GREEN MOUNTAIN WOOD PRODUCTS
This entrepreneurial owner of several businesses and real estate holdings, through a series of unforeseen events, was in danger of losing these cross collateralized investments.
One of his companies, Green Mountain Wood Products, was draining cash rapidly and threatening the viability of the others. This once profitable business had lost most of its largest customers. However, we also recognized that GMWP could potentially be the most marketable of our client’s holdings in the short term. Knowing that there was a potential buyer for this company, the key leverage point for us was to determine how to win back profitable customers and then market the company for sale as revenue and profit growth returned.
Continuum initiated strategic outreach to targeted customers, through which we identified the main performance issues that led to customer loss. Based on this information we reorganized the operation. The result was that the company was sold quickly stemming the cash drain and preserving the other businesses.
“We employed Barry as a consultant to help us position for sale one of our seven companies which was struggling as it was under attack by Chinese competition and as I was approaching retirement age. We believed that it would be the hardest to sell and should be sold first.
Barry did an amazing job of identifying and prioritizing our strategic needs. He first re-positioned the company from a “job shop” to focusing on proprietary items and strategic partnerships. He then cross trained and motivated our staff by “selling” them on the new strategy. Next he created a value added department which could meet our customer’s higher quality and engineering standards and difficult-to-manufacture items while shortening delivery times, making us both unique and irreplaceable in our customer’s eyes.
Once these goals were accomplished, we marketed the business which consummated in a successful sale within months.
Without Barry’s help, I not only doubt that a sale would have been possible; I believe that the company would have gone out of business.”
James
Owner / President, Green Mountain Wood Products