I find the Decision Associates’ Peer Group sessions very informative. I appreciate the opportunity to meet with individuals of similar career positions and age range who face some of the same challenges that I face as a young executive.
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Rouse
Our Mission
The Top 20%
What we are trying to Accomplish for You
Let’s get to the point: Our objective is to help each of our clients move into the Top 20% in their field. We created a full service consulting firm in 1984 specifically to help every client reach that threshold and to move up from there.
To that end, we designed each of our services to work in an integrated fashion; to help a client begin with a fundamental starting point and reach new levels along the way. Most of our clients start with Strategic Planning or Marketing Planning. Once that is motion and generating results, they turn to Human Capital Management issues: creating an organizational structure to accommodate growth, recruit executive talent, design and implement employee development and training, evaluate and guide employee satisfaction programs, etc.
Along the way, clients ask us to provide “point solutions”: “Help us upgrade our sales function, help us improve sales rep performance, help us implement operations improvements and capacity expansion, help us address unexpected growth, put together a compensation plan with incentive compensation, do a customer survey, do an employee survey, retool of our Brand Strategy, and on and on.
And, after 15 or 20 years (yes, clients stay that long) they ask us to help develop the Exit Plan: Transition to the children, sell to the management team, find a CEO to run it so the owner can semi-retire, prepare it for a sale to outside buyers, hire a new Executive Director.
But, what is the Top 20%? How is it benchmarked? How do you know where you are and how you are doing? In most industries, there is an industry trade association. These associations almost always establish a set of benchmarks that allow companies to see where they stand. We use those benchmarks.
Further, a study of companies that populate the Top 20% year in and year out reveals a list of consistent characteristics, regardless of industry or field. This is even relatively true regardless of whether you are a business or a nonprofit. Further, it is not a matter of size. For example, in a 300 mile radius of any point in PA, NY, OH, WV, NJ, there are hundreds of small and mid-size machine shops, plastic injection molders, fabrication shops, powdered metal processors and others. In the nonprofit world, there are hundreds of nonprofits providing services to children, behavioral health, family support, hospice, community nursing, autism, abuse shelters, United Way, mental health and other. In both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors these organizations range in size from a few employees to thousands. In either case, we see the same companies and non-profits in the Top 20%, measured by common, cross-industry metrics such as profitability, growth, return on investment, productivity, new product and services, quality performance, delivery performance, clients served, service per donated dollar, donor development and growth, etc.
In addition, those who are in the Top 20% enjoy a set of common benefits, regardless of industry. We have listed these below. Clearly it is a set of benefits that are highly desirable in good times and bad.
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Characteristics of the Top 20%: In The Business World |
Characteristics of the Top 20%: In The Nonprofit World |
| 1. The best customers have a strong attraction to the best vendors and suppliers. | 1. The best donors are attracted to the best nonprofits. |
| 2. The Top 20% have the strongest profitability and financial stability. | 2. The Top 20% have the strongest reserves and financial stability. |
| 3. The best market positions belong to the Top 20% | 3. The best market and public awareness belong to the Top 20%. |
| 4. Market pricing policy and price points are dictated by the Top 20% | 4. The best people want to be board members, employees and volunteers in the Top 20% |
| 5. The best people want to work for the Top 20% and they tend to stay put. | 5. The Top 20% attract the best partners: related agencies, foundations, corporations, corporate foundations, board members and others. |
| 6. The Top 20% have the best partners and are in the best negotiating position: vendors, suppliers, insurance companies, attorneys, accountants and others. | 6. The Top 20% are able to develop the best relationships with granting agencies, contributors, regulators and political entities |
| 7. The Top 20% are able to develop the best relationships with regulators and political entities. | 7. In a recession, donors, granting agencies and funding agencies focus on supporting the top performing nonprofits in each service sector. Under-performing nonprofits are urged to consolidate and merge. |
| 8. In a recession, customers always look for the safest supply sources. The work to protect their best suppliers, and aggregate their purchases to reduce sourcing cost and complexity. Almost always they turn to you, the Top 20%. |
Remember, the above list is a set of outcomes, not actions. All of the companies in the Top 20% with these outcomes started in the bottom 20%. They planned and worked to get where they are, surpassing other companies year in and year out, accumulating powerful advantages along the way and further leveraging those advantages to “ladder” themselves into the Top 20%. They had limitations and weaknesses to deal with, just as all owners do.
Since 1984, we have helped good and poor companies “ladder” their way up. I can assure you that anyone can do it, from any starting point. There are dozens of key elements that have to be done well in order to get into the Top 20%: Leadership, management, organizational structure, product and service development, marketing, selling, employee development, operations, technology, capital investment, and others. The nonprofit sector has all of these and a few more: donor development, grant writing, volunteer recruitment and management, public relations and others There are dozens of complicated decisions to make, all with tradeoffs.
Decision Associates stands ready to help our clients identify, plan and implement the key elements to get you where you belong: The Top 20%………and up!
