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"I wanted to congratulate you on the RTP Financial Dashboard... You've really created a phenomenal tool that gives business owners a unprecedented level of insight into their business.     Our two hours spent with the tool yesterday gave me a level of understanding of my business that would previously have taken me days or weeks of Excel/QuickBooks crunching to accomplish.   After only 1 day using the tool,  I can't imagine running my business without it....   It would be like driving with my eyes closed.."

Jeff Roback
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Marathon Consulting
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Steve Barnett
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Streamline Networks
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Blue Earth, Minnesota
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Darren T. Walter
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I started working with the Taylor Business Group in 2007. We were already very profitable, but suffered from a lot of turmoil inside the company. John and TBG were instrumental in helping me root out the causes of the turmoil and fix the problems. John also helped me move from a ‘service driven' to a ‘sales driven' company by helping me define and recruit a sales team. Through the help of TBG, I increased my 2008 sales and am projecting significantly higher sales (28%) in 2009."

Eric Ringelberg
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Next I.T. - Muskegon, MI
www.next-it.net

"Working with Larry Schulze as our coach for the last two years has been a tremendous benefit to our business. We have transformed the company from a reactive sales and service company to a proactive, managed service organization. We have seen improvements in all key aspects of the business, including revenue, service utilization, and most importantly profitability. Larry has helped me focus on working on the business rather than working in the business."

David Prince
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Databranch
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Mike Doerfler
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"Since we began working with the Taylor Business Group, we have quadrupled our net profit, radically improved customer service and responsiveness, reduced our staff's stress levels, and gotten rave reviews from our client's on the improvements in our processes. Working with both Josh and Larry has helped me to focus on the business in a way that only someone looking in from the outside can. TBG does for us, what we do for our clients - Provides the business tools and processes for success."

Eric Hanson
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"I have been working with the Taylor Business Group since 2004 when I began attending their workshops, which include Managing for Profitability, Services Workshop, and Managing Sales. Within 2006, I engaged their consulting services to ensure that on a monthly basis, time was set aside in my business to focus on how and when we'd implement the things learned in these workshops. I highly recommend the Taylor Business Group as a way to regularly step outside your business to work on your business."

Alan McDonald
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AllConnected
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"The TBG provides us with a solid foundation of strategies to improve our business. But what sets them apart is their ability to provide a detailed operational path to take advantage of their strategies. In a very short time, The TBG has helped us zero in on items to improve in our business, with operational plans to increase our success. We continue to work with the TBG because they show us how to get our business where we want it to be."

Jennifer Roback
Chief Operating Officer
Praxis Computing
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"The Taylor Business Group has helped us obtain tremendous results! We knew we could improve our business, and with TBG's assistance, we have far exceeded our goals, and ahead of plan to the point we are generating profits well into six digits. Their expertise allowed us to recognize immediate results across the entire organization!"

Gary Aufdemberge
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Nex-Tech
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Wednesday, 11 August 2010 14:08
Taylored Comments

 

Welcome to our New Blog and the Importance of Benchmarking

by Larry Schulze, Co-founder and Principle Consultant

Welcome to Taylored Comments our new blog.

I have been debating doing this for over a year now. As with everyone, our schedules are jammed pack. Before we ventured into the blog abyss, I wanted to be ensured we would be able to deliver on our commitment to you to have current and meaningful information available every week; week in, week out.

My team has stepped up to that commitment. You will be seeing blogs covering every aspect of your business. These blogs will be designed for you to better run your business more efficiently and more profitably. Every member of my team will be providing articles allowing you to see topics from different angles and perspectives. We are excited to do this for you and look forward to any and all comments regarding the blogs we have written and other topics you would like to see.

One of the areas that many of you have asked about over the years is regarding the importance of benchmarking. This probably goes without saying but if you do not know what and how to measure your performance, both financial as well as your activity levels, how do you know what areas to work on your business to make it better?

The first step in being able to benchmark your business is to ensure you are collecting all of the data to be able to apply benchmarking. This data resides in two places; your accounting package and your PSA solution. Let's first look at your accounting package. The Chart of Accounts is the most important aspect in setting up your accounting package. Too many times we have seen company's Charts of Accounts with basic Hardware, Service, Wages and Expenses categories. None of them broken down into the detail required to truly evaluate your Income Statement and Balance Sheet. And without that detail, there is simply no way to use any type of benchmarking system to grade your performance.

For those who are interested, we have a recommended Chart of Accounts for you to use. Those who have access to our Resource Center can find them there. Everyone else can contact us if you would like a copy.

The other area you need to utilize for benchmarking is your PSA solution. Whether it is Autotask, ConnectWise or Tigerpaw, these solutions have the ability for you to gather intel about your daily sales and service activities to use for benchmarking against SLA expectations or daily service and sales activity objectives. Noticed I said daily. Many of us pay to little attention to the daily activities and then wonder why the weekly or monthly activity reports don't meet our expectations. It is all in the details. If you pay attention daily, the rest will take care of their selves.

So, this should get us going. Jeff Razafsky will be blogging next week about the utilization of financial dashboards and managing your results to financial benchmarks.

Stay tuned!

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