Business Coaching

In the past four years I have come to focus my consulting almost exclusively on business coaching. This is giving me opportunities to work with owners and managers of startup and small businesses. I am really enjoying this because it puts me in a position to really apply the broadest range of skills where I can have immediate and ongoing impact. My clients like working with me because I help them grow their businesses and grow themselves. They find that they are spending more time working on things they are good at. And, my clients like working with me because we always find opportunities to laugh and have fun.

Telephone-based Business Coaching

Over the last year I have surprised myself with a transition to working with clients almost exclusively over the telephone. I have proven to myself , and clients have confirmed, that this is effective and time and cost efficient. We can easily schedule an hour telephone conversation into busy schedules. If we need more or less time we can easily work that out.An hour talking with me turns out to be about the right amount of time each week. We can talk about current issues and keep a focus on the important tasks that we have identified to drive the business forward. When we add a web-connected computer to the mix, we can review financials, plans, and reports together. If I am working with a team of managers we use web-conference tools that are so easily available.

More here about Telephone-based Business Coaching.

Hot Topics Among Clients

Marketing and sales performance tops the list of functional areas that I am currently working on. And within those, web marketing is the burning issue. The days of approaching marketing as an exercise in the 4Ps (Product, Price, Placement, & Promotion) are clearly over. Today we need to figure out a workable strategy that utilizes the best mix of pay-for-click advertising, organic search engine results, and the possibilities of connecting with potential and current customers through the social net. Then, we need to find the tools to organize and monitor the activities required tocarry out the strategy.

Other Work

I maintain an interest in helping companies learn how to be high-performance organizations through applying lean manufacturing/lean enterprise principles and practices( also know as the Toyota Production System - TPS). My experience really focuses on applying these to job-shops, a non-traditional environment for the methods so closely attached to repetitive manufacturing.

In addition to working in the manufacturing sector I have developed expertise in applying these approaches in the service sector. In this arena I have developed a special tool, Moments of Truth Analysis, that greatly increases the impact of lean enterprise methods in the service environment.

Go here for more about our other work interests.

Riverside Systems

Riverside Systems, llc is a business coaching company based in Cambridge, MA and New York City serving clients around the US.