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ABB Global Sales Group

Project: Financially Strategic Selling

ABB is a global engineering firm with over 100,000 employees operating in 100 companies. Their sales professionals are trained intensively in product sales. When the company transitioned them to a consultative sales approach tailored to its global corporate customers, it required the sales team to meet with C-level decision makers for whom financial issues are a primary concern. Financial Decision Maker’s two-day training gave ABB's sales people the financial acumen to confidently address these issues with their customer's corporate executives and to better articulate the value of ABB's products and services to their customers.

Strum Foods

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Project: Making a Difference at Sturm Foods

This family-owned, private-label food manufacturer was purchased by a private equity group, which installed a new management team. The team's objective was to move from a family-owned culture to one focused on business management and performance. Michael Higgins and his team designed a four-hour program the company could rollout to all 400 employees, with the largest group being workers on the line. Using business acumen and financial awareness as the content, the program changed the company's culture to engage everyone in making a difference. Following the program, employees and their supervisors began meeting regularly to brainstorm ways to improve key performance measures. Sturm's CFO, Rob Reugger, estimated his potential cost of goods and expense savings from the training @ $5,000,000.

Steelcase

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Project: Understanding EVA at Steelcase

Steelcase had a problem. To tie its employee bonuses directly to the company's financial success, the company picked a bottom line performance measure called EVA. EVA - Economic Value Added - is a complex formula but put in plain terms, measures financial success that company managers and employees can mostly control. Because of the complexity of the measure, company personnel viewed the new system with confusion, wondering if it was really a good deal or in their best interests as management insisted. Understand EVA at Steelcase was a custom 3-hour training that put EVA in laymen's terms for the whole employee population at Steelcase.  After developing the program, our team trained Steelcase trainers to deliver it. The program was a huge success and was eventually delivered to a worldwide audience of over 10,000 Steelcase personnel.

Almatis

Project: Growing Cash Flow, Profits and Return

Almatis was formerly a division of the Alcoa Corporation that was purchased by private equity firm Rhone Capital. The new owners asked our team to design a two-day training program for managers in the U.S. and Europe that focused on general financial acumen and two crucial bottom line drivers: EBITDA and cash flow objectives. In the year following the training, the management team reduced cost by $14 million. In Year Two, the team improved cash flow by 11% with additional EBITDA improvement of $11 million in Year Two, and $14 million in Year Three. These savings came six years after the company had started and invested major resources in its Lean Manufacturing program.

​BOC Gasses

Project: How We Make Money at BOC Gases

BOC Gases had a two-part strategic plan: 1) Make all of their 2,500 North American (and eventually a much larger worldwide audience) employees literate on performance; 2) Empower the employees and  managers to “huddle” together to improve financial performance. Dan Meyerson, senior training designer at BOC, employed Michael Higgins and his team to design “How We Make Money at BOC Gases” and train BOC trainers to deliver the workshop. The financial “huddle” process was powerfully successful. For example, one idea from one of their drivers saved the company over $60,000 per year.Type your paragraph here.