Firth Improvement isn’t a public listed company, or beholden to any shareholders, and so we’re not required to announce any details of our performance in 2014. But as I mentioned in the Strategy blog post one of the core values of our company is transparency, and so it is in this spirit that I’m going to share with you a high level summary of our performance in 2014.
Our first goal was to sign up a number of consulting companies to partnerships, and you may have seen on LinkedIn that we made fantastic progress in signing agreements with oee consulting, and a number of other firms.
I’m hoping to formally announce these partnerships in the same way that we did with oee consulting, and this should be completed in the next few weeks.
- 2015: After the success of signing partnerships with UK based companies in 2014, we’re intending to pivot this year towards arrangements with firms based in Europe. We’re actively seeking arrangements with potential partners that can expand our access to and enrich the portfolio of clients we have.
- We see tremendous untapped potential from partnering with smaller firms in the Great Region (Luxembourg, Alsace, Lorraine, Saarland and Eastern Belgium), to increase the impact that we and our partners can achieve with clients and to offer a more cost effective solution than that of a top tier consulting firm.
Our second goal was to explore marketing and brand activities that expose us to a wide range of potential clients, as well as raising our profile in the region. We were able to exploit a number of quick wins in this area; sponsoring the St Andrews event, arranging advertising with AngloInfo, and becoming a main sponsor of the Luxembourg business lunch.
However we also fell short on this goal. Due to client commitments we had to push back the proposed Lean coffee to Q1 2015.
- 2015: Plans are already underway to hold a series of Lean coffee’s throughout 2015 in Luxembourg and further afield. We’ve also identified a number of industry conferences that we’d like to attend and use for brand development. Additionally negotiations continue to expand our brand into French and German speaking markets.
Our third goal was to build a business development plan for Luxembourg and the surrounding region. This plan was developed in Q4 2014, and work is on-going during the early part of this year to implement it.
- 2015: We’ve decided to continue our focus on helping local entrepreneurs though our low cost, low intensity offering and have already received a number of enquiries.
Firth Improvement will also be focusing (as alluded to in the Strategy blog post) the local tech start-up community, but will also invest time and effort into Tier 2 and 3 automotive industry here in the Grand Duchy and its frontiers. - Additionally we will continue to build strong relationships with Local giants, having already commenced a project with a major Business services client.
- We hope that this approach will lead to an expansion in the team and a deepening of our experience.
The fourth and final goal was much more specific, but nevertheless not achieved in 2014. We have continued our discussions and are now in final negotiations with a UK based training provider to become a licensee. This is going to be a major new service offering, as well as an opportunity to raise awareness of both brands.
Overall I’m extremely proud of the achievements made in 2014. Having set ourselves the goal of surviving the year, I’m pleased to say that we’ve done better than that, and in some areas have charged ahead of our original business plan.
2015 for Firth Improvement is about expanding our brand, our access to top class resources, and our range of services offered. We hope to help you make 2015 your year of improvement.
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