Cornerstone Principals ... work with clients in an advisory relationship.

Typically, leaders of small businesses find advisory support to be the most cost-effective means of accessing consulting assistance. An advisory relationship allows clients to access timely advice and support from a highly knowledgeable and experienced consultant at a price they can afford. Our approach is based on a collaborative process that begins with establishing a mutual understanding of the business issues and the forces affecting them. The consultant’s role is to be a “sounding board” while offering outside perspective and insightful judgment regarding the client’s situation. Ultimately, the advisor’s value lies in his ability to help the client think through the issues and assist in their successful resolution.

Ownership ... It is a key assumption of this approach that the business leader must participate in the process of diagnosing what may be wrong, or missing. The client must be actively involved in the process of generating a remedy because only the client ultimately knows what is possible and what will work in their particular culture and business situation. The advisor’s role is to assist the client in successfully addressing their business issues. The advisor brings proven approaches to assist the client in analyzing and diagnosing a situation and then making sound business decisions. Advisory engagements have specific goals and timelines to ensure that the support provided is value creating.

Trust ... A close working relationship between client and advisor is based on competency and trust. Trust can only be built over time. Therefore, both the client and the advisor must invest the time necessary to build a close working relationship. Candid and frank discussions between client and advisor about the business, its ownership issues, its people, and its performance are the relationship’s building blocks.

Process ... To start, the advisor facilitates the discovery of the underlying forces impacting business performance and ownership concerns. Next, the advisor’s knowledge, experience and insight will enable the client to gain a more objective assessment of the issue, its relevant factors, and what the options are for resolving it. To find implementable solutions to challenging issues, the business leader must own the issue, as well as the needed actions to resolve it. In truth, only the client can judge what is possible, and what will work in their unique culture and business situation.

Business leaders ask our advice in dealing with many issues, but three are especially critical:

Culture … Understanding culture is mission critical. One of the keys to our success is our insight. We can quickly assess an organization's management process and the culture created by it. Having the right culture enables a company to increase its capacity to produce, to change or adapt, to encourage innovation and to profitably grow.

 

Leadership … Developing management and nurturing leaders is a key challenge for any business leader. By definition, leadership focuses on the future to anticipate the need for change. Management, on the other hand, focuses on the present by maintaining order and control. For a leadership development process to be successful it must provide managers with knowledge, learning, coaching, and challenging experiences. Leadership qualities can only be seen when managers interact with others, and work through issues of both change and complexity.

Underperformance ... Our principals work directly with owners, presidents and general managers to assist and support improvement initiatives that achieve measurable, sustainable results. We provide a structured diagnostic process for understanding performance inhibitors and cost driving activities. It is a rigorous process that demands objective, fact-based analysis. We dig deep to uncover profitless revenue, broken processes, and valueless resource consumption. Our focus is always on providing insightful, cross-organizational solutions that support business strategy, and anticipate changing market conditions.

Difficult management issues are solved jointly with our clients, not for them. Often, we are asked to train, guide and facilitate client project team. In such cases, we intensely train team members in the use of best practices, methodologies and tools. Then we work closely with the team leader to guide and direct their efforts. However, to realize sustainable improvement the client's people must always be the real agents of change.