Many owners of small and medium-sized businesses quickly discover that the learning curve for more advanced business problems doesn’t allow much time to learn by trial and error.
Essentially, business throws the inexperienced into a pool of sharks, where any lessons learned come at ridiculously high costs. That’s why Double Iron Consulting works with businesses to identify gaps in knowledge that can generate costly consequences for the unwary.
Founder William Smith learned how to work through various business complications during high school and college. His family-owned business, Royal Cup Coffee and Tea, allowed Bill Smith to be highly immersed in many different business experiences.
William Smith threw himself enthusiastically into their daily mix of business workings. He later pursued a business education and obtained a multiple degrees before leveraging his knowledge and experience to become President and CEO of this company.
Table of Contents
Advice from a Highly Experienced Business Expert, Bill Smith
As a board member of Royal Cup, Bill Smith is ready to share his business insights as a mentor and trusted adviser. Nothing provides greater satisfaction than helping business owners avoid or lessen the most common business challenges.
These include:
- Expanding to capitalize on exciting new business modalities
- Willingness to expand by using merit-based team member advancement
- Identifying owner strengths and weaknesses and playing to strengths while delegating tasks where an owner’s inexperience becomes obvious
- Streamlining business operations and creating lean, agile teams capable of sustained progress toward goals
- Coaching targeted to filling in gaps in business knowledge
- Recognizing the value of experienced staff members and working to retain employees can boost productivity by up to 36 percent
- Cutting operational costs by reducing waste, duplicate work, and expenses related to initiatives not being directly pursued
- Embracing change management as a critical part of modern business
- Increasing the ability for owners and their employees to focus with laser precision on both the micro details and the guiding macro long-term vision
- Adopting a team approach and replacing autocratic policies with teamwork and interdependence
- Learning how to rebrand a successful company without endangering the business by losing its most valuable clients
William Smith of Double Iron Consulting knows a lot about these issues because of his experience as a third-generation leader in his family’s business, Royal Cup Coffee.
One pivotal experience involved transitioning the family business to a non-family leadership. The board, the family, and Bill appointed one of his talented team members to the COO position, and the decision was made to promote him as the first non-family member CEO.
William Smith recognized that this was the right decision at the right time to capitalize on the company’s opportunities, strengths, and new capabilities.
Leadership Development
[Alt Text: A picture of a laptop, glasses, notebook, and pen as someone takes notes from Double Iron Consulting on developing leadership training skills.]
One of Bill Smith’s favorite services provided by Double Iron Consulting is leadership development. Regardless of how talented a business owner might be, the owner or a talented manager cannot handle every problem or micro-manage the business.
There are always unknown problems to solve at every level. That’s why Bill recommends adopting a solid leadership development program to train people in the right way to support the company’s core values and culture. Double Iron Consulting works with new companies in the following way:
- Design a comprehensive program to support leadership development, encourage thought leadership, uncover critical educational gaps in staff member training, and use the correct coaching methods to enlist employees’ support of the process.
- Encourage employees to consider internal and external forces in all decision-making, especially the most important ones.
- Understanding how short-term tactics and long-term goals can benefit or suffer from each decision.
- Taking a customer-centric approach to customer service by making it easy to navigate the company’s website, find answers to common questions, and have a customer-friendly experience.
- Strengthening leadership companywide by offering cross-training programs, proactive coaching, mentoring, succession training, and internal advancement
Internal positioning is often neglected when introducing a new product or service or revising standard operations in some way. Unfortunately, many owners and managers need to consider the problems that arise internally from changes, and the staff needs to be aligned as soon as the first notice about changes goes live.
Many companies need to prepare their staff to answer questions about proposed changes, but customers will burn up the phone lines if any changes might affect them personally.
Companies must be ready to answer inquiries as soon as information becomes public, whether it was intentionally revealed or not.
Experience and Expertise
Double Iron Consulting works with businesses, owners, and proprietary teams to solve problems, address shortcomings, and provide valuable leadership. Some of the typical issues that the Double Iron Consulting team addresses include the following:
- Strategies for building customer and team member loyalty
- Blueprints for taking a business to the next level
- Focusing on the positive abilities, skills, knowledge, competencies, and behavioral qualities of the company’s existing staff members
- Offering training programs for in-house advancement
- Troubleshooting the software issues that impede many companies’ opportunities for growth
- Partnering with family businesses to find strategies to overcome limitations imposed based on historical operating goals and adopting new techniques for modern growth
- Planning important long-term goals like succession planning and ensuring the company’s continued success with the right insurance coverage like crucial person insurance
About William Smith
Bill Smith understands the forces that challenge progress. He can help business owners overcome challenges like talent gaps in tradition-bound family businesses or new businesses just getting started and wondering how to attract talent to an unproven company.
William Smith graduated from Davidson College in 1991 and earned an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in 2000. He is well-prepared and has plenty of experience and business expertise, which he has learned through his immersion and leadership in the family business.
