Between 1811 and 1816, a group of English Textile workers rebelled in Northwestern England, destroying the "new-fangled" labour saving machines that they believed threatened their jobs. The rebels were nicknamed "Luddites", and it took a significant deployment of military forces to put the rebellion down.

Now, in the first world, most of us would see that as backward and pointless behaviour - almost like trying to hold the tide back. Humans naturally invent new and better ways to do more with less, and we might as well embrace these opportunities to move forward.

Yet change is difficult because it involves breaking new ground in the depths of our brains. It is like hopping off a well-made 6 lane freeway, and to use an Australian term, "bush bashing" to create a new path where none existed before. It is hard, often slow, and non-intuitive work. It seems strange, kind of unnatural, and sometimes, it seems like the freeway might take us to the same destination more quickly - even though it will take us well out of our way first.

Many times we find ourselves defaulting back to the freeway because frankly, it takes less energy in the sense that while it might take us around the long way, it is something we can do on autopilot.

Let's do an experiment...

If you work in professional services, and I told you that there is a new technology that makes travel to a client (or travel for them to you) a thing of the past, and that allows documents to be legally signed online, what is your gut reaction?

If I told you that this technology would save you significant costs, and increase your billable time at the same time, what would your reaction be?

What if I told you that the research shows that with the popularisation of video-conferencing apps like Skype, clients only really value a face-to-face visit the first time, and after that, face-to-face meetings play no real part in their value equation when they are assessing whether or not to go with you or stay with you?

Or what if I told you that everybody was already using this technology, so if you want to keep up, you'd better jump on board?

At what point did you decide to find out more?

If it was at the introduction to the new technology, you are typically known as a "change initiator". You actively seek out change and you see the possibilities before they are even stated.

If it was at the paragraph where the benefits were stated, you are an "early adopter" sliding into the "early majority". You want to hear anecdotal evidence of the benefits.

If it was at the research paragraph you are part of the "late majority" - you really want to see if the wind has shifted for good before you dive in.

If it was at the "everybody is doing it" paragraph, you are a "laggard". You typically wait until a new business model has replaced the existing business model for a few years before you move across.

If you are sitting there saying to yourself "clients will never move onto this type of technology - nothing substitutes for being there in person in all client engagements", you are known as a skeptic. Ferment that skepticism with a pinch of economic downturn, add a dash of "violence against the machine", and you are officially a Luddite.

OK, That's Enough Of the Name Calling, What's Your Point?

One of the keys to navigating change is to not only understand your natural change setting, but why you hold that setting. Some people are born risk takers, while others are naturally more risk averse. Are these emotional settings or have they been created through hard life lessons?

Understanding the basis for the setting helps us to understand exactly what we need to know or learn before we make a change. Deliberately placing some rigour around this actually creates a degree of certainty for us because we have a specific yardstick to measure the proposed change against.

So if you want to navigate change more effectively, next time you are faced with a change, ask yourself this question: "What specific information would I need to know/learn to make this change?"

Then if that information becomes known to your satisfaction, jump in and make the change.

As discussed in "KPIs 101: How Much Can Your Business Improve?", every quantifiable Key Performance Indicator that has ever been devised falls into the following categories:

Size - how big is the deal?Number of - how many deals are on the table?Speed - how fast does the deal take to work through?Capacity - how many deals can we actually do?Statistics - averages, conversion rates, ratios, standard deviations, skew, correlation etc. etc. etc.

If you use them together, you can quickly work out how much your business can improve.

Today we will discuss #5: Statistics - averages, conversion rates, ratios, distributions, correlations etc.

The first thing to realise is that a huge amount can be learned about a business without getting into the really hardcore statistical measures. For example conversion rates and averages.

Conversion rates are very similar in make up to velocity discussed in 101.4. Conversion rates deal with how many of one thing are required to produce another. For example, how many contacts does it take to generate a sales meeting? How many sales meetings does it take to generate a quote? How many quotes does it take to generate a sale? What % of a Sale is Gross Profit? What % of Sales are Fixed Costs? What % of Sales is Net Profit?

Conversion rates can be expressed either in percentage terms, as ratios, or as simple numbers. Every area of a business has its own key ratios that need to be tracked. For example, in production we might look at set-up times, velocities, capacities and wastage rates. In accounting, as well as looking at the % of Sales measures mentioned above, we might look at Accounts Payable and Receivables Turnover Rates, and how we went against budgets; while in marketing, we might look at the Lifetime Value of a Customer and Average Cost of Acquiring a Customer.

From there, we can build models which describe how our business works, and we can start to play with these models to work out where best to spend our money to get the biggest improvement bang for our buck.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Statistics are often trotted out to support points of view. For example, the average house price today is $500,000. However, in statistics, there are actually 3 different measures of the average. The most common measure is called the mean which is defined simply as the total value of the population divided by the total number of the population. However, the mean can be skewed by a small number of huge values. For example, if the population is 10, and 8 have houses worth $200,000, 1 has a house worth $1m, while the remaining person has a house worth $2.4m, the mean produces a skewed and, in this instance arguably unrepresentative result.

So statisticians came up with 2 other averages as an attempt to provide further information. The first is the mode which is the most common value. In this instance, it would be $200,000.

The second is called the median which is the value at which 50% of the population lies. In this instance, that would be $2.5m.

Taken separately, each average tells a completely different story. Taken together, the mean, median and mode give us a far better understanding of the subject.

The key to making statistics and in fact, any KPI work is to understand what questions you want them to help you answer.

For example, correlation is the process of establishing whether 2 things are related. But the first thing that any science or statistics major will tell you is that correlation does not equate to causation. I did some work recently for a big NGO, and I discovered that there was a 75% correlation between rainfall and donations. Now, the sample was only 1 year, and the rates were based on averages, but the correlation still existed.

Questions immediately arose:

What happens to the correlation if we expand the sample?What happens if we drop the averages and use the actual daily data?Are there any offsets e.g. lags in the data?Are there other factors involved e.g. do the wetter months correspond with the end of the tax year when donors want to maximise their tax deductions?

This is where other statistical measures that look at the spread of the distributed values e.g. standard deviation and skewness come in really handy. Essentially, we are trying to understand the impact of outliers on the data with a view to determining whether we need to direct our marketing spend across the whole spectrum of our customers and markets, or whether we can significantly reduce our spending by focusing it in specific, high volume or value areas that generate most of our results. This process is all about getting rid of the outliers.

On the other hand, in the world of sales and risk management, it is all about the outliers. For example, if our top sales person is consistently generating greater volume and better Gross Profit Margins, we need to look at why that is, and whether it can be replicated across the rest of the sales team e.g. by extra training or by better sales qualification processes.

In risk management, the outliers point to situations that may have slipped through the risk management framework gaps which need to be investigated to understand if, and how, the risk management frameworks and practices need to be changed to effectively catch these outliers in future.

Without context, KPIs make no sense.

If you do not understand why you are trying to measure what you are trying to measure, the numbers produced will mean nothing. Context is everything.

In the next article, we will look at a simple business KPI model where small changes can have a massive impact on the net profit results.

As discussed in KPIs 101: How Much Can Your Business Improve?, every quantifiable Key Performance Indicator that has ever been devised falls into the following categories:

Size - how big is the deal?Number of - how many deals are on the table?Velocity - how fast does the deal take to work through?Capacity - how many deals can we actually do?Statistics - averages, conversion rates, ratios, standard deviations, skew, correlation etc. etc. etc.

If you use them together, you can quickly work out how much your business can improve.

Today we will discuss #4: Capacity - How Many Deals Can We Actually Do?

Everything in this universe has a finite size. That size more or less determines how much of another substance will fit inside the object.

(For the purposes of this part of the the discussion, I am setting aside the fact that some things e.g. acid can change the properties of other things e.g. plastic, and therefore can change how much the containers they are put in can actually hold e.g. by burning holes in them and rendering them unable to hold anything.)

For example, if you have a bath tub which holds 200 litres, once it is full, it cannot have any more tipped in without overflowing.

However, the interplay between capacity and velocity means that a bath tub may be able to process far more than 200 litres over a given time period.

Let's say that the plug is pulled out and the bath tub drains at a rate of 40 litres per minute. In 5 minutes, a full tub will be empty. If the tub is constantly refilled at the same rate, the tub can effectively process 2,400 litres an hour. That is 12 times its actual capacity.

Your business is no different in theory...

...in practice, capacity is a juggling act, and the key is not how fast the work comes in, but how fast it can go out.

Every process has multiple steps. Each step is bound by capacity i.e. the capacity of the person or machine completing the step or the facility in which the step takes place.

For example, Bob is a machinist on the old faithful green machine. The capacity of the green machine is 15 mins set-up per job, and a rated speed of 6 units produced per minute. But Bob only works 8 hours a day, and there is no-one else to work the machine if Bob is not there. Therefore, assuming Bob works an 8 hour day, the green machine's production capacity per day in a single run is 2,790 units.

That is: 8 hours x 60 mins - 15 mins x 6 units per minute.

Jemima is a welder who can weld 1 unit every 3 minutes. Her capacity over an 8 hour day is 160 units. For the welding department to keep up with the green machine, 18 welders are required or the green machine will have underutilised capacity.

As the green machine's costs must be split over the sold production, the impact on profitability of underutilised capacity cannot be overstated. For example, if the green machine's costs are $55,800 per year, and we assume that there are 200 working days per year, and that each day's production is a single run with set-up time, then 558,000 units will be produced by the green machine at a cost of 10c each.

However, if we assume that Jemima works all alone, and the product cannot be sold unless it is first welded, then Jemima can only produce 32,000 units. This increases the costs of the green machine to $1.74375 per unit.

If we assume that Jemima is paid $40 per hour, and she uses consumables of $40 per hour, her welded cost per unit is $4.00 ($80 / 20 units per hour).

The total cost of the product at this point is somewhere between $4.10 and $5.74. If it is sold for $8.00, the fall in profit is $1.64 or 42%.

Assuming that all production can be sold, by employing more Jemimas and increasing the throughput capacity, the business turnover and profitability will radically increase.

OR

...by reviewing the design and production processes, it might be possible to reconfigure the product to allow Jemima to produce a welded unit in a reduced amount of time. This would be the same as increasing the size of the plug hole in the bath tub.

The key to any good business is to understand what capacities are required across your facilities, machines and workforce to support the level of turnover and profitability you require.

Check out some technologies that make the most of your capacities in customer engagement, quoting and process management.

As discussed in KPIs 101: How Much Can Your Business Improve?, every quantifiable Key Performance Indicator that has ever been devised falls into the following categories:

Size - how big is the deal?Count - how many deals are on the table?Velocity - how fast does the deal take to work through?Capacity - how many deals can we actually do?Statistics - averages, conversion rates, ratios, standard deviations, skew, correlation etc. etc. etc.

Today we will discuss #3: Velocity - how fast a deal takes to work through...

Whenever I have been asked to help a business search for a new business system, I have started off by asking "what happens now?". From there, I use a tool like Xsol to model the current processes cradle-to-grave, identify the weaknesses, identify the possibilities for change, and ensure that all RFP documentation addresses these opportunities for improvement explicitly.

It is not rocket science, and by calculating how long it takes employee A to do task B, it is easy to calculate how much a process costs to run. Having said that, it is amazing how many businesses cost their processes on a smooth flow through - instead of on what actually happens. As a result, they so often miss the silent velocity killer...

Wait time.

Wait time is any time that a process goes into a non-value adding halt.

Let's clarify what constitutes a "non-value adding halt". If you are building fibre glass boats, the drying time required for the fibre glass to cure properly is not wait time. It is adding value to the final product because non-cured fibre glass is useless.

If your boats are sitting idle waiting for the engines to be delivered, that is a non-value adding halt. The halt is incurring costs e.g. of electricity, storage, security etc.

Now some of you may argue that these costs are being incurred anyway, and should not be allocated to the idle products. However, if there was no idle time in all of the production, then it stands to reason that the same size facilities could produce a greater number of products.

For example: if one boat takes 20 days to produce, and there is only room to produce 1 boat at a time, then assuming there are 200 production days a year, the facility can produce 10 boats. The velocity of the plant is 10 boats per year. If we assume that the facility costs for the year are $100,000, then each boat effectively carries $10,000 of those costs each.

However, if there are 2 wait days per boat, meaning that it now takes 22 days to produce a boat, only 9 boats can be produced a year. But your facility costs are still the same. Now each boat must carry $11,111 in facility costs - an increase of 11.11%.

All else being equal...

Slower Velocity = Lower profit.

I said "all else being equal" because it rarely is. For example, a bottling line might be rated to run at 200 bottles per minute. However it only runs at 180 bottles per minute - 10% slower than its rating. According to the equation above, this leads to a lower profit.

But sometimes, faster is not always better. For example, if an increase in the line rate leads to a significant increase in breakage and wastage, it might make more sense to run slower and better than faster and looser.

The key takeaway on velocity is this:

Understanding how velocity interacts with your other KPIs is critical to optimising your profit.

For mortgage brokers, one of the key brakes on their velocity is getting signed contracts back from customers. Suitebox eliminates this brake immediately.

For anyone quoting in construction, Planswift reduces quote preparation time by 50%-80% while increasing quoting accuracy.

As discussed in KPIs 101: How Much Can Your Business Improve?, every quantifiable Key Performance Indicator that has ever been devised falls into the following categories:

Size - how big is the deal?Number of - how many deals are on the table?Velocity - how fast does the deal take to work through?Capacity - how many deals can we actually do?Statistics - averages, conversion rates, ratios, standard deviations, skew, correlation etc. etc. etc.

If you use them together, you can quickly work out how much your business can improve.

Today we will discuss #2: How Many Deals Are On The Table?

This is commonly called a pipeline, and it directly determines how fast you can possibly go.

The key with pipelines is how well you can convert them to actual orders/work. For example, if you have 20 deals in the pipeline, but your deal/order conversion rate is only 20%, you will only be able to work on 4 deals. However, if the 4 deals are all big deals, then it may soak up much of your available capacity. But if they are not big deals, and you have capacity for more, you team will be underutilised.

The number of deals x the deal/order conversion rate = number of orders.The number of orders x the size of the deal x the frequency x avg order value = total possible revenue that could be earned from the current marketing/sales efforts.

This is then compared with the capacity to determine whether the possible revenue is probable or whether it is constrained by the current capacity.

This is one of the many tightropes that businesses walk between sales and operations.

For example, while it might be possible to increase the number of deals on the table by 10%, if the capacity is already full, the orders cannot be processed any more quickly - and therefore, the increase leads to no increase in revenue.

When sales people are incentivised on margin or revenue, good sales people do not like being held back like this. So one of the keys is to always keep some extra capacity available to deal with the seasonal lumps and bumps that inevitably turn up.

The easiest way to uncover extra capacity is to reduce the resources required to perform a process.

In the world of face-to-face meetings where documents are required to be signed and executed to facilitate the business relationship, Suitebox reduces unbillable and unrecoverable travel time to meetings for both you and your customers to zero.

In the world of construction quoting, I have seen Planswift cut take-off/quoting times by 80%.

For everybody else, the key to understanding your capacity is to understand the time taken to complete the many processes that undergird the fulfillment of an order. Xsolallows your processes to be modeled and reviewed from a helicopter level right down to the task level.

As discussed in KPIs 101: How Much Can Your Business Improve?, every quantifiable Key Performance Indicator that has ever been devised falls into the following categories:

Size - how big is the deal?Count - how many deals are on the table?Velocity - how fast does the deal take to work through?Capacity - how many deals can we actually do?Statistics - averages, conversion rates, ratios, standard deviations, skew, correlation etc. etc. etc.

If you use them together, you can quickly work out how much your business can improve.

Today we will discuss #1: Size - How Big Is The Deal?

Deal size is a pretty simple concept - it is an easy to derive number. However, what we are looking for are some statistics around deal size e.g. the average deal size, minimum deal size, and maximum deal size.

The key to understanding the impact of deal size on your operation is in understanding how it interacts with #4: Velocity - How Fast Does It Take The Deal To Work Through?

For example, if an average deal takes 3 hours to work through, and this time does not change much based on the deal size, then your profitability is more or less dependent on the deal size.

On the other hand, if the minimum deal size only takes 25% of the time of the maximum deal size to process, your optimal operating rhythms need to be assessed a little more closely.

Let's do some numbers...

Assuming your team has 2000 days p.a. to process deals, and

On these numbers, it would make sense to construct your business around getting the maximum number of minimum and maximum sized deals possible, and to stay away from the average sized deals as much as possible.

The questions then become how many of these types of deals are out there, and how frequently can we get them?

Even so, the profitability of the deal is dependent on both the size, and the time taken to process it.

If you provide face-to-face services, which require documents to be signed and executed (lawyer, accountant, financial planner, mortgage broker, real estate agent), the simplest and cheapest way to speed up processing time is to use Suitebox.

If you need to quote from building plans, then the quickest way to speed up your quoting is to use Planswift.

If you are a business that wants clarity around who does what, when and how, and how much time deals actually take to process, then you will love Xsol.

If you are looking for help to quickly and easily derive your KPIs from your business data, then check out the leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence for the last 5 years - Qlik.

Every quantifiable Key Performance Indicator that has ever been devised falls into the following categories:

Size - how big is the deal?Count - how many deals are on the table?Velocity - how fast does the deal take to work through?Capacity - how many deals can we actually do?Statistics - averages, conversion rates, ratios, standard deviations, skew, correlation etc. etc. etc.

Everything else is a Dimension...

Time, Geography, Products, Projects, Customers, Resources, Suppliers, Processes, Cost Centre, Account.

For example, some would call frequency a group of KPIs. However, frequency is really just a count across a time period.

...Or a Comparison.

Comparisons are when a KPI is compared across a dimension or multiple dimensions e.g. Sales $ by Sales Person by State.

The thing with KPIs, is that if you use them together, you can quickly work out how much your business can improve.

For example, if you have 10 people working for you, and each one works for you for 200 days a year, you effectively have a capacity of 2000 days each year.

If the average deal velocity is 5 days, you can only process 400 deals per year. If the average deal revenue (size) is $1,000, then the gross revenue you can earn in a year is $400,000. If you pay each one of your team $30,000, and have no other costs, then your profit will be $100,000 p.a.

The key to growing your business from here is to work out how to change these numbers.

For example, if you could reduce your deal processing time (i.e. increase your velocity) by 10%, then you could process an extra 44 jobs per year. If you could increase your deal size by 10%, then together with the increase in velocity, you could earn an extra $88,400 p.a. - all of which would go straight to the bottom line.

That represents an 88% increase in profit.

The beauty of the interplay between KPIs is that small changes in multiple KPIs can have a big impact on the net result.

In the following KPIs 101 series, we will look at how each KPI type impacts on the others in closer detail.

Delta Point Management is focused on delivering paradigm shift technologies and business improvement consulting that greatly improve your organisation's KPIs. Check out how t is time to disrupt.

Historically, business has been a geographical meeting between suppliers and customers in order to exchange products and services.

However, the rise of the information age has changed this to a large extent, with buyers and sellers no longer required to be in the same place. Products and some services still have to be delivered in geographic proximity, but technology has made it possible to deliver information services remotely.

Yet many advisors still only see clients to which they can travel. They effectively ignore those outside their geographic reach.

Where this became really interesting was in the mining boom. Suddenly, you had a geographically disparate group of people all coming together to make squillions in the middle of nowhere. Many of them had similar financial services needs, and a number of opportunities existed to develop high value practices that dealt with these specialised needs. But unless you were prepared to relocate to mining boom town #14 somewhere in the Pilbarra, there was no real way that you could interact with these people with any scale.

Until today...

Suitebox allows financial advisors to conduct face-to-face video conferences, present financial plans, and then most importantly, get immediate, compliant sign-offs from clients. If you and your client have access to the internet and webcams, you can conduct and transact business from anywhere.

Suddenly, the ability to build a scaled financial services practice that addresses a specific market vertical is available - without any geographic constraints.

How much better, faster and cheaper would your advice model be if you could focus with scale on specific verticals?

With Suitebox, you can now find out...

I want to know more.

If you have been in the Financial Advice arena long enough, you would have seen a picture that looks like this below:

It is the classic Superannuation Funds Under Management Bell Curve where funds are accumulated until retirement, and then steadily paid out during retirement.

Historically, most financial advisors have sought to engage with clients at the top or towards the top of this chart because those clients typically want the services that a Financial Advisor can provide AND they can pay for them.

But something strange is happening...

Industry Fund advisors are engaging with clients and building relationships with tomorrow's leaders much sooner. As a result, there is a strong chance that the "go-to" non-aligned middle-aged investors that have been the bread and butter of so many advisors will not exist in the future in anything approaching their historical numbers.

So what does that do to the value of your advice practice - and your practice succession plan?

Unless Financial Advisors can find a way to reduce the cost of giving advice in a way that allows them to access their desired clients earlier in their savings/investment journeys, we shall see a fair contraction in the Financial Advice industry over the next few years.

As clients head across to the right, they will not be filled up at the same rate from the left. However an advisor chooses to price their services - fee for service, % of FUM, or % of Income, on all measures, the advisor's income will inevitably fall.

Congratulations For Reading This Far: Now Here's the Good News...

The key to avoiding this fate is to make some hard decisions. The first is to conduct a thorough review around WHAT advice is provided, to whom, and by which means. The second hard decision is to determine WHERE in the market the practice will play - cut price or quality/niche service. The third decision is to thoroughly review HOW the practice will play. What technologies will be used to deliver the advice?

Welcome To SuiteBox - The Online MeetNSign...

Suitebox is a virtual conferencing tool that allows you to:

Conduct face-to-face meetings remotely;Identify that who you are meeting with matches the appropriate identification documents;Create, review and collaborate on documents;Sign those documents – and email the signed copies through to the client immediately;Record the meeting; andReview the recorded meeting at a later date.

In addition, if you have a Client Relationship Management (CRM) or practice management system, Suitebox can integrate directly with it to allow you to kick off meetings from within the client record, and store or link to the signed documents and the video record of the meeting back to the client record.

At a charge out rate of $300 per hour, Suitebox becomes worthwhile if it saves you just 10 minutes of uncharged travel time per month. Additionally, because you do not have to wait for documents to go backwards and forwards, it speeds up the document execution process incredibly. The best part about Suitebox is that it can be used across as many clients as you want – for no extra investment per month.

I want to know more

Financial Advisors: whether you know it or not, you already exist in a billable hours world.

And in fact, you always have.

Historically, you may not have calculated your income on a billable hours basis, but ultimately, the success of your advice business has always come down to what you make per hour.

The equation is simple: how much your advice makes you per year / how many hours a year you work.

So, if you work 200 days per year, 8 hours a day (I know, most of you don't work these part-time hours, but go with me on this), you have 1,600 billable hours per year.

If you make $480,000 in revenue, with $240,000 in costs (other than your wages), leaving you with $240,000 profit, you are billing at $300 per hour, with a profit margin of $150 per hour.

This formula still works even if you calculate revenue on the basis of a % of Funds Under Management or a % of income generated. However you calculate revenue and costs, you still end up with an amount for a time period that can be divided by the number of hours worked in that time period.

It's Time To Reveal the "Dead Time" In Your Business Model.

Under historical revenue generation models, as long as revenue targets were hit, many hours of "dead time" tended to be hidden or go uncosted on a billable hours foregone basis. Now, while the odd golf/lunch/sailing-networking exercises are great for client relationship building, unless they happened every week, they are unlikely to be a great source of billable hours leakage.

The biggest sources of billable hours leakage are the normal, every day things for which you cannot charge (or choose not to charge) the client.

The classic example of this is travel.

Travel adds nothing to the value of the advice given or accepted.

If we break it right down to basics, the revenue generation process is really the delivery to the client and their acceptance of your value proposition. This typically occurs with face-to-face time with the client, plus the advice formulation, presentation and sign-up time.

After the initial meeting with the client - where travel is a worthwhile marketing activity to cement the relationship, the value of travel to the ongoing relationship diminishes significantly.

If it adds no value, it becomes questionable whether the client should ever be billed for it - and indeed, whether they will pay for it. If it is not a billable event, it is dead time which directly impacts on your bottom line.

There Is A Better Way...

Suitebox is an elegant product that cuts travel time to nothing. It allows you to meet with people in a secure online space that both of you can return to again and again and again. The best part is that Suitebox allows you to conduct online the nitty-gritty stuff of business that you previously had to do face-to-face.

From positively identifying people; to the delivery of presentations and proposals; to preparing, collaborating and signing documents; to recording the whole meeting - or just the signing part for compliance purposes; Suitebox does it all.

And for the low price per user per month (assuming your standard meetings run for 60 minutes), you can have as many Suitebox meetings as there are hours in the day. Based on the numbers we did above e.g. $150 per hour profit, you will have paid for Suitebox with just 20 mins travel saved a month.

What About My Clients?

Now, I've never met an advisor who doesn't travel to at least one client a month, but let's assume for the sake of the argument, that you do not travel to see clients.

Your clients still travel to see you... if they are running a business, you are costing them billable time...

Suitebox allows your clients to cut down on THEIR costs of engaging and maintaining you as their advisor.

Whether you travel or not, in a faster, cheaper, greener world, by saving your clients the cost of travel, Suitebox could actually become your edge in client acquisition and retention.

Now, that goes far beyond merely surviving, to thriving in the new fee-for-service world...

Picture this:

You have been given a new job. That job has processes for which you are responsible. How do you learn what you need to do down to the finest detail?

“Go to the Document Management System” (DMS), your colleagues intone. “It is our business bible – the font of all knowledge”.

Now, to be fair, I have never come across a DMS that has everything you will ever need to know already in it. However, I’m going to assume that your DMS is somehow magically completely up to date, and that everything you need to know is in there somewhere.

But how do you find what you are looking for? You’d ask the previous person responsible – but they became a movie cliché last week as they were walked from the building carrying a box of stuff. So what do you do? Conduct a word search? Scan through a gargantuan folder structure that was created 10 years ago using descriptors that no longer have any currency? Ask the DMS Librarian where to find it? Or find the DMS evangelists and ask them to coffee?

Most people do all four. Sometimes they hit the jackpot early on, but more often than not, they do not, and getting the information they need to be excellent becomes a grind. In the process, they inevitably hit the DMS wall – the single point of failure for these well-meaning and sometimes beautifully constructed libraries of information:

Lack of Context

An information resource is only as good as its ability to turn that information into usable knowledge. Arguably, all knowledge is usable simply because it exists, and the innovation process is a critical development path of information that may not be instantly usable – but is expected to be over the medium to longer term. However, in today’s fast paced world, if you are not innovating, information only becomes usable knowledge when it can be connected quickly to the problem at hand i.e. when it can be placed into immediate context. If you are into equations, knowledge could be represented like this:

Context + Information = Knowledge

Imagine if your problem had a process for systematically working through it… Imagine if you could connect the information available around this process directly into the process… Or to the role to which the process has been assigned… Or to the department in which the process resides… Or to the business that contains the department…

Imagine if you could explore the information required to do your job excellently in a way that makes sense to what you are doing right now…

Ok. Stop Imagining.

XSol’s structured process modeller provides the missing link. While it has many uses, from a DMS point of view, XSol’s structured process modeller creates the context that your DMS stuffed full of information desperately needs.

And if you do not have a DMS - just an ad-hoc folder structure somewhere, XSol can easily become the central point for accessing it. So the knowledge equation above becomes more like this:

XSol + Information = Knowledge

If you deal in process management, business improvement, HR, OH & S, or you just want to understand what the heck happens and who is responsible for what goes on in your office/ department/business, XSol might be for you.