March 21, 2018
The term “value” is often shorthand for “money” and while helping companies save money or grow revenue is undoubtedly a primary goal for Hudson, there’s more nuance in how we can help our clients. It’s often not as simple as focusing on the bottom line; we help enterprises discover new ways of assessing performance and understanding consumer behavior by taking a more holistic view of what “value” really means. Retaining customers and finding new ones are vital business goals and to accomplish them, companies must have a more comprehensive knowledge of what constitutes value beyond simply looking at dollars and cents.
Of course, monetary value is still the primary concern for businesses: there’s a baseline that’s necessary to reach to be able to maintain operations, there are targets that can be hit to potentially expand the enterprise, and – for publicly traded firms – there’s pressure to increase stakeholder profits. The goal for any business is to make money. Adding value that can be seen as positively impacting the bottom line is at the forefront of Hudson’s consulting philosophies, but that’s not the only goal. While trying to cut costs or increase revenue are obvious objectives, they’re often the end results of focusing on the elements of value and specifically targeting ways to maximize those elements.
There are two parallel but distinct areas where value that doesn’t directly affect the bottom line can be found: internally (within a company’s business practices and processes) and on the customer’s end. Since Hudson works as a consultant for businesses, we focus mainly on seeking opportunities to increase internal value – though we do work with our clients to help them better recognize what their customers want and what they value in their interactions with the company.
An example of how Hudson attempts to increase value for our clients is our reliance on Lean Six Sigma methodology which is essentially an ideology that attempts to target waste and produce uniform results within the framework of individual business processes. By putting together “Lean” – which was originally used in manufacturing to find superfluous processes where value wasn’t added for the consumer – and “Six Sigma” – which sees variance in the outcomes of business processes as especially problematic – Hudson can properly assess areas where value can be added.
There are other ways to maximize an enterprise’s value beyond trying to streamline business processes. For example, increasing employee knowledge and versatility is an area that may not directly affect the bottom line, but it surely makes businesses stronger, more creative, and ready to adapt to changing conditions. Hudson’s human capital management services can help develop your employees and enable them to reach their potential.
Our IT services can also help add indirect value by marshalling your resources and infrastructure towards a more sensible arrangement, which would make your computing process smoother and more efficient. Strong infrastructure doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales or higher customer satisfaction, but the benefits enable businesses to focus on their core competencies and focus on improvement instead of maintenance.
Ensuring that companies are accurately interpreting feedback from their customers is crucial to the health of those companies. While consumers certainly do make decisions based on price, there are many other factors that go into the decision-making process: product quality, convenience, risk prevention, entertainment value, and many other criteria affect which products consumers buy and why.
Understanding why people make the decisions they do is invaluable to firms; if they can better asses which factors matter most to their consumers, they can emphasize the elements of their goods or services that people find most attractive. Hudson’s analytics services help businesses discover that information with a variety of methods and, by extension, help those companies better understand their customers.
Ultimately “value” is a complex idea that doesn’t neatly translate into discrete financial information. Increasing value, adding value, or discovering value is an objective that frequently requires both outside-the-box thinking and proven methodologies – and Hudson has the requisite experience to help companies find opportunities for improvement and growth.