Consult

Consulting

Business Plans

“People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” How much cash will you need to kick off the business? Will you advertise in traditional ways or use guerilla tactics? How many people do you need, with what skills and at what stage? What is the competition, the barriers to entering the market in that business?

Web Services

Phone books report that they have lost 85% of their active users to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. The internet has almost entirely replaced the yellow pages phone book and become the undisputed primary resource of company research.

Write a Business Plan

Business Startups

Kicking off the business can be a daunting task.  However, this is one of the most important stages, when you have the chance to get it off on the right foot.  Our experienced professionals have been there, and worked in environments from the kitchen table to the Board Room.  They can help you find the things, the places, the people and the time to get things going.  The organization will inevitably change over time as the skill sets will be different on day one from what is needed down the road.  It’s all in the plan.

 

We usually don't plan to fail, we just fail to plan. How much cash will you need to kick off the business?  Will you advertise in traditional ways or use guerilla tactics?  How many people do you need, with what skills and at what stage?  What is the competition, the barriers to entering the market in that business?

Employee Policies & Procedures

Before you hire your first employee, you should have thought through and documented all of the terms and conditions involved in working with you, and in the states you operate in.  With differing numbers of employees you have certain obligations regulated by the state.  Most importantly, you must get them to do what you need done as efficiently (with the least cost) as possible.  Happy employees have the best potential to generate profits for your enterprise.  Surprises about your rules and working methods do not usually lead to happy employees.

Commerce International will help you develop a handbook of workplace terms and conditions that meets your business needs, while ensuring compliance with state and federal employment regulations.  Further, we can help write position descriptions with measurable components and estimate time needed to accomplish these positions after the learning curve, leading to minimization of labor cost.

 

It starts with knowing what you need and how much of it.  Should you hire or outsource?  Having a position description for each person you hire and knowing how long it should take (in the real world) to do each task will help you find the person(s) you need and what skills they need to bring to the table.  You may think “wow, the kitchen is never getting cleaned up!”  Do you hire a maintenance manager, or add that task to an admin who has time on his or her hands?  Maybe you feel that accounting is not giving you the information you need o a timely basis, but do you hire a Controller, or would an Accounts Receivable clerk give a talented Full Charge Bookkeeper the time they need to crank out financials in real time?

After ensuring everyone knows their role in the company and has the skills to perform it, the next thing is ensuring your wages and benefits are attractive to the people you need now and in the future.  We can look at compensation rates on different levels and help adjust your policies to stay within budget but get the most high performing people on your team.

Finally, if there is a clunker in your group, there is a right way and a wrong way to remedy the situation.  After decades of management experience, we can help make it as quick and painless as possible.

We can also write ads and screen candidates, so that you can spend the least possible time hiring the best people to help in your venture.

Regulatory Compliance & Safety

OSHA, EPA, Storm water Pollution Prevention, HAZMAT, MSDS, Yes, we actually know what these all mean and what needs to be done in your particular circumstances to ensure your workers are safe and the various agencies do not issue fines or worse.

Accounting & Taxes

Accounting is thought of as the ‘necessary evil’ in business, but the most successful business owners know it is how they can keep their ‘finger on the pulse’ if they have the right systems in place.  By looking at certain key statistics on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, they can see quickly if something is wrong, or if their decisions are generating the results they wanted.

Nirvana for an accountant is when all transactions that affect the business automatically flow through the accounting system from deciding how many products to make, buying the components of the products to actually shipping the finished goods out to customers and receiving payment.

Both of the principle partners of Commerce International have been CFOs in various size companies, including their own.  From Excel Spreadsheets to complicated fully integrated accounting systems, they have done it all.  They will help determine what is right for you based on the size and cost, then get it implemented all the way through to the reporting you need to manage your business the way you want.

Technology

Are you a MAC or a PC?  Technology has come so far in the past thirty five years from IBM card punch machines to 32 gig flash drives, and quad core duo processors.  Do you want a completely paper free office?  How much of the data you need to run your business can be obtained without data entry?  Key strokes on a computer are the enemy, because they so often lead to mistakes:  a missed digit, transposition, too many digits, a bad part number.

We will help get the right technology in to ensure the highest quality information is used in the execution of your business.  Although the principles have done some light programming in the past, their expertise is best used to find and communicate with the right people who can do it efficiently.

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High Performance Workplace

The business case for creating high performance workplaces is increasingly strong, with studies in sectors as diverse as steel mills, automotive plants, banking, retail and healthcare.

They show that good management of people leads to improvements in performance measures such as productivity, profit, new products to market and customer satisfaction.

Some key examples include:

• In a study of 968 US firms in 1995, the researcher Mark Huselid found that organizations using progressive people management techniques made $27,000 more sales and $4,000 more profit per employee. For a company employing 10,000 staff this equates to roughly $27 million more profit - well worth having!
• Malcolm Patterson and colleagues at Sheffield University, in their 1997 study of 67 manufacturing firms in the UK showed that 19% of productivity and 18% of profitability was explained by the use of high performance people management
• A study of 366 UK firms published in 2003 by David Guest at King's College showed that high performance management was strongly linked to lower staff turnover and higher profits per employee
• Michael West and colleagues at Aston Business School, examining hospitals in the NHS in 2003, showed that high performance people management was linked to lower patient mortality rates and higher quality of care, having controlled for other factors such as number of doctors per bed

The key point about the evidence above it is that rather than just rhetoric, there is now strong research evidence that getting the people element right really does make a bottom-line difference. There are really six elements that go into designing truly high performance organizations. These elements are often described as the Star Model because if you visualize a pentagonal shape with a five-pointed star, each point depicts the key features of an organization: strategy, structure, rewards, processes, and people. The glue that holds this all together is in the center of the star: the organizational culture. All points on the star are interconnected. This is an important point to understand because this shows that organizational success or effectiveness requires a good alignment or fit among all elements.

Core to achieving high performance is the firm’s strategy. The strategy needs to define the capabilities and competencies that are needed to enhance performance and responsiveness. The right strategy, however, without the right structure to support that strategy can often lead to less than optimal performance or even failure. The challenge for management is to develop an approach to organizing that considers all of the elements and how they fit together to create an organization with the right strategy, competencies, and capabilities to succeed.

Structure is how people are grouped together, who reports to whom, how tasks are assigned, and the nature of the jobs. Because these decisions are basic building blocks, they must be closely articulated with strategy. They largely determine how the organization will behave, what people are needed, and what reward systems will work.

Proof Reading

We are probably not experts in your business field, so you will have to write copy for ads, websites, training materials, etc.  Either your external customers or your internal customers will read this material, and it will make an impression on them (hopefully multiple impressions).  It is important to make a good, professional impression if you want your external customers to work with you or buy from you.  Your internal customers (employees, investors, colleagues) should also get the best impression so they will convey the highest regards for you to those you don’t reach directly.

With over 80 years experience writing and reading business documents, in addition to newspaper experience and a journalism major, we can check each document or web page for spelling, grammar, usage and punctuation.  We can understand what feel you are going for and make sure the words you publish create that feel.

Incorporation

There are many reasons to incorporate or form a Limited Liability Company. You must register in each state that you will do business in, you should limit your personal liability and that of your employees, and you should protect your assets from lawsuits.