Caruso Leadership Case Studies

Caruso Leadership works with clients to develop The Quintessential Process for their organizations. Use the links to learn more about The Quintessential Process, or read our case studies below.

Assess, Accept, Adjust, Advance | Case Studies | Why it Works | QP Promotion

Case Study #35

The Economic Development team for a mid-western state hired Caruso Leadership to help them with their goal—to create more new jobs than any other state in the country.

Caruso Leadership applied The Quintessential Process™ to every aspect of their pre-existing long and involved sales processes, from identifying leads and fielding requests, to closing the deal. This examination includes identifying the “Pareto Point” in the sales process. This is the point in the process where 80% of prospects will close the deal.

Once the Pareto Point was identified, every piece of the sales process prior to that point was scrutinized. Every step was either removed or drastically reduced in order to help prospects get to the 80/20 point more quickly and using less time and resources.

This analysis, accompanied by highly customized sales, service and communication training from Caruso Leadership, helped the team achieve their goal of becoming the #1 job-creating state in the country.

Case Study #102

A privately owned printing house on the west coast was having trouble growing. They couldn’t figure out why, but every time they reached about 100 employees, something would happen that would inhibit their ability to grow the business. Caruso Leadership’s Quintessential Process™ revealed several critical challenges that the business owners were aware of, but were not linking to their growth issues.

In this case, the problems were operational, managerial and structural in nature. The existing, traditional publishing production-house structure was an assembly line-type set-up. Each division contributed to each product from their respective domain. While each division said (and believed) that they were doing their best to contribute, the deadline-driven nature of the business created animosities and bad communication across divisions that were getting in the way of the collective success of the printing house.

Caruso Leadership worked closely with the leadership to accept these realities and to use the QP to reveal the right Adjustment – to create five cross-functional work teams to replace the existing divisions. Each team was led by a designated coordinator and was composed of one or more of the technical and editorial people from each of the previous divisions.

Every morning at 9:00 each team met separately to assess the amount of work they had for the day against their deadlines, constraints and availabilities. If someone thought they might need help, they could request it. At 9:15 there would be a stand up meeting in the center of the room where each team leader shared the information with the other team leaders about their deadlines, constraints and availabilities. This allowed the leadership team to make productive, real-time decisions about allocating resources across teams to better manage workflow within each cross-functional team.

This new structure and process, combined with some communication strategies and training provided by Caruso Leadership, allowed the publishing house to not only break through their growth barrier but actually double the company’s revenues in just fifteen months. The process worked so well that the sales team decided to fly in potential clients so they could actually watch how the work flowed as a selling point. This new sales approach, along with the new organizational structure, allowed the company to optimize its' outcomes in a way that made it the leading industry provider in less than 20 months AND created a 25% growth rate.

Footnote: Jumping to the Adjust phase without the proper Assessment can be detrimental. Three of their clients tried to shift to cross-functional teams without first using the Quintessential Process™ and got such miserable results that all three re-organized back to their original teams.

Case Study #10

A small technology company with moderate growth, owned and founded by a subject-matter-expert, was having cash flow problems and beginning to see more sophisticated competition with bigger budgets. Feeling out-gunned in the marketplace, they called on Caruso Leadership to help with the problem.

Using The Quintessential Process™ two realities quickly became evident. They needed to triple their sales force and entirely re-think the way they approached the market. They needed to acknowledge that some of their management team were in over their heads: a few key employees who had been with the owner since the beginning had been promoted to jobs they simply didn’t have the expertise to do anymore based on the company’s growth. Accepting this reality wasn’t easy for the owner or the employees. However, once these realities were accepted using elements of The Quintessential Process™, the right adjustments were made.

Within one year of accepting and implementing the recommended changes, sales revenue doubled and the company was so valued in the marketplace that it was bought by another business in the industry for ten times its annual revenue.