Our Services

The Shimshock Group provides coaching and advice for those considering starting a new business, guidance for entrepreneurs who are in the process of beginning a company, and implementation expertise for owners looking to grow their small or mid-size business to the next level.

Contact us or sign up for a complimentary one-hour coaching session today.  We look forward to helping you achieve your business dreams.

Coaching

Maybe you've never started a business before and you are uncertain where to start.  Or possibly you have a great business idea, but would like to confidentally discuss it with someone who can give you solid advice.  In some cases, maybe you just need some encouragement from a professional who can help to guide you in the right direction.  We offer all of this and more as part of our coaching services.

Coaching is provided by the hour and is available on days and times to fit your personal schedule.  Some prefer coaching sessions over the phone or via Skype, while others prefer in-person meetings.  If in-person is preferred, please schedule your appointments at least two weeks in advance.  Currently, all coaching sessions are conducted with Ron Shimshock, CEO of the Shimshock Group.

To read more about our special business coaching introductory offer for new clients, click here.

Business Planning

Our business planning activities help clients quickly formulate their objectives and understand the pathway to success.  For those who have not yet performed any business planning activity, we start by developing a checklist of high-priority activities.  We then work with our client to quickly accomplish important tasks such as understanding your market focus, understanding your customer, understanding the competition, and much more.

Once these initial steps have been completed, we can assist a client in the development of a formal business plan.  The business plan helps to crystallize and clarify the business' objectives, goals, and risks, and can be used when seeking financing.  Banks, loan institutions, and investors will require a business plan before considering any form of financial investment.

Also important to note, the financial components of a formal business plan serve as an excellent input into the company's financial budgeting process.

Executive Leadership

It is often said business entrepreneurs have to "wear many hats."  One executive may be responsible for juggling sales, marketing, and operations (or even more!).  We can help lessen the burden by providing executive leadership until a full-time resource can be identified.

Whether you need assistance in technology, operations, sales, marketing, or finance, we have executives who can help.  Our leadership skills will allow you to focus on key business tasks and reduce overall workload.  We believe small businesses should take the time to find the right candidate for important executive roles, rather than being forced into a rush hire to meet a need.

What our customers really appreciate about our executive leadership is how we are able to "hit the ground running," quickly fit into the team, and take full ownership of a role.  A great compliment we often receive from clients is our presence allows them to focus on tasks they have been neglecting.  They have trust in our capabilities and know we have high expectations of the services we provide.

Incorporation & Taxes

Should I incorporate in my home state or as a foreign corporation?  Why do people often choose to register in Delaware or Nevada?  Does it make sense to be an LLC, C-Corp, S-Corp, or another structure?  What types of local and county tax obligations will I have?

There are many confusing questions which must be answered when formulating a new business.  We can help you sort through the chaos and provide straight answers.  We offer guidance on which forms must be completed, which aspects may require legal assistance (and which can be done without), what tasks need to be performed to meet local obligations, and the tax implications of your chosen business.

The amount of time necessary to collect all the required information can be significant if you have never completed the incorporation process in the past.  Let us help, so your time can be freed to handle other important business startup tasks.

Money Management

A key concern for many small to mid-size businesses is money.  Some companies need a quick plan for acquiring more funds, while others need to more effectively manage the money supply to smooth the peaks and valleys.  We provide money management services to our clients to help answer these questions and more.

Shimshock Group has years of expertise in helping small businesses and mid-size organizations develop reasonable plans for managing cash flow, setting pricing guides, analyzing profitability, and a host of other capabilities.  In some cases, clients have requested for us to serve as a de-facto Chief Financial Officer to develop a plan to reduce debt, while others request assistance in creating financial models for investors or budgeting purposes.

We can help to guide you to a path of financial stability, and offer direct assessments of what will be needed to harness the reigns of spending.  Talk to us today for more advice on how we can improve your situation.

Operations Planning

The Shimshock Group has many years of experience in developing operational plans for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 organizations.  We develop guides for our startup clients by striking a balance between depth of information while minimizing time to completion and cost.

Our goal is to create a business operational guide that provides a framework for future growth, but doesn't overburden a small company with detailed minutia better suited to a large multi-national conglomerate.  As well, operational activities for a smaller organization often require significant help from third-party vendors.  Therefore we work with our clients to ensure all the proper workflow hand-offs are properly documented to minimize future problems.

Sales Strategy

The sales strategy for a small business tends to be quite different than a larger company.  Typically everyone in a startup helps with sales efforts, whether identifying new leads, shepherding customers through the sales process, or preparing sales presentations.

Our sales strategy exercises help a small business understand how the skillsets of team members fit with the various roles necessary for sales success, and the types of incentives which are most successful.  The strategy exercises also provide a framework for identifying the customers which will be most interested in what you have to offer, and the sales messages which will most readily resonate with them.

We also provide clients with tools to measure sales effectiveness, return on sales investment, sales close rates, and much more.  The goal is to ultimately make the sales process more metric-driven, thereby providing a much better understanding of where opportunities for improvement exist.

Tactical Marketing

We refer to our marketing activities as "tactical marketing", rather than simply "marketing."  The reason for doing so is often marketers consider their practice to be more "art" than "science."  Because small businesses need to carefully manage expenses, over-the-top marketing costs are not acceptable.  We provide an outline of tactical, high-value marketing activities that can make a significant impact on revenue opportunities.

When partnering with newly formed businesses, our activities typically include foundational steps such as creating brochures and postcard mailers for a tailored marketing campaign, developing business cards with a consistent brand, and building social networking opportunities through sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

When working with established companies, we review recent marketing activities, potential areas for improvement, and determine how well a company's activities match their brand message.  Once this is complete we develop a strategic checklist of  high priority, high-value marketing activities.  These items will also have a strong return on investment.  In some cases we help clients to implement the marketing tactics, and in others they use in-house resources to complete the work.

Website Development

Our resources have been working with web technologies and developing websites since the advent of the first publicly-available Internet browsers in 1995.  On current projects we most often use one of two open source content management systems: Drupal or Joomla!.

Both products are amazing advancements in web technology, and provide an easy way to implement a broad array of functionality in a very rapid timeframe.  Typical projects built with Drupal easily would have required three or four times as long to complete as recently as 6-8 years ago.

Since Drupal and Joomla! are open source technologies, there is in most cases no software costs.  This allows clients to have a very low total cost of ownership, and website expenses are limited to implementation services, hosting, domain name, and security certificates (when necessary).

See our client projects page for snapshots of a few recently completed sites.  Also our technology expertise stretches beyond website development, and we can provide advice on computer hardware and supporting software for marketing, sales, customer relationships, bookkeeping, and much more.

Shimshock Group also has skill in implementing open source business technologies such as SugarCRM and vTigerCRM.  We have many suggestions to provide customers with a wide range of technical advantages, while keeping costs at a minimum.  Technology can often be a significant differentiator for small businesses, and we always focus on ensuring our clients leverage it to a high degree.