How I helped our client prepare for oncoming economic challenges while getting them access to a $15k grant and $100k 0% interest loan.
Let’s face it – the economic landscape has changed on so many levels. Now more than ever, business owners need to pay close attention to what they are focusing on.
In this blog post, I’m going to highlight how I helped our client overcome staffing issues, keep up with the latest technology, and access a $100,000 interest-free loan. And as a bonus, they got a 90% discount on this service by taking advantage of a limited-time $15k Canadian Government grant.
Top 3 challenges our client faced:
- Difficulty in retaining and hiring skilled staff
- Keeping up with the latest technology
- Increased interest rates and cash flow
Difficulty in retaining skilled staff:
Like most business owners these days, the number one challenge was staffing. The market has never been more competitive. Headhunters were messaging key staff members providing competitive benefits, salaries, and bonuses, promising better “work-life balance,” and it was a battle to keep their staff engaged.
During our assessment, we found out the following was lacking a process for HR. Without scheduling regular 1:1’s with direct reports, there was a disconnect between minimum/maximum expected outcomes, how valuable those outcomes were, misalignment and lack of clear performance goals, and trust. Ultimately boiled down to poor communication. Work hours were fixed, which led to disengagement and burnout. There was little to no career development or professional development offered or incentivized to those interested in developing their skillset. And above all, the company wasn’t big enough to hire its own HR manager and oversee these crucial aspects of the business.
Keeping up with the latest technology:
“You don’t know what you don’t know.” I keep hearing this a lot from our clients. Especially when it comes to technology. With rapid advancements in applications for all parts of a business, we found key areas where I was able to help our client keep up with the pace.
People
First and foremost, people are your greatest asset. I helped our client identify an HR platform that would help them with their #1 challenge – retaining key staff and developing talent density.
Under this platform, we achieved the following.
- Automated 1:1 meetings with direct reports.
- Place to store all key data related to performance, expected minimum/maximum outcomes, and goal setting.
- Helped align the team on their progress as professionals.
- Framework to standardize 1:1s to make them meaningful, actionable, and consistent.
- Recognition of individual strengths and being able to lean into everyone’s unique abilities.
Best of all, they were able to implement this without having to hire a full-time HR manager since given the size of the company they weren’t quite ready for that yet. Overall, these changes led to higher team engagement, retention, and performance.
Clients
Secondly, our client was missing a platform to track leads, sales, conversions, and gather feedback from clients.
How I helped.
- Identify a CRM that would help manage the pipeline and various stages their prospects went through.
- Track communications between prospects and salespeople.
- Engage clients in post-work completion feedback surveys.
- Automation to reduce manual entries.
- Highlight the benefits of email marketing and automations to do so.
- Show how Zapier could connect their project management application to sales CRM (reduce double data entry).
With my help, we were able to show our client what other businesses were doing to automate sales and marketing. We introduced powerful automation that helped reduce manual data entry between prospects and clients and helped their sales team stay top of mind on their leads and audience. Not only that, but we also introduced automated forms that would gather client feedback on work completion that would help our client improve their service by incorporating that feedback. This led to an overall better client experience.
Increased interest rates and cash flow:
Prime interest rates recently hit 7.2%, with signs that they may keep going up. Business cash loans are upwards of 12%. I helped our client get access to $100,000 at 0% interest through the digital adoption program. This boosted cash flow and was aided to help with the implementation of tools that automated key functions of their business, benefiting them by retaining key staff and improving their overall sales process and service delivery.
I helped our client get a $15,000 grant which covered 90% of the cost of our service. At the end of the day, our client only had to pay $1,669 for 8 weeks of our advisory services.
To this day, we have a 100% success rate helping clients like this access this grant and loan.
They were able to get a full 360-degree assessment of their business, where we uncovered the constraints that were holding their business back.
We created a strategy for implementing new tech tools that would solve those constraints and allow them to focus on increasing the talent density of the team while increasing sales and improving their service. And we still work with them to this day to help implement and improve upon the solutions in their plans.
If you’re ready to make a change too, email me at michael@argentocpa.ca and I’ll show you exactly how what we did for this client can be tailored to help you and your business succeed.
