I understand that this letter is to help identify a waypoint on a journey for Valley Signs and Surveys. We started the company as simply a way to earn a living. As we evolved it became more of mission to provide service to our stake holders:
1. Employees are our primary stakeholders and providing a stable work environment for them is critical to any success.
2. Our customers are stakeholders who have problems that require care and compassion.
They are often at the mercy of their customers and desperate for reasonable solutions. Our mission is to work to achieve a positive result for them in all they entrust to us.
3. Our Venders are stakeholders who partner with us to help us perform. They need reliable and trustworthy customers who can be counted on meet payment obligations in a timely manner.
As we grew as a company we discovered deficiencies in our accounting, scheduling and HR practices that contributed to significant friction and loss of potential profit. We worked to improve on our own for some time placing great people in key roles and developing a structure to be able to scale to.
In placing individuals in key positions and experiencing some success with delegating we came to realize
that we needed some help in developing systems to help our team to thrive.
A list of some of the systems I feel are key are as follows:
-Estimating proof which identifies break even and preplanned profit.
-Shop Scheduling which is showing great promise.
-Cash Forecasting system which allows us to plan our payments to maintain our cashflow.
-Employee evaluation system to help us give objective feedback and identify individual and
group strengths and weaknesses.
-A budget is now in place to help us measure financial performance and make course
adjustments in a timely fashion.
Our time with Cogent Analytics has been a good learning experience and has helped provide a basic set of systems that we can start working and making our own. I look forward to seeing what the future holds as we move forward with a clearer vision.
Nick Joy, President
Valley Signs and Surveys
