In his book “What the CEO Wants You to Know,” Ram Charan shares the universal laws of business success that it doesn’t matter whether you are selling from a fruit stand or running a Fortune 500 company, the same basic fundamentals dating back to his days working in the family shoe shop in India still hold true.
At Clark-Reliance, we focus on sharing concepts from the book with our employees with the goal of helping our team understand the basic fundamentals that drive business results. Every member of Clark-Reliance becomes a leader when the basic fundamentals of business are promoted and executed.
There are three things to hone in on in any business in order to be successful: cash generation, return on assets and growth. We want our team to understand these important concepts individually and the relationships that exist between them.
Charan tells you right up front … you don’t need a formal education and it does not matter what size your company is, you still need to think about your company in the simplicity of a street vendor. He stresses the importance of keeping the entrepreneurial spirit that he learned on the streets of India and shares his sage advice:
Cash generation — Cash is generated when the inflow of revenue exceeds the outflow. The cash that goes out applies to salary, taxes and supplier costs. Cash in is generally payment from customers. Cash is the business’s oxygen supply.
If you do not have cash, nothing makes business sense. The underlying goal is to make sure that everyone is involved in the daily thinking of, “How can I generate cash?” Simple things such as getting invoices out on time by assuring mailroom efficiency will help with cash generation.
Return on assets — Return on assets measures how well you are using the capital you have invested in your business. You may use capital to buy equipment, plants, computers, inventory and more. What kind of money is being returned to you through the use of those assets? How fast do raw materials go through a factory and become finished goods and then get sold?
The velocity or speed with which you turn your inventory into sales has a great impact on your return. Within the return on assets calculation lies gross margin: your sales dollars less your costs of producing the product. Watching and evaluating your costs to produce your product gives you valuable clues to your competitiveness and material costs.
Growth — The question you have to ask is, “Are you growing profitably?” How do you continue to encourage growing profitably? The customers are critical to this analysis. You have to make sure that you are going to produce a product that the customer base knows that they can use to reduce their costs and expenses.
You also want to assure that your engineers design the product with the customer’s needs in mind. The customer’s satisfaction with design, performance and price directly affects the basic fundamentals of your own growth, return on investments and cash generation.
This book is a tremendous tool to get everyone in the business to grasp, understand and to drive good results moving forward. The best methodology that we have utilized is to give employees something they can read and go back and answer questions and use examples to implement in our industry. ●
Matthew P. Figgie is chairman of Clark-Reliance, a global, multi-divisional manufacturing company with sales in more than 80 countries, serving the power generation petroleum, refining and chemical processing industries. He is also chairman of Figgie Capital and the Figgie Foundation.
Rick Solon is president and CEO of Clark-Reliance and has more than 35 years of experience in manufacturing and operating companies.
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