Hello. My name is Christine Abela, and I am a business consultant with Oxygen8 Consulting, based in Timaru, New Zealand.
This is a fictional case study, made up from a blend of clients that I have worked with. I want to protect the confidentiality of my clients, but still give you a good overview of what I do.
Meet Bob from Bob’s Plumbing. Before I started working with Bob, he was under a lot of stress. He was working far too many hours in his business. He had started out as a plumber when he left school, working for a local business, and that business did really well. Bob is a good plumber and is really good at getting water from where it is not wanted to where it should be. He saw that his boss was making good money from running his business, and Bob figured he could do the same.
So Bob went out on his own, hired a couple of friends to work with him, and started getting plumbing work.
But five years down the track, Bob’s business was in trouble. He had an annual turnover of $1.8 million, five employees, and was struggling to find enough work for them in a competitive environment.
He had a free meeting with me, Christine Abela from Oxygen8 Consulting. I asked him some really tough questions, and gave him a few pointers. He liked what I said, so he booked a second free meeting with me.
In the second free meeting, we went through a spreadsheet with 66 questions. He rated himself from 1 to 5 depending on how he thought he was doing compared with the ideal business. An example of one of these questions is, “Do you have a current business plan that you work from?”.
If the answer is “Ah, what’s a business plan?”, you give yourself a 1.
But if you’ve had a business plan built in the last few months, and you work from it, you get a 5.
We also fed into the spreadsheet his annual turnover, his expenses, cost of goods sold and wages. The spreadsheet gave him a result known as a Profit leakage figure, which is, theoretically, how much more money Bob could make from his business if he got all the 1, 2, 3 and 4 answers up to 5.
All of these 66 questions covered areas that I can help him with, using Oxygen8’s Business Success Programme. In addition, I bring to the relationship around 30 years of online marketing and programming experience, to help him to grow his business.
Bob decided that it was a no-brainer to work with me. We got started right away, and met weekly for the first two months. During this time, we implemented a lot of “quick win” strategies, and got a proper business plan sorted.
Since then, we have met twice a month, so that I can help make sure he is staying on track and doing what he said he is going to do.
The sorts of things I have helped Bob with include:
– Getting his processes documented so that nothing falls through the cracks, and the business can cope if he gets sick or has a holiday.
– Identifying bottlenecks in his business, so that he can actually scale it and grow it bigger, which is what he wants to do.
– Defining his “A” customers, so that he spends more time chasing the ideal clients and less time chasing those he is going to get anyway.
– Getting his online presence sorted. He now has a proper website with a blog, and lots of social posts come from each blog post so he gets plenty of eyes on his business every day.
– Fixing up his Google Business Profile so that he actually appears on Google for local searches.
– Implementing a state-of-the-art CRM system (or Customer Relationship Management system) to keep track of enquiries properly.
What has been the result? Well, twelve months after starting working with Bob, he has grown from 5 staff to 8, and his annual turnover has grown from $1.8 million to $3 million. He has hired a part-time admin person. He now has weekends off, and Friday afternoons off every week to play golf, compared with the six days a week he was working before. And, he has even had a holiday, well, if you count going to Auckland to visit your mother a holiday.
And the future? Bob and I are going to soon be implementing a SMS marketing campaign that is backed by AI, to reach out to even more clients. He is looking at moving to a bigger location for his yard, and he has ideas about opening another office in another town an hour away.
I hope this has given you some ideas about how I work with clients, and what kind of people I like to work with. They aren’t all tradies, but they all need help.
I’m Christine Abela from Oxygen8 Consulting, and I’ll help to fall in love with your business all over again.
I look forward to hearing from you. Or, to make an appointment to have a chat about your business, please go to
https://calendly.com/d/yy3-245-vtp
Short Guitar Clip by Audionautix – Artist: http://audionautix.com/