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."

"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."

"S4 proved to us that they really understood our business - and that was very important to us. It was important that they had a process that was repeatable. We have 150 people all over the United States, and there is constant turnover. We felt their program could be repeated over and over and produce good results. It helped that they proposed a simple program. The other people we considered came to us with 25 books and 14 follow up steps. It was just too complicated for the culture of our company. So the quality of your process - and its simplicity--met our needs."

"They are very responsive, adaptive and multi-faceted in many areas of business. They have expertise around management solutions to complex and varied business issues. They are particularly skilled in getting both personal and organizational commitment to doing things differently."

"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."

"The information was not only gathered and assembled but put into context and delivered with step-by-step suggestions on how you go about solving the problems that have been identified. S4 Consulting was there with us to provide that service and help us grow our market share and revenues."