The company
The company is a major retailer operating in the UAE with 6 branches.
The Challenge
Upon initial consultation with the leadership, we established 3 key challenges within the business.
- The business could not capitalize on growth opportunities. Its high operating expenses led to inability to budget for change into new areas of business.
- The business could not strike a time or financial balance between obtaining profitable business and expansion into new growth opportunities.
- The business saw resistance for change from leaders and key employees which affected their ability to evolve.
Our Approach
Our approach was to look at three key areas of the business
- Refining the business offering to focus on areas that delivered the best rates of profitability
- Restructuring the talent within the group
- Opening new revenue streams
Refining The Business Offering
When we review the portfolio of the company, we saw that there were numerous products, all with varying cost to profit ratios and varying consumption. We removed the products that were non-performing, low margin or high cost and switched the focus to high turnover, low margin alternatives. This provided the business with a predictable, streamlined income that used less energy than its less profitable products and services. We then built a system to review and streamline processes that were costing the business time, money and energy; in particular, the logistics process. Lastly, we embraced the business’s borrowing efforts. We structured the acquisition of products to ensure that stock being held was balanced with demand. This ensured the company didn’t need to store surplus stock nor borrow funds to hold these stocks.
Restructuring The Talent
By offering a more streamlined portfolio and more efficient processes we could now assess the team and their competencies towards the new offering. We reviewed time schedules and logs to review the level of employees versus their tasks at hand. With this we were able to consolidate multiple roles. This gave us the ability to marry customer needs with employee output, along with reducing unnecessary wage expenses.
One of the biggest parts of this process was achieving the buy-in of the now key staff. Through education and adoption of an operational plan and through the use of individual goal setting with the view of the benefits of the achieved goal, the teams built their own, guided paths to success. This allowed them to envisage and define their roles in the new arena and their importance towards it. This was met with great spirit and bred employee cohesion.
Opening New Revenue Streams
With the move towards a more digitized solution, the company saw the opportunity for the use of online platforms for selling its products. We developed the migration path towards building their own online platform along with harnessing the power of other third-party platforms to move their stock.
The Result
As a result of the actions the company now had an engaged workforce, with reduced expenditure, a profitable portfolio of products and a migration towards a more sustainable, cost effective platform of sales.
In short, the business:
- Continued building its operation towards business excellence without the need to borrow from banks and shareholders
- Became the Benchmark for its industry
- Benefited from a consolidated Supply Chain and Sourcing process which harbored increased sales, profitability and supplier/vendor cohesion
- Swapped a $500k portfolio for a more profitable $1.2m portfolio
- Benefitted from consolidated employee roles and overall wage reductions to allow it to self-fund its e-commerce platform
- Built a team of High Performers that navigated smoothly throughout the Change Management Process
- Grew its operation to 18 Branches (& Growing), including a set of mini-consolidated branches that carry only the high-performing SKUs and serve as the shipment hub for surrounding geographies