diagnostic and strategy project offerings to be even more simply and practically effective.
We love to hear from you
If you are the owner/ manager of a small to medium business and you would like Redflank to help you address revenue or profitability issues, drop us an email at HelpingHand@Redflank.com, providing some background on your business and the issues you are experiencing.
Success stories
A couple of our Helping Hand success stories are included below.
Lauren Michelle
When we first met Lauren Stewart and Michelle Peters, we just couldn't get over how passionate they were about their business. Walking through the Lauren Michelle showroom and workshop in Edenvale, it was really gratifying to hear the excitement in Lauren's voice as she walked us through some sample Lauren Michelle jewellery pieces, or to see the passion with which Michelle approached exciting her customers about corporate gift possibilities. It was easy to buy into the potential underpinning this small jewellery manufacturing business, making the most amazing and unique jewellery and corporate gifts incorporating Swarovski crystals.Lauren Michelle asked us to focus on how we could help identify ways to boost sales and to improve profits and cashflow. At our first workshop, we weren't sure whether the diagnostic and planning models we typically used with corporate clients would work for a smaller business such as Lauren Michelle. As the discussion progressed though, it became quickly apparent that the fundamentals underpinning businesses don't vary much between larger and smaller businesses. Sure, we were talking through models conceptually, using a flipchart rather than a Powerpoint deck, but we found the models still worked!
So, after much discussion on target markets, pricing strategies, business and financial controls, resourcing gaps etc, we agreed a list of ten key actions and some follow up checkpoints with Lauren Michelle.
Two years later, Lauren Michelle has not only survived the financial market crisis but is also experiencing unprecedented growth, with a 200% increase in revenue, and a client base that includes a number of blue chip corporates. And for the first time in a long time, Lauren, typically used to working weekends, has been able to reward herself with some time off...
Primi Forum
A couple of months post the opening of their Primi franchise restaurant at Melrose Arch, the owners of Primi Forum found that revenues were not living up to expectations. Worse still, this was impacting directly on the bottom line, requiring fresh injections of cash to keep the business going.Given that the cost area was already getting a lot of focus from the owner and management team, us volunteers from Redflank decided to zone in on how we could help improve revenues. Working with Brendon (the restaurant manager, and also one of the owners) and Suren (another of the owners), we identified a couple of initiatives to help increase the number of patrons at the restaurant. This included a "Meet Brendon" campaign, with various guerrilla marketing tactics to give Primi Forum a recognisable face and to increase visibility for the restaurant. Another of the initiatives involved a comedy evening of (then) South Africa's up and coming new talent, such as Chris Forrest. We also helped pick up on the practical, such as improving signage to increase visibility of the restaurant in the highly competitive Melrose Arch space. And then there was the more structured stuff around sourcing feedback from customers on their culinary and service experience, while at the same time presenting Primi Forum with the opportunity to build up its customer database.
Bottom line: Primi Forum managed to increase its revenues by more than 30% over a 4 month period - the boost it needed to help put it on track to meet its revenue and profitability targets.