During a very successful Remax, Chris Doyle from Excelsis presented the concept of Solutions Focused Management (or SFM) which he says is a powerful, practical and proven way for businesses to develop. It is just as useful and relevant to the ‘micro’ one person organisation as to a global enterprise employing hundreds of people.
During Remax, David Connett, and other industry experts, explained how in the current economic climate the remanufacturing industry has an outstanding opportunity to go from strength to strength as not only does it produce high quality merchandise at affordable prices, but its products also offer significant environmental benefits over those produced by the OEM sector. So the industry must seize this opportunity.
The graph, shown at Remax by David Connett, demonstrates how the market share changes with the age of the printer technology.
The challenge for the remanufacturing industry is to push for a larger share of the market much earlier in the life cycle of the technology. “Solutions Focused Management offers a way to achieve this in a pragmatic and positive manner” says Doyle.
Excelsis’s paper on Solutions Focused Management at Remax was enthusiastically received with participants commenting that the topic was ‘thought-provoking’, ‘challenging’ and ‘timely’. “However the majority of those attending were from the OEM sector!” Doyle told Recycler.
So, Excelsis argue, now is the time for the remanufacturing industry to look to its future strategy, drawing on its unique strengths, to develop a significantly stronger market presence through both volume delivered and branding. This can seem time-consuming or even overwhelming, however the Solutions Focused Methodology concentrates on taking small steps towards a target (rather than long term plans, as it recognises that the world is constantly changing) so the changes becomes more manageable and user friendly.
SFM has a range of powerful tools that allow managers and business owners to sidestep the traditional, and often fruitless, search for the cause of problems and take the direct route forward to developing the business. In essence SFM focuses on solutions (not problems), strengths (not weaknesses) and on what’s going well (rather than what’s gone wrong) and leads to pragmatic and positive development.
Excelsis is a broad-based business development consultancy that offers a wide range of support to their clients including:
· assisting with obtaining finance,
· facilitating the purchase or sale of a business,
· providing management development programmes,
· and, of course, assisting with the implementation of Solutions Focus Management.
Solutions Focused Management is now becoming widely used in other industries with outstanding results, so Excelsis hopes to bring that success into the remanufacturing industry and bring about the growth and development that the sector deserves.