As we wrap up 2024, it’s clear that this year has been a rollercoaster for many businesses. Through all these challenges, we at CMG Consulta have had the opportunity to work with a lot of amazing businesses, helping them tackle their issues and set themselves up for success. Let’s take a moment to reflect on some key areas we’ve focused on this year and look ahead to what 2025 has in store.
1. Tackling People and Recruitment Issues
This year, many businesses found it tough to find the right employees. Here are some common chellenges we noticed:
- Finding the right skills – It is increasingly difficult to find the right skills to fill roles that require specific skills and experience, both in the country of operation and from overseas.
- Employee retention – Retaining employees has become more challenging due to different expectations from younger generations.
- Clarity in roles and remuneration – Some businesses do not have clear role definitions and remuneration structures resulting in a feeling of unfair treatment in employees.
- Clear career paths – Some businesses tend to overlook the importance of creating clear career paths for employees.
- In planning roles and work, many businesses would not have planned succession of roles. This introduces great risks when an employee leaves.
- Planning capacity – Many businesses with ambitious growth plans fail to align the capacity required to the effort needed to reach their goals.
To help our clients, we:
- Worked with clients to de-centralise decision-making and to remove dependence on owners.
- Helped business build a management team (depending on the company size) with clear structure, responsibilities and remuneration paths.
- Assisted businesses to define future staffing needs and job roles.
- Streamlined the recruitment process to make it smoother and even actively participated in reviewing candidates, interviewing them and presenting a shortlist to management for their consideration.
These steps helped our clients to develop, build and retain stronger teams.
2. Boosting Sales Performance
Many businesses were disappointed with their sales results this year. We worked with them to figure out why they weren’t hitting their sales goals. Some reasons included:
- Pricing issues – Pricing was not aligned to market expectations and to the brand pitch. In addition pricing might not have been aligned over time while costs kept creeping up.
- Short-term gains vs long-term success – Business focusing on easily accessible customer segments instead of those that could provide greater long-term value. This may include different economic segments as well as geographic segments.
- Evolving to adapt to changing customer needs – Businesses not evolving their products or services to match the changing customer needs.
- Increase operational costs – Increased costs of operation caused higher sales to result in much lower profits.
To address these challenges, we:
- Worked with businesses to identify the ideal customers for their offerings.
- Helped them redefine products and services to better meet market needs.
- Assisted them to focus their sales efforts on activities that would yield better results in terms of selecting and exploiting different channels, measuring the success of different activities and tuning future activities accordingly.
- Helped the businesses to develop clear plans to improve sales strategies.
These efforts helped our clients create a clear path to get back on track with their sales and to plan future efforts accordingly.
3. Aligning Efforts with Results
We also met businesses that felt they were putting in a lot of effort but not seeing the results they expected. Our work here involved:
- Working with the business to clarify what the real goals are.
- Analysing where time is spent in order to understand how their efforts matched those goals.
- Exploring the analysis to help the business identify what really drives their business success.
- Assisting the business to making changes to improve efficiency and outcomes by planning efforts that are aligned to
By helping these businesses understand what truly matters, we enabled them to achieve better results from their hard work.
4. Understanding Technology for Better Business
Technology can be confusing, especially for businesses that aren’t very tech-savvy. Despite this, it is increasingly important for companies to have technology in the business and especially to have the right type of technology that will drive them forward, support their operations and possibly gain them competitive advantage. This year, we helped many companies navigate this challenge by:
- Working with business to identify various benefits that technology could give to the business in terms of digitising processes, improving the customer experience, increasing efficiency and even enhancing the offering.
- Explaining technology in simple terms that make sense for their business.
- Guiding them through choosing the right vendors and implementing solutions.
- Helping the business to ensure that technology projects deliver real benefits.
Our approach allowed us to focus solely on what our clients needed, making it easier for them to use technology to boost efficiency and improve customer experiences.
5. Optimising Marketing and Outreach Campaigns
In 2024, we encountered many businesses questioning the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. These companies often invested in various campaigns without a clear understanding of their return on investment. To address this, we:
- Helped businesses define clear objectives for each marketing initiative.
- Ensured campaigns were aligned with overall business goals.
- Implemented measurement systems to track campaign performance.
By taking these steps, our clients were able to:
- Accurately assess the success of different marketing channels.
- Make data-driven decisions about future marketing investments.
- Optimise their marketing budget for maximum impact.
6. Implementing Data-Driven Business Management
We also worked with businesses that were primarily operating on gut feeling and experience, without solid data to guide their decisions. Our approach included:
- Working with the business to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) across various business areas:
- Financial metrics.
- Commercial metrics.
- Operational metrics.
- People and IT metrics.
- Assisting the business to tune these metrics to each business’ specific industry and business model.
- Helping the business set up simple, effective tools for monitoring these KPIs.
- Establishing tolerance limits for each metric.
- Supporting management to analyse interdependencies between different metrics.
These projects provided valuable insights for businesses, enabling owners to more effectively task and monitor management teams. With data at the foundation of all decision-making, companies experienced greater stability, more structured operations, and more planned growth.
Looking Ahead to 2025
As we step into 2025, we’re excited about the opportunities ahead for all kinds of businesses. The lessons learned and strategies developed in 2024 have set a strong foundation for future growth.
In the coming year, we expect:
- Agility to respond to change – More businesses will adopt flexible models that can respond quickly to the changing environment within which they operate.
- Flexible employee structures – A greater focus on developing more flexible employee structures to drive value to all stakeholders based on knowledge creation and retention.
- Increased technology adoption – to drive efficiency, automation and eventually value to the business and its stakeholders while creating opportunities for a more data-driven decision-making approach.
- Sustainable practices – Increased awareness of sustainable practices that benefit both businesses and the environment.
At CMG Consulta, we’re dedicated to helping more businesses look ahead, grow, and become more efficient while embracing sustainability. By using the insights gained in 2024 and staying aware of new trends, we believe that 2025 will be a fantastic year for our clients.
