Meier is a mid-size asphalt and concrete paving company located in the St. Louis, MO area with sales in the mid $20 million range. After seeing the company faltering and experiencing some rough years, management changes were made to turn the company around and after a few years progress was being made. We received in invitation from Cogent Analytics in the fall of 2021 to perform a Discovery Review. This review is designed to our needs and is designed to analyze our current state of business. We jumped at the change to get a full blown review for a very modest price.  We expected to see many processes of focus that had been approved as strong, knew we had some weaknesses and were excited to use the experience to get a great overview of the current state and provide us with a clear roadmap of priorities on which to focus.
Cogent certainly provided this current state with clarity. What they presented, however, was far from what we expected. While we had made progress in many areas, we suffered from a lack of leadership and accountability. We realized we needed to act quickly to correct these deficiencies and agreed to a 10-12 week consulting engagement and LifeCycle agreement for a quarterly checkup after the initial engagement.
Gregg Jones with Cogent ran our engagement and provided a focus and assistance on every area identified as needing improvement for our firm. While the process was not inexpensive, we feel the benefits well outweigh the expense. The goals that we are confident we will achieve will provide for a 4-1 profit improvement over the cost of the engagement.  In our case, Cogent’s knowledge, recognition, and business partnerships helped us justify a several million-dollar ERC refund that our current attorney’s and CPA assured us was not available. Needless to say, we are overjoyed with this unexpected windfall.
The expertise within Cogent is widespread and very impressive. Unlike many consulting firms I’ve worked with in other companies, Cogent has a mature, experienced team of business experts from leadership, accounting, computer support, tax management, and sales & marketing. We could not endorse Cogent Analytics more strongly.
Sincerely,
Rod Fain
Chief Operating Officer
E. Meier Contracting, Inc.
