Southern Business Research

SOUTHERN BUSINESS RESEARCH
Making Your Business Better

Southern Business Research (SBR) is all about making your business better!

Our multi-disciplinary team of business development experts has been helping our business clients improve profitability since 1970. Based in Atlanta, we have served clients in 39 states in the USA as well as clients in Canada, Japan and Latin America.

Our innovative approach to business building is simple and effective. Because the Southern Business Research team of experts are objective, third-party observers of a business, we can easily identify and remediate those policies and practices that keep a business from reaching its true potential.

To quote POGO, the famous cartoon character, “We have found the enemy and he are us!”

A common failure in many organizations is to recognize how quick and easy it is to change “things”, and how difficult it is to change "people".

For a business to be successful, both must be accomplished.

Therein lies the secret to our success: Southern Business Research approaches change management from a "bottom up" perspective.

SBR has no difficulty accepting your assessment of problems and shortcomings or the malaise when things are not going well. You know your business better than anyone else. So, our initial discussion is only to draw out the details of the problems, what you have tried and what you have identified as being mission critical, so that we can get directly to work on why those problems are occurring.

While every business is unique and complex in its own way, there are several problem areas we find in nearly every business that comes to us seeking our help.

Your staff and middle managers will share with us things that they might be reluctant to share with you...ideas about how things could be done better, insights about why things are not working well, observations about people that are causing problems or who need training or sometimes even replacing. It's not that they don't trust or respect you... but you are the boss - and that scares a lot of people!

Southern Business Research productivity engineering is not just a case of getting more done with fewer people, or of replacing people with machinery and information systems. It is really about efficiency and effectiveness:

But as one management guru observed, there is nothing as wasteful as doing something efficiently that doesn’t need to be done at all!

So we get down into "the trenches" of your operation to really dig into the work process. We not only look for what is necessary to accomplish your mission, but for all the things that are not, including

For more than 40 years, Southern Business Research has studied and advised hundreds and hundreds of different businesses, large and small.

One of the major shifts in strategy we have seen in the past 15 years is how differently businesses are connected. In the past, the functional relationships between a business and their vendors and customers were clear and distinct.

Today’s technology causes the pace of a business to be constantly increasing and that has caused a strategic re-alignment between a business, their vendors and customers.

Today, successful businesses have merged into varying degrees of strategic relationships and joint ventures – what we define as symbiotic relationships.

Outsourcing is another component of many successful businesses. Often it makes more sense to pay for a service than it is for a business to try and do the work inhouse.

Competitive relationships have also changed – where the cost for competing for business is being analyzed differently. Projects are being sub-contracted to decrease costs and to provide a faster delivery of products and services.

The business building experts at Southern Business Research will help reduce business costs by helping create new strategic business relationships and joint ventures.

So the question we pose to business executives:

Are you concerned about productivity?

Customer complaints increasing?

Quality of product or service dropping?

Shipping deadlines being missed?

Profit margins shrinking?

Sales volume decreasing?

Does this ring familiar? You held management meetings and a retreat to come up with ideas and plans to turn things around...

You installed an elaborate information system. You threatened, you cajoled, you increased bonuses, you authorized overtime so your people could get the job done well and still meet customer deadlines...

But, you haven't had more than marginal success, certainly not the spectacular turnaround you expected from all the effort and cost. You need some fresh ideas and insights, someone who can check into things and come up with practical and effective solutions...

If you need fast and cost-effective solutions - It's time to contact Don Schwerzler at Southern Business Research!

OR pick up the phone and call Don Schwerzler at 770-952-4085.

The initial call won't cost anything, and you can get a good sense of whether or not Southern Business Research can help you improve the growth and profitability of your business!