Consulting

We pride ourselves on our relationships with highly talented, experienced consultants who, because they are independent and unaffiliated with large consulting firms, are difficult for clients to locate.

For every project, we assemble the necessary expertise to ensure clients' complete satisfaction. In fact, we practice what we preach: WE GUARANTEE IT!

Please download our Guarantee Capability Statement

Senior managers must achieve results fast

Narrowly-focused initiatives are unlikely to get the job done unless a specific, tightly defined fix is needed. Creating significant performance improvement across a broad front of activities involves many parts of an organization, all of which are interrelated. Like a set of gears, movement in one part affects the rest.

The challenge is to create stretch goals mated to an improvement plan, designed to speed up an organization's "gears" while keeping them synchronized. Otherwise, an increase in the speed of one gear will be constrained by the slower moving gears to which it is connected. A carefully designed, integrated change initiative is the first step in creating a solution to this challenge. However, the solution cannot be so broad that it sinks under its own weight. We believe that the answer to this challenge is for a performance-improvement initiative to be rooted in what we define as a Catalyst Concept.

A Catalyst Concept:

• Is simple
• Alters your perspective
• Reveals new, value-creation opportunities
• Creates urgency and the need for rapid change

We use the following catalyst concepts in our consulting work:

• Service Entropy Reduction
• Extraordinary Guarantees

Service Entropy Reduction

In a Harvard Business Review article, “The Profitable Art of Service Recovery,” Dr. Hart defined service recovery as “…turning a failure into an opportunity you wish you never had.” Since then, extensive research has demonstrated the impact of effective service recovery on customers’ loyalty, price sensitivity and word-of-mouth impact in the marketplace (the importance of which our studies show is far greater than generally realized).

Enter The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates, first, that service failures are irreversible and, second, that recovery is impractical if not impossible in many cases. The result is service entropy, which, in technical terms, is defined as “the measure of energy wasted and no longer available for productive use.” Practically speaking, service entropy saps a business’s profitability and often creates “service fractures” that destroy customer trust, employee morale, organizational standards, and—most important—a firm’s market value.

Service-entropy reduction is a leading-edge methodology for identifying and eliminating entropy “leaks.” It is designed to increase service-process stability through systems and feedback loops designed specifically for your business. A service-entropy reduction project starts with understanding what entropy is, why it occurs and what it costs. This leading-edge consulting approach will reveal major sources of untapped profits.

For more information, contact us.

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Extraordinary Guarantees

Just as JIT forced factories to excel by removing the "stocked-warehouse safety net," an explicit commitment to customer satisfaction at any cost creates an unparalleled, galvanizing force in an organization to ensure that customers are satisfied -- period. Clients say that an extraordinary guarantee forces them to do what they should have done anyway, and further, that without it, such progress in a compressed time frame would have been impossible.

For more information, contact us.

"I cannot overstate the impact the 100% satisfaction guarantee had on Hampton Inn and Embassy Suites."
	Michael Rose Chairman Gaylord Enterprises

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