The founders of gFour Marketing Group Inc. reached out to The Profit Recipe to help them manage their company’s rapid growth and find a way to delegate better. They are happy they did.
On the surface, Miami-based gFour Marketing Group hardly looked like a company that needed help growing when it hired The Profit Recipe in November 2017.
The company had been growing 30 to 50 percent a year helping high-volume home improvement contractors and service providers establish and run relationship marketing programs. But its co-founders and owners Brian and Adi Kaskavalciyan understood that rapid growth poses its own challenge when it comes to building a business – and the lives they wanted.
“We understood that the skills that we developed to get our company to that point weren’t the skills that we needed to grow it to the next level,” recalled gFour Co-founder and Profit Growth Consultant Adi Kaskavalciyan. “We are going to have to pick up a new skill set and a new mindset to help get us where we are striving to be. It’s like they say, “What got you here, won’t get you there.”
Prior to working with The Profit Recipe to implement the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), for instance, gFour would plan for its annual goal based purely on sales numbers it wanted to achieve.
“We had a vague idea about the team we needed to build but that was it,” said Kaskavalciyan. “The clarity that the EOS process has provided about the organization we need to build has been amazing.”
One area the couple wanted help with was communicating their vision so that they could rely on employees to run the business day-to-day and free up time for themselves to focus on scaling the business to grow even faster.
“We had never really sat down and structured a plan to say this is where we are going to be one year from now, two years, five years,” said Kaskavalciyan. “What are our core values? What will drive us as an organization?”
Given their hiring needs, the Kaskavalciyans realized this was something they could not put off. In November 2017, they hired The Profit Recipe and got to work.
Upping client engagement
The Profit Recipe took the gFour leadership team through the 6 EOS components of entrepreneurial success laid out in Gino Wickman’s book Traction. This included not just discovering the company’s vision but learning how to set and measure progress against quarterly goals – known as “rocks” in EOS parlance –and implement them through weekly “Level 10” meetings.
One of the first rocks the gFour team broke down was client engagement. After signing up for its relationship marketing program, gFour clients were not using it as much as expected. Using the Level 10 weekly meeting process prescribed by EOS, gFour leaders determined they were not providing customers enough training on how to use its system; so gFour committed to developing a new training program and hiring a team of account managers and junior account managers to train and support customers via regularly scheduled follow-up calls.
“It’s helped new customers who came in 2018,” said Kaskavalciyan. “We’ve noticed a substantial increase in client retention and satisfaction. As a result, we’ve gotten more reviews. Clients feel more confident in launching our program.”
The vision building process and Level 10 meetings have also given the Kaskavalciyans the tools they needed to align employees around their goals.
The “Aha!” moment
“The biggest ‘Aha!’ moment came when we realized that there were people on the team that did not live and breathes our core values,” said Kaskavalciyan.
That included an employee who excelled at creating systems and processes the company needed in its first two years, but who had become an obstacle to growth because they were not good at sharing their expertise with others to build a team. In January 2018, just two months after gFour engaged The Profit Recipe and five years after joining gFour, the employee resigned.
“It was a relief we didn’t have to fire her,” Kaskavalciyan said. “Firing is never fun. She auto-deselected herself because she wasn’t going where the rest of us were going. She did not share our core values.”
Among the four core values gFour developed with The Profit Recipe’s help is “Be a team player. Every individual’s performance affects the team’s success. At gFour we rely on one another, hold each other accountable and share in the overall success of the team.”
“It worked out well because there was someone already in the organization who lived our core values, who got it, who wanted to be in a larger leadership role and who eventually just kind of moved into that role and she’s awesome,” Kaskavalciyan continued.
The company has since hired seven people, including interns, using a list of interview questions designed to elicit whether candidates align with its core values and will fit well with the team. It’s on track to grow 40 to 45 percent in 2018 and gFour is now looking for a sales manager and VP of marketing.
“There is no question anymore as to what G4 is, what are our goals and where we are going,” said Kaskavalciyan. With a clear vision and meeting pulse, now they are all rowing in the same direction to achieve the vision faster.
Empower your Leadership Team and improve efficiency, increase value, and foster collaboration to get better results. A professional Facilitator can ensure that all of your members are on the same page, so you can kick your business up a notch. Connect with The Profit Recipe to Achieve Traction.