Bottom-Line Growth Through People

"Most of my experience has been with two kinds of vendors: research firms and technical consultants. The research companies gather intelligence on industry products, sales and service, and then they dump and run. Some might make a few verbal suggestions, but they're not tailored to our specific situation. The technical consultants come with a tool set, but they haven't studied our business enough to realize that their solutions don't necessarily work for a regulated industry or a financial services industry. S4 understands B2B so they are not suggesting things that are so "out there" that they are unreasonable. A lot of firms come in and propose to retool everything. S4 takes a very practical approach. They say let's take on one or two issues and try to make them better. Then when we've accomplished that, we'll decide if we want to take on more."

"Most consultants have canned answers or they tell you what they think you want to hear. S4 listens. We had a problem with a major customer. S4 went out and did field research with the customer. They talked with us about the life cycle of a customer and showed us what we would have to do if we wanted to keep the customer. Together we used S4's recovery process to win back that customer. Now years later that same customer is our largest customer. They helped us transform both our internal and external relationships so as to significantly grow our business."

"I still remember the account assessment report on the manufacturer after S4 Consulting finished its customer interview process. On the very first page, we got a list of four things we should do right away, along with four things we should not do immediately after reading the information in the report. It reminded us not to get defensive and prioritized for us the customer's concerns ... Although the numerics on satisfaction weren't terrible, the qualitative feedback was a wake-up call regarding many of the soft issues. Advice and contextual information like this is vitally important, and there is no way we could have come up with most of this on our own."

"Whatever S4 did, it was done in a professional manner. They spent a lot of time listening and trying to understand what we wanted and needed. They were very thorough in customizing what they did for us. We've had difficulty getting the entire organization aligned early on. They helped us work as a high-perfoming organization. Our leadership team, especially, has benefited tremendously. We've seen great business results from our partnership with S4."

"We've learned a lot from S4. They've brought a lot of value. Their approach is different from most other consulting firms. We worked with them as "trusted business advisors", who stayed and helped us implement behind the scenes. They are so genuine, so rich in experience and so easy to trust."

"What I've liked about S4 is their clear application. Theory is great, you can talk about best practices all you want, but S4 offers a bridge to implementation and seeing how a practice can be applied to our organization. Some consultants are so high-level or "fluffy" that their ideas are never usable...S4 does a different job in a different space from [some of the big name players] ... They could not have done what S4 did in terms of creating organizational alignment."