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How much of our time will be required?

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It many respects, your time requirement is your choice.  We recognize that your business continues on a daily basis, and our business advisors are highly experienced at improving a running business while daily operations continue.  One of the advantages of engaging Texas Consilium is that we can focus on leading the improvements, freeing your time and focus to continue doing what you do best.

Diagnostic Analysis & Action Plan

Our first phase with many new clients is to perform a Diagnostic Analysis & Action Plan, which generally requires about four weeks of calendar time — but very little of you or your team’s time because we’re doing the heavy work.  Here are your typical time requirements during this initial month:

  • Employees – We will hold a 10-minute employee meeting with you to introduce the business improvement initiative, followed by an employee survey which each employee can complete in about 30 minutes online or on paper on their own schedule.
  • Information Gathering – We will provide you with a list of documents and other information for our review, including financial statements or a backup of your accounting data, business plans, policy & procedure manuals, marketing materials and similar information so we can holistically understand your business.  We will also tour your business for a visual overview of operations.  Gathering this information can often be done with us by one key employee in 1-4 hours.
  • Leadership Survey – In addition to the employee surveys, we ask the top leaders to also complete a Business Issues Questionnaire, which generally requires no more than 15 minutes.
  • Findings Review Meeting – About three weeks after we begin, we will meet with you and your leadership team to share our findings.  The purpose of this meeting is to assure that our understanding of the facts and our analysis of your business is correct before we prepare the action plan based on these findings.  Allow up to 2 hours with your key leaders.
  • Presentation Meeting – About a week after our Findings Review Meeting, we will return to share your completed Diagnostic Analysis & Action with you and your leadership team.  The purpose of this meeting is to expand on the facts and analysis with a prioritized action plan for your improvement journey.  Upon completion of this presentation, we can move with confidence into the initial steps of your Improvement Program.  Allow up to 2 hours with your leadership team.

In summary, since Texas Consilium does almost all of our work for your Diagnostic Analysis behind the scenes, you and your team’s time requirement ranges from less than 1 hour per person to about 5 hours over the course of a month.  Based on a 160 hour work month, that’s only 1 to 3% of your time, leaving 97 to 99% of your time to continue doing what you do.

Your Improvement Program

As we move into your improvement program, of course, you and your team are welcome to become as involved in the improvement process as you have the time and interest to spare.  You can have Texas Consilium develop and implement a turn-key improvement program, we can collaborate and actively work together on improvement, or you can take a significant role under our guidance.  Our only requirement of your time is this statement from our Master Services Agreement:

So that there shall be a continual meeting of the minds between TXC and Company, Company agrees to stay informed as to the progress of the work and promptly communicate any questions or concerns to TXC personnel so they may be addressed.

Improvement activities are phased to focus on the most important and highest-return issues first, with as little disruption to your operations as possible.  What we often find is that as inefficient processes are automated or otherwise modified, employee time requirements are reduced by the improvement process rather than added on top.

Opportunity cost is the greatest cost of almost every business, so we want to move as quickly as we can since every day wasted is lost forever.  Part of our improvement program management is to find that balance of benefits, adapting our speed and activity to your availability and business rhythm.