Fred had cut back costs as far as possible but was still struggling to make a reasonable profit. To maintain output and quality he wasn’t able to cut back on staff and his staffing costs were in line with the industry average anyway.

We did an analysis of the roles of productive staff versus overhead staff and found that productive staff were doing a large proportion of administration tasks. These role inefficiencies had a huge impact on the productivity of the business as a whole.

Together, we worked on re-defining the roles of the staff and processes so that the productive staff could focus on producing and the overhead staff could focus on supporting.  We set up KPI’s for all staff so they could see how they were going which drove their capacity, capability and held them accountable to themselves, their managers and the business.  The plan was monitored each quarter with the business owners being accountable for the staff KPIs.