ThinkFounders - Challenges

There aren't enough hours in the day

Challenges

The workload is overwhelming. Your team can't keep up. Leadership is caught between under delivering and balancing the risk of a burn-out or losing talent
Scaling up is challenging. Budgets are tight. Talent is hard to find. As you juggle, you worry about resignations or a client termination.
You shouldn’t have to choose between which task is most urgent. You shouldn’t have to choose between getting charges out the door to protect your client's cash flow, at the expense of posting payments and protecting your own cash flow.

Solution

We take a numerical approach to work. We quantify it, trend it, and staff to it- so that getting behind doesn't happen. If this approach is applied consistently, over months and years, hours are created. Backlogs are no longer a drain, and productive hours are about getting ahead, not catching up.

Landing a big account would be great, it would also be impossible to handle.

Challenges

I can’t find good people. I can’t find good managers. I don’t have the technology to stay organized, the more I grow the less confidence I have that everything is being done.

Solution

Our solution is that our team is your team. Our software tools that help us scale are your tools. Our management talent are your managers. Your concerns become our concerns. And we work as one team towards strategizing, planning, and implementing goals.

Financial Goals

Challenges

Eventually, I’d like to sell my business. If I can increase my profit by 5% - 20%, I can materially change my deal.
Or alternatively, I plan to grow through acquisition, if I can drive EBITDA I can increase the size/frequency of the deals I close.
I plan to grow organically, but I’m being under bid. I need to lower my costs so I can compete and grow.

Solution

Our solution is anchored in looking at work in transactional terms. We believe that most, if not all work, can be distilled down to units, which opens the door to mathematically derived insights and recommendations on cost control. In other words, work load determines cost, and by redefining how work is tallied you can bridge financial objectives by eliminating waste.

Convert Direct Costs Into Variable Costs

Challenges

My largest expense line item is payroll. If revenue drops, my costs don’t scale down comparatively. I’d like to convert some of my direct costs to variable so that my business can better adapt to market changes and protect profits.

Solution

Our transactional view of work allows us to convert your work into a type of utility. Much like a water bill or an electric bill, you pay for what you use. If your clients experience a drop, there is less work to be done and your costs should drop proportionally. This protects your business from changes, and prevents you from being caught between a rock (your revenue) and a hard place (payroll).
Similarly, if there is opportunity to increase revenue, then logically we would expect work volume to increase in turn. If your only option is to add staff in full or part-time increments, then your cost increases could exceed your revenue increases, and you won’t realize any added profitability from what should otherwise be great news.

Risk Mitigation

Challenges

Everything from an individual staff member being out sick, to storms, power outages, fires -and as we discovered- global pandemics can disrupt workflow and impact revenue.

Solution

By partnering with us you naturally spread your risk – we can be working even if your geography is temporally shut down. This allows for a consistent throughput of work, prevents the creation of backlogs, and promotes and maintains consistent cash flow.
We apply redundancy checks to our own operation and we plan accordingly. We are very proud of how we adjusted to the Covid-19 pandemic. We successfully shifted our operations to protect our employees and at the same time saw no capacity drops throughout.