Brothers in Business

Brothers Reno and Dustin Heon founded AccuAir in 2001 and grew the company from a shoestring budget. Like many business owners, they were experts in their industry, but had very little business experience and had been learning everything on their own. Their company nearly doubled in size each year between 2007 and 2009, and they knew they needed solutions. They struggled from lack of infrastructure, had serious management issues, and inconsistency in their focus. They didn’t have an established approach for managing the company.

“Essentially when we were sitting down and originally trying to determine how we were going to advance the company and become more efficient, we looked at bringing somebody like Collaboration on. We looked at maybe hiring a really skilled manager, somebody that’s got a lot of experience. The bottom line was we felt like if we hired somebody we were bringing this one person in and if it didn’t work out or once he left, we essentially lost those skills.

Whereas bringing Collaboration on, we were teaching ourselves how to run our company better and that was something that we were always going to have. So we felt like it was a better investment for the company and for us. And that’s exactly what we’ve gotten. How to utilize our time and how to focus, that’s something we’re never going to lose and we’re always going to run our company with that kind of direction now. Huge value.”

Process & Solutions:
They first aligned their responsibilities within the company for the partnership and their current employees. As partners, they identified their strengths and defined their responsibilities to prevent overlapping. With regular check-ins, they saw a huge improvement in their communication and efficiency. Once that was established, they were able to diagnose their sales pipeline and process.

“We set sales targets and break-even numbers that we had never looked at before. We hadn’t ever hit our break-even numbers because we didn’t know what they were. Within about a three month period, we hit our sales targets consistently. It was a real eye-opener and a huge accomplishment for us and for what Collaboration had done for us.”

They examined their sales pipeline, which was a new concept. In the past, they put efforts into marketing and attended numerous trade shows, but it hadn’t been yielding results. In working with their consultants, Michael Gunther and Lee Johnson, they realized that they had more than 1,000 leads they had been ignoring—900 of 1,100 people they had never personally contacted. By creating a process to manage their leads and a schedule for moving forward, their sales pipeline was in progress. They learned that they might have to make contact with each lead nine or 10 times before they generated a sale, and that once the lead became a client they needed to maintain that relationship.

“We broke down each of our hours and set targets on how much time we should spend on new leads and on current customers, keeping them moving. We used to approach new markets once every two months, and they taught us that we had to spend two hours a week consistently approaching each of those markets. As our time and our focus got more evenly spread and applied to the company, the results and the outcomes started to become more consistent. And that was just a tremendous improvement and change for us.”

Results:
“We’ve exceeded our 2009 sales by one-third, so we’ve grown the company in a rough economic time and that’s a huge accomplishment!”

After completing six months of consulting, their processes and sales pipeline are in place, and they are now extending their engagement and shifting focus to the production and fulfillment side.

“No matter how long you’ve been running your company and think you have certain things figured out you can always benefit from bringing somebody on that’s got a different point of view and an outside perspective, and a ton of actual experience, because they can shed light on things you never knew were a problem. As owners we have to be the most efficient we can be. There’s no slack for leaving little inefficiencies in the process.”

“Collaboration has become such a part of our team and has as much knowledge about our company and its interworkings as we do, that is such an asset to us. There was no way we were going to completely walk away from that. As time progresses we are always going to have Collaboration as part of our team.”