In 1995 Christen Carter began her very own button company in Bloomington Indiana, called Lil’ One Button Company. Soon she began to realize that buttons were a hot commodity, so she began her search for a better establishment. She went off to San Francisco, California, then to Chicago, IL, where she finally became established and changed the name to Busy Beaver Button Company.
After the first few years of growing the fledgling button company, she realized that there were many challenges within the company that she needed to solve quickly, but did not have a handle on how many, or how to solve them, but knew they included:
- Trouble keeping up with orders
- Making sure orders were delivered on time
- The need to work efficiently and smarter
- She needed to define responsibilities for her workers (and her)
- Working six days a week, she was becoming exhausted
- Hiring family members needed special attention
She was keenly aware that these problems were costing her thousands of dollars every year.
With the Cycle-of Success Institute, she started a workshop with her employees that taught them the proper small-business tools to identify these everyday challenges. The first was to create a Problem Identification Team, identifying internal and external problems. Working together, they found 55 major problems costing Busy Beaver. They also completed a complete financial analysis provided by COSi that:
- Gave the employees an understanding of how big the industry really is and how much growth was available
- Identified that they can all work together to think of new ways the business can grow bigger and better
- Showed issues in the company’s profitability
Picking a key problem from their Problem Identification Team efforts relating to information and order flow throughout the company, Busy Beaver started a targeted project to create a key Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Within this project,
- They improved and institutionalized internal order forms, allowing a clear definition of each order
- Upgraded checklists and delivery forms
Once the team and the standard operating procedures had been completed, they took on their next project using the COSi-developed action teams, and then they never looked back. Busy Beaver has been using the COSi Action Team tools to this day.
There is no doubt that the Cycle-of-Success methodology,
- Made a big impact on the company productivity
- Helped to solve a number of costly problems quickly
- Created better customer service and focus
- Saved money by the thousands just by tackling the 55 problems they had listed
Before coming to COSi, Christen Carter did face many challenges, but once she graduated from the institute, she was on the path to constantly challenging and solving problems as they arise. She learned that profitability is very important in order to provide better service, lower cost, and create better pricing, which gained her much more business. She is certain that COSi is the place to get instruction, and small-business management tools, to make your business run efficiently, learning to not waste time and money. COSi taught her the best business models, how to document and analyze problems, and the proper focus to make the company better. The final result? Two years after graduating, Busy Beaver Button Company has increased sales by over 50%, and has hired 4 more employees.
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