Collection agency executives spend most of their time working “in” their company and not “on” it, and that can hinder growth and cause them to miss out on opportunities, said a pair of former agency owners during a webinar yesterday.
The former owners are Gary Anzalone and Mark Neeb, two well-known names in the industry who now spend a lot of time helping agencies improve their operations. The webinar was sponsored by G2 Consulting and was on the topic of strategic planning.
A copy of the audio portion of the webinar can be accessed here. A copy of the audio portion plus the accompanying presentation slides can be accessed here.
“Hope is not a strategy,” to help build a business, Neeb said during the presentation. A business won’t grow if individuals are just “focused on emergency after emergency.” A strategic plan is necessary to help a company focus on what it does and where it should be looking to grow.
A well-formed strategic plan will help individuals “hunt, not fish,” Anzalone said during the webinar. Fishing is just casting a line and hoping something bites, whereas hunting is working towards a specific target.
Strategic plans also can not just be a set of pie-in-the-sky objectives that aren’t based in reality and aren’t necessarily achievable, Anzalone said.
Another essential component of a strategic plan is a viable mission statement, Neeb said. He used to offer paid time off to any employee who could recite — verbatim — the company’s mission statement on demand.
Anzalone also pointed out some key metrics that agency executives should also be focusing on, if they aren’t already. Those include:
- Unit yield. How much in fees is being generated by the number of accounts that are being worked. Generally, the higher this number is, the better.
- Revenue per Full-Time Equivalent (FTE). Anzalone and Neeb approached this differently, which Neeb including all employees and Anzalone including just those whose jobs generate revenue, but they both emphasized the importance of knowing this figure.
Unit yield, for example, will “give direction to the sales staff on where to focus to find the higher profitability,” Anzalone said.
