25% Growth this Year: The Possible Dream
by Bruce Berg, President, Berg Consulting Group

As a background checking company, you should be growing at a real nice pace. A 10% growth rate in a lot of industries would be praised. In our industry, it is an outright failure.

A large company doing $50,000,000 in background checks might only grow at 10% while you are growing at 50%. But 10% of $50,000,000 is $5,000,000 and there are a lot of background screening companies that would love to just have sales that much leave alone grow that much in a year.

But, is such growth really outside the realm of the possible if you are only a $1,000,000 sales company. Sure at $1,000,000 in sales you are taking home a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year and this is OK. But, what if you could grow to $2 million or $3 million or even $5 million in sales? Seem impossible? Not at all. It just depends on your goals, how you set them, and what you are willing to do to reach them. Heck you could grow that much on the crumbs the bigger companies leave through lesser customer service (no offence, big guys). Not only will you eventually make more profits, your company will be worth more when it comes time to sell.

According to a recent KPMG study of our industry, 50% of companies were looking at sales increases in the 10-25% range and 39% felt they would grow by more than 25%.

To grow, you need superior customer service, a good internal operating system and a solid customer interface to keep your service level up and to keep your costs down, a good network of sources for county crims and other data and an investment in sales people and probably some middle management. As an owner, your task is to move away from the day-to-day details by assigning these to a supervisor and you doing more strategic tasks.

It also helps to be willing to be price competitive when needed and to know that with volume, you can drive down your costs. I have consulted with many clients who just had no idea how high their costs were. They thought they were doing pretty well until they learned otherwise. Then they began to take action to improve things and not only were these owners happier, their employees really liked it better working for a company that was superior, not just OK.

The point is ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ and ‘you only know what you believe is fact.’ Start to learn what the rest of the industry is doing, create a long-range plan and put 25%+ growth into your day-to-day thoughts.

Contact: Bruce Berg for more information at www.bergconsultinggroup.com

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