Companies often state that their employees are their most valuable assets, however many of them talk the talk but fail to walk the walk.
Neil Belenkie, COO of Growth Point Group, a Vancouver-based organization of senior business leaders who work with company owners to build their companies when they can’t do it on their own, echoes this sentiment.
The GrowthPoint Group typically works with companies that have $10 to $50 million in annual revenue, are owner-operated and privately held.
These companies are generally not achieving their goals or have a material event planned and think they won’t achieve it. For example, company owners may want to sell their company and think its not worth what it could be; or they are trying to achieve revenue growth or a profitability margin and can’t figure out how to do it themselves.
What makes GrowthPoint different from other business consultants is that once it completes its discovery session and creates a roadmap or strategic plan for a company, it stays on and sees that plan to fruition.
The roadmap is project-based and easily identifies the necessary skills required to complete each project.
The ownership group of the organization looks at the roadmap with GrowthPoint and says, “OK, we have the resources and expertise to take on the following projects, but we can’t handle or even know how to handle project.”
GrowthPoint then takes responsibility for all aspects of that strategy and its implementation, matching the skill sets required with members of its seasoned team of experts, which includes former executives from Vodafone and WestJet. The experts then go in to complete the project.
Belenkie noted, “We have yet to encounter an organization where human capital isn’t a problem or even the problem keeping them from achieving their goals.”
That means clients haven’t been able to develop an organization that can support the growth they’re looking for, they haven’t been able to put the people together who represent enough credibility and proven experience that investors will trust them and they don’t have the people who are skilled enough to bring new people on board to support the organization’s growth.
“Essentially you are investing in your human capital when you bring the GrowthPoint Group in,” said Belenkie.
Belenkie was responsible for the human resources portion of a project with Kamloops-based home-builder and developer the Mibroc Group.
He developed the organizational chart to support the company’s growth, then had to phase in that growth and hire according to that phasing.
“I actually took care of the hiring of all the different positions to support their organizational growth to support their objectives,” said Belenkie. “So before we could really build the revenue portion of the business we had to build the infrastructure to support the business growth.”
Since May of 2010, the GrowthPoint Group has helped Mibroc hire 15 employees.
President and CEO of Mibroc Darryl Caunt exclaimed, “They’ve been excellent in helping me create the opportunity to attract the right people. And retain the right people. And that is the magic.”
Caunt noted the significantly unique aspects of the Growth Point Group are that it has a truly hands-on approach and the expertise within its partnership allows it to come in at a moment’s notice with the ability to execute.
“I’ve gone through two other business consultants in the past five years,” said Caunt. “They had good ideas but it wasn’t as in-depth or integrated as the GrowthPoint model.”
The private sector is not the only one that can benefit from this hands-on approach to business development.
Belenkie said an added benefit of Mibroc’s work with the GrowthPoint Group is the fact that four of GrowthPoint’s partners are represented on the organizational chart of Mibroc’s website, showing where the expertise is and what they have access to. This expertise can be leveraged for future investments.
This type of foot-in-the-door consulting often takes place in the non-profit sector when charities can’t afford the full-time specialists they need.
Rose Terzariol, vice-president of Ketchum Canada Inc., a fundraising consultancy in Vancouver, works exclusively with not-for-profits that need some kind of expertise or service that is not provided in-house.
She says that because the business of fundraising has changed and become more sophisticated, these organizations need someone with expertise in the short term for the duration of a campaign or initiative.
“If they are doing a capital campaign and don’t have the resources internally to do it and they don’t want to hire because the campaign will be over in a year or two, we come in and provide more intensive counsel, whether it be two, three, four or five days a week,” said Terzariol.
She also noted a trend she has seen in recent years toward not simply providing human capital on an as-needed basis, but creating long-lasting legacies within a specific non-profit.
“We can come in and work with them intensively to help build their organization and leave employees with a specific skill set. So next campaign down the road they have that experience in house. We are working intensively to build capacity in the shorter term.”