Helping SMEs Manage "How To" Capital
Most start-ups depend heavily on a few individuals for everything – from day-to-day decision-making to charting new directions (Human Capital oriented approach)
The loss of any of these individuals can lead to a significant loss of intellectual and knowledge capital best described as “How To” capital.
Many organizations (especially SMEs) don’t have a plan to capture and keep this intellectual capital. Most businesses don’t always see this is a form of intellectual capital. Do you?
Our Approach
We work with SMEs to help manage and exploit their "How To" capital.
It starts with an MOT type assessment - a half day to one-day effort where we understand how the business works and get an overview of the processes.
We then undertake a fixed fee project to work with you to understand, define and document your processes - all the "how to" elements of the business.
Benefits
- A better understanding of all the key processes enables a significant portion of your intellectual capital to be captured by the business, rather than be lost with people as they leave or take on new roles. This also increases the value of your business to a prospective investor.
- A detailed view and exploration of how work actually gets done in the business often surprises the management teams of companies we've worked with. And throws up plenty of obvious and hidden opportunities for improvement, and time and cost saving.
- The output document is a valuable one for sharing with new employees and can cut the time required for them to become completely familiar with the business from months to days.
- The output is also a useful document to share with potential investors, who sometimes may not have a first hand experience of your specific business and may need to understand it in more depth.
- The exercise also often throws up clear pointers about systems, IT and business applications - gaps, areas of opportunity, and ways in which to codify processes where appropriate.
Call us to talk about this, explore how it can work for you or simply for a discussion about how you're managing your Intellectual capital at present!