Our CEO, Stephen Johnson, was recently a panellist for the 2013 Australian Insolvency Forum.  In it, he was asked to talk about ways of identifying hidden assets and opportunities in companies that might be in trouble.

A lot more companies are going to be in rough times as the economy heads down for a while.  That might come to include you.

So here are the handy hints summary he gave attendees of this expensive forum, simplified for quick and easy use –

The key is to take pen and paper and build a matrix of the table below and physically walk around and examine your processes and interview all staff.  You’re using the prompts below to identify assets you can use better.

For example, in ‘Staff – Time not Utilised’, you might interview some staff and find that on Wednesday and Thursdays, things are so slow that they’re only really doing a half day.  They could use the other half day to call old customers and ask if they need some extra widgets for their gadget.  You get the idea.

Here’s the prompt table we use, internally, to help examine clients… then there’s an offer for the first 10 companies who ask for it…

Hidden Assets Within your Company:

• Staff… Time not utilised, Skills not utilised
• Products/ Services… Unsold products in stock, Undersold products and services not properly sold
• Operations… Unused equipment that can be redeployed for low marginal cost, Inefficiencies that can be improved

Hidden Assets Outside Your Company

• Customers… Unsold capacity for them to buy/refer more, Intelligence they can give you to improve
• Suppliers… Financial terms they can loosen, unsold supply they can discount to you
• Sales and Marketing… Collateral and messages you can improve, Activities in sales and marketing you can improve

The offer… Take a Half-Day Hotseat consulting session from us for $1,100+gst… in that Hotseat session, we’ll help you audit your company for hidden assets… if the results don’t suggest ideas that produce enough value to pay for it twice over, the Hotseat was free.