Behind the scenes, Hythe Group has been going through business restructuring and transformation, setting the foundations for its business growth goals. A big part of this has been bringing on Chris Dionne of Consult Stellar; a highly experienced business consultant with 25 years of expertise in training, educating, and coaching business owners and executives.
In this article, we get to know more about Chris and his company and delve into some of Chris’s key suggestions for business growth.
Chris Dionne has a background in building companies and sustainability, applying his knowledge to his own businesses and numerous small-to-medium enterprises worldwide.
He has worked with divisions of large corporations, CEOs, and business owners, and holds several advisory board positions.
In 1999, he co-founded Shirlaws Group, a successful business coaching and consulting firm. In 2017, Chris founded Stellar Business Consulting, a boutique firm with a collaborative team of business leaders.
Chris brings a unique level of expertise in understanding economic cycles and leveraging market opportunities. Clients of Chris increase their performance and achieve their goals due to his undeniable ability to realise their untapped potential.
Stellar Consulting help business owners and leaders, realise their personal and professional potential, and ultimately improve their business asset. Each team member is or has been a business owner and therefore understands to varying degrees the challenges a business faces. One prime example of Stellar’s work is Cohort, a company that grew from $5M in revenue to $28M in 6 years.
Cohort’s specific goal was to become a mature, high-performing and formidable business within their industry sector, so an intense project over 100 days was launched. Working with Cohort’s leadership team, Stellar focused on developing high-performing functional structures, clarifying the business’ products and positioning, and building a collaborative, growth-focused culture.
The result of this intensive scale-up was Cohort Global transforming dramatically over a six-year period. Throughout the journey, Stellar set up board structures and assisted with a partial exit in 2014 and a full exit in 2016.
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How do you adapt your approach when working with different types of companies and industries?
Each business is as diverse as the people who work in it, so mostly our approach is based on the client. But we have identified 20 key business requirements that transcend industry and size: all businesses have basic fundamental needs that are consistent globally.
When looking at different industries, each will have its own cycle where approaches and needs vary. We generally operate across market conditions and know what’s happening, and then we talk with the team to understand what specific issues they might be facing and focus on an “education process” to undertake change management.
For Hythe Group, I will support the business in becoming a more mature, robust, and therefore leading, operative in its sectors as well as Mentoring Josh as CEO. This is achieved by tapping into my experience and background to move through the required change using our unique business tool kit that will be transferred to the business.
Getting our foundation right from the outset will create new job opportunities and career growth for people that come on the journey, we will all need to learn new things and adopt new ways to take on competitors. If we have that mindset, we can leverage numerous aspects of the business and our team can grow, learn more skills and share the exciting journey as a community.
How do you approach identifying areas for improvement in business processes?
We always ask the business. Due to our experience, we can usually spot things that we know will be prime opportunities. But it’s still fundamental that we ask the team what’s happening on the ground for them. We do this by having a “fact find” at the beginning of every assignment, where we want to interview a cross-section of the team from all divisions and layers in the organisation. We ask basic things like what’s working well and what isn’t, and more creative questions like ‘If you had a magic wand what would you change?’ This helps people to think outside the box of what they know, perhaps identifying some hidden blockages in the business that we can address.
How do you measure the success of a consulting project?
Success differs depending on the client and what their vision for their future is, both professionally for the business but also for themselves and their family. When I see a client start to shift their energy, which might be a renewed vigour for their business and their team as well as commercial improvement, then I know I’m on the right track working with them.
What advice would you give to companies looking to improve their business processes?
Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Especially in turbulent economic times when it can be a bit uncertain what action to take, sometimes taking no action can be the worst thing. Consider what you might need to do to create a mindset shift. You may need to take some counterintuitive action – zig when everyone else is zagging. This type of thinking is well worth bringing in outside help to assist you in reframing the context.
Chris will be assisting the Hythe Group to build the relevant systems, processes, disciplines, and foundations required to underpin and realise future growth aspirations in a controllable manner. This business decision has highlighted for our community the company’s commitment to growth, employee development and well-being, and building fruitful career opportunities within Hythe Group.
Click here to learn more about Hythe Group and Stellar.
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