Analyze the information
The ultimate goal of every business is to make a profit and to grow. Clearly, there are other aspirations to strive for, but fundamentally, that’s what every business has in common.
“The strategy has to be developed around what can you do to make yourself more profitable and what can you do to grow,” Gingo says. “Then you come back to core skills. You start out with, ‘Well, what am I good at, what do I do well?”
That question can be answered with the culmination of your information gathering and analyzing.
“You take all of those things and you say, ‘What do we do well? What is our core skill? What can we build on?’” Gingo says. “One of the ways to really do that is to look at your profitable divisions and say, ‘Well, what do they do that makes them profitable?’”
Gingo tends to look for an anomaly in all of his information and data to start his focus.
“Data that sticks out either bad or good,” he says. “You think: Why is that occurring? What’s interesting about that?”
One of Gingo’s objectives was to return A. Schulman’s U.S. operations back to profitability. So he looked at the overseas operations that were doing well and asked a logical step of questions to figure out a new strategy.
“If I can do that well, for example, in Europe and I can do that well in Mexico, why can’t I do that well in the United States?” he says. “You begin to say, ‘Who are my competitors? Are my competitors different in the United States and Mexico?’ If the answer to that question is, ‘No, they’re not,’ that’s a clue to you that, ‘Hey, maybe I can do it.’ Second, ‘Do I make the same product that I’m making in Mexico and Europe in the United States?’ If the answer is no, ‘Well, what do I have to do to make those products? What kind of equipment do I have to bring in? What kind of technical skills? What new product support do I have to get? What kind of new products do I have to introduce?’
“Fundamentally, you look around, you see what you’re doing good and then look where you’re doing bad and try to figure out why am I doing bad there.”
