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Minnesota Technology Magazine - Winter 2007

THE FINAL WORD

THE BIG PICTURE

—Dick Pedersen
MTI business services consultant
dpedersen@mntech.org
Photograph by Brett Schreck.

Dick Pedersen, Minnesota Technology Inc.

Editor’s note: Starting with this issue, we’re introducing a new column. The idea is to let MTI’s business services consultants offer their unique insights and opinions on the issues facing the state’s manufacturing and technology firms.

One of the perks of my job as a business consultant with MTI is helping to plan and then attending a CEO roundtable group that we put on. The participants include nine to 10 people who own small to medium-sized companies in southern Minnesota. Their businesses operate in a range of industries, from food to heavy equipment. I feel fortunate to have had a chance to get to know these CEOs and their companies well through the roundtable and my regular consulting work. The CEOs themselves are older and younger, men and women, self-taught, and highly educated. But they share several characteristics.

First, they all make proprietary products. They all have companies that they want to see grow. They are all smart people who are always on the lookout for new ideas and solutions. One reason CEOs participate in the roundtables (MTI regularly puts on five of them around the state) is to share ideas and problems and gain insight from their peers. They know that even the most talented CEO is not good at every aspect of business but needs to see the big picture and supplement his or her own insights with information and advice from the outside.

They also all have complicated jobs and need to understand every part of their business and how the parts fit together. They have to manage a range of elements— the shop floor and the back office, marketing and Website development efforts, what the competition is doing. They need to keep an eye on the past— finance—and the future—new product development, strategic planning, and eventually, succession planning.

My role is to be another pair of eyes for the CEO—someone else who is looking at the big picture, the next opportunity, the change in operations that could help the bottom line. I’m not there every day, but I’m “in the neighborhood” often enough to see which problems are recurring and which strengths are propelling the company’s growth—or could be propelling it.

As with the CEOs, it’s MTI’s job to understand the issues affecting the businesses we work with. MTI is best known for its capabilities in promoting operational efficiency. We’ve worked with hundreds of companies on such initiatives as lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, lean office, and value-stream mapping. These services help businesses ensure that they are as competitive as possible and as financially sound and well-run as they can be.

Improving operations, however, is only part of the CEOs job—which is why MTI has added services over the past few years to help firms plan, develop new products, and increase their market share and customer base. We also work with businesses on a range of issues that require special skills—complex IT issues, employee training, and human resource management, among others.

More and more of the companies I work with have been taking advantage of MTI’s strategic positioning services. This program helps firms identify the strengths they already have and the market potential of those strengths. Strategic positioning helps companies pinpoint their most valuable customers and also understand how to increase business with them. These projects often help firms anticipate their customers’ changing expectations so they can get out ahead of those expectations. Other planning tools help companies develop a culture that promotes innovation and new product development. Several of the companies I work with in southern Minnesota have used structured product development processes with good success. We also help clients sell more of the products they already make by conducting a competitive analysis, market segmentation studies, or an Internet competitive analysis. Since I’ve been around a lot longer than the Internet—maybe even than the telegraph—I’m still amazed at how much difference tweaking a Web site can make in both driving prospects to a business and, just as importantly, increasing the amount and quality of interaction a company has with its current customers.

Like other MTI business consultants, I can’t provide the companies I assist with all of these services myself. Part of seeing the big picture is knowing what you don’t know, and finding those with expertise. Fortunately, MTI has a network of talent— both internally and outside our organization—that we draw on for specific services. This allows consultants like me to do what we like best—learn about companies, watch them operate, and help them grow.