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Boosting dividends by improving leadership and management skills
The business is one of a number of finance houses that supports the growing business community in Trinidad & Tobago, supplying local businesses with loan products. Facing fierce competition, it recognised the need to improve in all aspects of its business to improve the returns to its investors, to improve the service to its customers, and to improve the skills and motivation of its staff.
It recognised that it lacked the leadership and management skills to make the changes it required. But it also recognised that if it was to use outside support, it would need to be highly-leveraged working through its staff so that the support was affordable, and so that, through the process, it would develop its own people to be able to better manage the business in the future.
Evolve helped it to first of all analyse the issues it faced, distinguish between causes and effects, and develop a clear plan for transforming the business that prioritised the areas that offered the biggest prize in terms of returns to investors and operational performance.
Key to making this programme work was making the leadership of the business more effective in making change happen. Evolve worked with the leadership team to help them build a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve and put together a route-map of the discrete deliverables that would be needed along the way, then helped them share it with the business in a way that involved people and reduced resistance to change.
Next Evolve worked with teams throughout the business, to develop processes and systems that improved their awareness of daily and weekly performance and improved their decision-making, and their ability to work together to deliver high-impact results.
Starting from the top downwards, and with only one Evolve consultant for four months, the business was able to make huge strides forwards in its operational performance, increasing dividend yield to its shareholders from 5% to 8% - worth more than US$100m a year. Twelve months after Evolve's short involvement, it has achieved its highest ever score in customer and employee satisfaction surveys, and continued to improve performance. In its latest financial year, ongoing operational improvements have allowed the company to increase dividend payments to 11% - the highest it has ever paid out to its shareholders, making it highly competitive in its marketplace.