Good to Grow
A new MTI program aims to help manufacturers generate new business growth ideas — and turn those ideas into revenue streams.
By many estimates, growth is the next big challenge for U.S.manufacturers. In the last 10 years, an intense focus on productivity and efficiency has helped fundamentally reshape howmanufacturing companies operate. Everything from the latest generation of software and automation tools to Lean-based approaches, worker retraining, and the looming presence of offshore competition has helped American manufacturers streamline their operations and fine-tune their processes.
The next step: growth. Many manufacturers are looking for ways to use their hard-won productivity gains to create new products and services, refine current products for new clients, and push into newmarkets.
MTI can help with that process. The organization is a member of the U.S. Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), a nationwide network of not-for-profit centers that help small and medium sized manufacturers. MEP and MTI have formed a new partnership with Eureka! Ranch, a Cincinnati-based firm that specializes in helping companies generate new business growth ideas — and in turning those ideas into revenue streams. Founded by Doug Hall, an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former marketing guru at Procter & Gamble (who also has appeared as a judge on ABC-TV’s American Inventor program), Eureka! Ranch has carved out a reputation as a trusted resource for a wide range of companies. In the last 10 years, such corporate heavy hitters as Nike, Compaq Computer Corp., Walt Disney, Pepsi-Cola, and Unilever have used the company’s services, typically paying between $75,000 and $150,000.
Because figures like that that are far beyond the reach of the typical small to medium-sized manufacturing firm, MTI and MEP have collaborated to create Eureka! Winning Ways®, a special program designed specifically for manufacturers.
MEASURABLY SMARTER CHOICES FOR GROWTH
The key to the Eureka! Ranch approach is creating what it terms “measurably smarter choices for growth.” According to John Connelly, MTI’s director of product development, that’s a crucial concern for manufacturing companies these days. “Manufacturers have worked hard to improve productivity and get control of their assets,” he says. “The next challenge is to take advantage of that expanded capacity and look for ways to grow — but to do so strategically. That involves thinking about: What more effective methods would bring your existing clients more of your existing products? Who else should be benefitting from your existing products? And what else could you provide to your current clients? It also involves thinking about one day selling new products to new clients, which is really a transformation of your current business.”
The Eureka! Ranch approach addresses those goals in a disciplined and structuredmanner. According to Eureka!, the process uses 1) data to stimulate insights for growth, 2) deep thinking to turn the insights into ideas, and 3) multidisciplinary feedback to turn ideas into reality.
Here’s how it works: The process involves a series of steps that take place over a 60-day time frame. The first step is to gather a company’s executive leadership team to review the current growth rate and also to visualize and discuss future goals. “What typically happens is that it becomes clear that the organization’s growth initiatives won’t lead it to the future goals,” Connelly notes. “Participants realize that the companywill need to engineer new growth.”
To help the business generate the new ideas for that growth, the second step involves pulling together the company’s thought leaders for a day-long ideation session. The goal is to come up with 50 new measurably smarter choices for growth. From there, the team takes the best 12 and considers them in more detail. Those 12 then get pared down to a final list of four concepts, which are thoroughly evaluated to see how viable they are for the company.
That evaluation process is aided in the third step by Merwyn, a proprietary software-based program that evaluates an idea’s feasibility by benchmarking it against 50 success factors (which were identified by reverse engineering what separates market successes from failures). According to Eureka! Ranch, Merwyn has an 88 percent reliability rating in forecasting the probability of an idea’s success, and has been validated for industrial, B2B, and consumer initiatives.
The fourth and final step in the process is the Trailblazer® coaching system, which takes the Merwyn-filtered ideas and assesses what will be needed to make them a reality, factoring in such elements as individual ownership and responsibility, learning from customer feedback, project death threats, and more. The end result is a highly detailed, rigorous, and quantifiable plan that allows the company to implement its idea — and see quick results.
A PROVEN, POWERFUL APPROACH
As part of the initiative, Connelly and MTI Business Services Consultant Dave Ahlquist have undergone training in Eureka! Ranch’s unique methodology and approach — and have both earned designations as Certified Growth Coaches. As Connelly notes, the program is a proven and powerful way to help smaller companies grow. “It offers a disciplined methodology to develop new ideas that can help companies sell more with less effort,” he says. “The systematic nature of the process also helps you prioritize ideas based on their probability of success. Plus, it helps keep people within a company on the same page and focused on a common goal or goals.”