Consumer Products – Facal & Cía

Yesware’s Matthew Bellows on His Ironic Challenge

admin — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:51:47 +0000

Project Infomation

Converting free users into paying customers. By early 2013, even with a newly hired 10-person sales team, Yesware’s sales were abysmal and the company had yet to turn a profit, casting a pall over pending efforts to raise venture capital. Because he was struggling to sell a product built to make sales easier, Matthew Bellows, a co-founder, felt like the shoemaker whose own children pad about barefoot.

YESWARE is a four-year-old company that designs and sells software intended to make it easier for sales teams to record and analyze essential data. Released in late 2012, Yesware’s basic version, which can be downloaded free, quickly attracted more than 100,000 users.

Client : Insight Studio
Date : 20 Feb, 2018
Skills : Project Planning

Challenge & Solution

But this kind of oversight requires salespeople to type updates into customer relations systems, rather like police detectives pecking away on case reports back at their desks. Sales agents hate doing it, and sales managers hate hectoring them.

Clean house. Fire seven of the 10 salespeople.

Step in himself as vice president of sales and devote the necessary time to training and supervision. To ensure he would have that time, he would hire a chief executive to serve in his stead.

Hire a vice president of sales.

Have this person do the firing, hiring and supervision while Mr. Bellows remained chief executive. Such a search might take as long as six months, and with the need to raise venture capital looming, Mr. Bellows wondered if he could wait that long.

Promote the best sales person among the three

He deemed worthy of keeping to manage the team. The person he had in mind had six years of sales experience. He had never led a sales team but had demonstrated an aptitude for mentoring and leadership.

Our Process

In his previous company, with no investors and no need to raise money, business had been simpler. He could serve as chief executive and the lone sales rep. Any doubt that he was wearing too many hats at Yesware evaporated the day he discovered his entire sales team in a conference room at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday in June — “hanging out, listening to loud music and drinking beer, like it was a frat house.”

Improve sales & operations & production planning

Determine the right inventory level

Optimize the supply chain for perfect order planning

Improve sales & operations & production planning

Result Driven

Mr. Bellows closed the conference room door without a word. That weekend he went to a meditation center in Vermont to ponder how he might fix his sales team. (Credit: nytimes.com)

Reduced lead time by 43%

Decreased variability by 50%

Lowered the risk of back-order by 95%

Increased stock for finished goods by 10%

Maclaren’s Stroller Recall: What Would You Do?

admin — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:51:21 +0000

Project Infomation

Safe to say the management team at Maclaren is having a terrible week. On Monday its US subsidiary issued a press release announcing a recall of every baby stroller it has sold in the United States in the past decade — which means about one million units. The purpose is to install a cover for the stroller’s hinge mechanism, which is sharp enough to cut through a baby’s fingers should they happen to be in the wrong spot as the stroller is opened.* In fact, this has happened on at least twelve occasions.

If you didn’t get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach as you read that paragraph, you are not a consumer goods executive — or a parent. Think about all the levels on which it’s your worst nightmare, beyond your obvious concern for the children’s injuries:

Client : Insight Studio
Date : 20 Feb, 2018
Skills : Project Planning

Challenge & Solution

Maclaren surely knows it has much to lose from the publicity, but it did the right thing in the US. It contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Office of Compliance and asked for its help in conducting a recall under the Fast Track Product Recall Program. That saved the CPSC from conducting a detailed evaluation of the product, and allowed the company to get out in front of the story as it hit the press.

Engage a reputable, independent, outside investigator

Once the study is complete, make it available to the baby stroller industry at large so that all companies involved in the manufacture of strollers might benefit from it. – John R. Hall, retired chairman, Ashland Incorporated

Hire a crisis management expert

charged with setting up and training a permanent, internal crisis-management team comprising people from the operations, marketing, IT, security, and legal departments. – Ian Mitroff, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business

Announce the recall in paid advertisements

as well as issuing the joint press release with the CPSC. While the CPSC does not allow ads announcing a recall to be marketing tools, the agency would allow language expressing the company’s commitment to its customers. – Alan H. Schoem, former Director of the Office of Compliance at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

Our Process

As for all the other fronts of the crisis noted above, we don’t know what Maclaren’s management will do. But thanks to Harvard Business Review’s archives, we know what they should do. In 2001, HBR published a case study called “When No News is Good News,” and asked four experts to advise on the issues it raised. It’s the fictional story of, you guessed it, a baby stroller manufacturer deciding what to do after a highly publicized accident involving one of its products. A few nuggets from those experts:

Improve sales & operations & production planning

Determine the right inventory level

Optimize the supply chain for perfect order planning

Improve sales & operations & production planning

Result Driven

Crisis management, by definition, is not something a company thinks about often. But when a crisis hits, a company has to do a whole lot of things right. Let’s hope Maclaren is doing them.
(Credit: hbr.org)

Reduced lead time by 43%

Decreased variability by 50%

Lowered the risk of back-order by 95%

Increased stock for finished goods by 10%

A Local Dry Cleaner Tries to Compete Against P.&G.

admin — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:46:58 +0000

Project Infomation

FOUNDED in 2004, Hangers Cleaners of Kansas City, Mo., was started as an environmentally safe dry cleaner. It uses colorless, odorless liquid carbon dioxide instead of the aggressive chemicals applied at traditional dry cleaners. It has 35 employees and 2009 revenue of $1.6 million.

To survive the arrival of a huge new competitor, Procter & Gamble, which began testing a Tide dry-cleaning service in Kansas City in 2008.

Client : Insight Studio
Date : 20 Feb, 2018
Skills : Project Planning

Challenge & Solution

When Joe Runyan started Hangers, he was hoping to bring a fresh approach to what he considered a stagnant industry. A first-time entrepreneur who had left a marketing career at Sprint, he had been dissatisfied with the local dry cleaners, finding dirty facilities and rude workers to be the norm.

Cultivate its offbeat image

Hangers continued to cultivate its offbeat image. “We have a personality in a business devoid of it,” Mr. Runyan said. “We can’t out-price or out-spend our big competitor, but we can be genuine, funny and edgy.”

Culture of service and accountability

He worked to create a tight-knit culture of service and accountability. If a garment was damaged, a store representative would call the customer immediately and offer to replace it.

Quantify the gained patrons

He initiated partnerships with corporations, nonprofit organizations and community groups, and he can quantify the patrons gained from each. He also contacted schools and donates 10 percent of the proceeds from parents’ dry cleaning back to each school.

Our Process

Then, while researching the business, he discovered that the chemicals used by most cleaners were prohibiting new entrants. Building owners refused to lease space to cleaners using perchloroethylene, or “perc,” which is now heavily regulated. “By no means was I a tree hugger,” Mr. Runyan said. “But from a business perspective, it was clear this industry had to change.”

Improve sales & operations & production planning

Determine the right inventory level

Optimize the supply chain for perfect order planning

Improve sales & operations & production planning

Result Driven

While other local dry cleaners have told him that their year-over-year revenue is flat or down as much as 25 percent, Mr. Runyan said his revenue grew 2 to 3 percent in 2009 and his profits quadrupled, largely as a result of closing the unprofitable location. (Cedit: nytimes.com)