Our Services

While we are in demand primarily for our technology consulting services, the Shimshock Group is a full-service consulting firm that offers a complete array of services to help you and your organization. We combine technological expertise with business savvy to provide a comprehensive support system that enables you to move your vision forward.

Our services include executive coaching, business strategy, process design, creative services and technology implementation. Contact us for more information or sign up for a complimentary one-hour executive coaching session today.

Executive Coaching

In the course of working with our clients on a variety of business and technology issues, we have discovered that many require something more than just implementation skills or process design capabilities -- they seek a strong partnership with someone who understands their business needs. They need an adviser to discuss strategy issues, bounce ideas off of, and serve as a sounding board. Our executive coaching provides powerful support to managers, leaders, and business owners by giving them a personal forum to discuss their needs and challenges. Often it is better to have a consultant/coach provide this support than someone on the inside, since a person in this role can provide a more objective view of the situation.

Coaching is provided by the hour or by the day or half-day rate, 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.

Business Strategy

Our business strategy activities help clients quickly formulate their objectives and understand the pathway to success. We start by developing a checklist of high-priority business goals and match the goals to organizational expectations. We then work with our client to accomplish important tasks such as identifying your market focus, understanding your customer demographics, mapping out the positioning of the competition, and analyzing risks to success.

Once these initial steps have been completed, we can assist the client in the development of a formal strategy document (or business plan, depending on how new the business is) to articulate how goals will be turned into actionable plans. The strategy document helps to clarify the objectives and risks, and can be used when seeking internal consensus or external financing. Banks, loan institutions, and investors will require a strategy document/business plan before considering any form of financial investment.

In addition, a well-defined strategy document can be a key input into the implementation of operational and technology plans. It provides insight into how best to utilize personnel and tools to maximize the organizational return on investment.

Process Design

The Shimshock Group has many years of experience in developing process design plans for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 organizations. Our goal is to create business guides that provide a framework for future growth, but doesn't overburden a growing organization with detailed minutia better suited to a larger conglomerate. We always seek to strike a balance between depth of information and minimizing time to completion / cost.

We have developed process design plans for clients in sales, marketing, customer service, and operations organizations. For example, our sales process activities identify steps for targeting leads, shepherding customers through the sales funnel, and preparing successful sales presentations. We have also worked with clients to match team members to sales roles, identify successful sales team incentives, and provide techniques for determining which customers will be most interested in what you have to offer (and why). We have also provided tools to measure sales effectiveness, return on sales investment, close rates, and more. Whether sales, marketing, customer service, or operations, our goal is to make the process more metric-driven, thereby providing better visibility on where opportunities for improvement exist.

Since technology is such a critical aspect of today's just-in-time culture, we also work with clients to determine systems and tools to streamline workflow. Whether our clients need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or an online database to manage order information, we can help.

Creative Services

The Shimshock Group provides a variety of creative services, often in conjunction with our technology implementation offerings. Examples of creative services include website design (logo creation, template design, and graphics creation), content development (copy writing, editing, video production), and product marketing (segmentation, email campaigns, social media).

The marketing services we provide tend to be very tactical in nature. We focus on identifying activities which can provide the greatest return on investment, executing the plan, measuring the campaign success, and using the results to determine the next course of action. Our goal is to help clients make marketing more results-driven and less "art" than "science".

The Shimshock Group also places a strong emphasis on online marketing and social media. We have had great success helping our clients utilize the low-cost -- but often high-return -- methods of online marketing that leverage social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Technology Implementation

Our consultants 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 the most powerful open source content management system: Drupal. We are Drupal experts.

Drupal is an amazing advancement in web technology, and provides an easy way to implement a broad array of functionality in a very rapid timeframe. Typical projects built with Drupal would have easily required three or four times as long to complete as recently as 6-8 years ago. Once implemented, a Drupal website can be updated by a staff with no Internet coding experience. The platform is highly customizable and scalable, and can include e-commerce, social networking capabilities such as friend connections and groups, third-party data integration services, and robust content publishing options.

Since Drupal is an open source technology, there is in most cases no software costs. This allows clients to save money that might have been otherwise spent on often overly complex proprietary systems that still require customization. Website expenses are thus limited to implementation services, hosting, domain name, and security certificates (when necessary).

Our Drupal developers maintain a thorough knowledge of the Drupal platform, while keeping fresh with other open source systems such as Joomla and WordPress and development platforms such as Ruby on Rails.

While most clients choose Drupal for its flexibility and ability to grow with their business needs and we like the Drupal product, we ultimately consider ourselves to be technology agnostic. We will always work with clients to identify the best technology solution for their goals and environment. Our consultants are well-versed in PHP, JavaScript, SQL, JQuery, and all the technology tools you will need to get the job done. What we don't know (which isn't much), we can quickly get up to speed on.

See our client projects page for snapshots of a few recently completed sites.