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Having taken three business ventures from zero to multi-million success stories, each in less than 12 months, David Abingdon is certainly aware of what makes companies tick. As CEO of Quantum Organisation, he is now using his skills to help other businesses improve their profitability and growth.
David explains how he moved into this area: “With the first company I worked with, we took it to £7.5 million in value from nothing in the first 12 months alone. The next one was a business of my own, which I expanded to £4.5m in the first year, and then this business, the Quantum Organisation, was valued at between £6.9 million and £11 million after just seven months of trading.”
He continues: “I’ve been consulting since about 1993/4 and with that experience of building businesses, I started going to others and saying, look this is what I’ve done, I’ve grown companies not dissimilar to yours into multi-million pound businesses – looking at your business I might be able to do the same.
“I then started to think about how I could turn my process of taking companies to the next level into a business in its own right. I’m aware that there are business coaches out there but that’s not what we’re about. Unlike a coach, we don’t work on the business owner. Instead we work with the business owner to work on the company itself. It’s a big difference.”
Subsequently David began thinking about the concept of putting together a business consultancy in 2000 and over the next two to three years developed the systems, methodology and plans that would eventually become Quantum. “I started looking at what I was doing and how I was doing it. I knew that I could pretty much train anybody that had communication skills, business acumen, a professional background and a real want and willingness to open their mind to new ideas. Quantum formally opened its doors for business in October 2002 and had its first consultants on board within three months.”
David feels that the first step in turning around a company’s fortunes is identifying exactly what industry it is operating in. He explains: “If you ask an accountant what business he’s in, he’ll tell you he’s in the accounting sector, a solicitor will say the legal business, a fashion store is in the retail fashion arena and so on. But they are mistaken. The real business of every company, no matter what service or product they sell, is the business of sales and marketing, of making a profit, of attracting customers and keeping those customers. Their products, services and markets may differ but their aim is the same.
“Therefore the reason our methods work on any business is because every company is effectively in the same business. It’s just what they market and sell that is different and so the strategies, the techniques, the tools, the principles and the systems that we use for growing a business are essentially the same, it’s just the implementation that differs.
“Once we have linked up with a company the first thing we do is a comprehensive business audit. This highly informative formality takes about five or six hours. We sit down with the business owner and executives, we talk to the staff and we find out everything we can about the business, and then we formulate how we’re going to develop and build it from there. Our aim is to double, even triple turnover and profit over a 12 to 18 month period.”
These impressive targets that David mentions are achieved through a range of ongoing methods: “We build on this platform with regular reviews and benchmark meetings to make sure the goals that we’ve set and the targets we have are being met and exceeded.”
Your existing customer
Although Quantum’s service can therefore be applied across a wide array of industry sectors, David feels it is better suited to some companies than others. “What we do definitely works easier and faster with some businesses than with others. That’s because our experience shows that it’s eight times easier and also eight times cheaper to sell to an existing customer, than it is to sell to a new one. In other words, finding new customers is a lot more difficult than selling to your existing client base. So companies that already have a large or even old customer base can be leveraged far more quickly and simply. This means that we can have a much more dramatic effect on the bottom lines of such businesses.” David goes on to point out: “Other than market share there is another ‘share’ that companies should aim to achieve and that’s wallet share. This is all about getting your existing customers to spend more. Think about it, if people have come in and bought from you, they’ve done so because they have trust and confidence in you. So you owe it to them to look for how you can provide them with extra complementary services or products. Items that they may be buying elsewhere.
“One of our main criteria for working with a business is that we look for business owners that have an open mind and a genuine desire to grow. For obvious reasons, they are easier to work with and are motivated to want to change.”
Despite his wealth of experience and success in turning around businesses’ fortunes, David is always keen to learn more to further enhance the service Quantum can offer its clients. “When a consultant joins us they undergo a gruelling training course and receive
11 encyclopaedic manuals designed to arm them to the teeth with all the knowledge and tools that they will need to turn a business around or build it into a success story.”
Other leading figures in the business management world also impact on David’s methods: “Peter Drucker said that there are only two things in a business that make money – innovation and marketing, everything else is cost… And that’s exactly what we work on. So unlike many management or business consultants, we’re interested in looking at the areas within the business that make money for the company and make it quickly.”
Above all else, David feels it is his entrepreneurial spirit that has allowed him to make a success of so many business ventures. He concludes: “There’s no doubt that if failure were terminal I’d be dead a hundred times over. The difference between an entrepreneur and a would-be entrepreneur is that an entrepreneur will get back up again and learn from his or her lessons and do it again. The would-be entrepreneur does it, fails, and that’s the end of it. They go away convinced that the gods are against them and so they never try again. The secret to success is to get up and try again.”
VTR
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