MA33 Strategies, LLC Claimed

Marc Alterman, ma33strategies.com
MA33 Strategies helps put companies on the path to sustainable profits.  Working with owners and leaders of small and mid-size businesses, we evaluate all aspects of your business; prioritize your challenges; and develop and help implement strategies that sharpen focus and improve financial and operational performance.

Video transcript:
Hi. This is Elizabeth Gearhart. I’m here with Marc Alterman of MA 33 strategies. Marc, why did you name your company that?

Elizabeth, that’s a great question. I love when people ask me that because I actually did give it a fair bit of thought. M.A. should be pretty obvious for most people. Those are my initials. Again, my name is Mark Alterman and the 33 stands for the fact that this venture is really the third-third of my life. The first third of my life, I spent a lot of time getting an education, honing my skills and really discovering what my interests were. I spent the second third of my life managing several companies, startup companies and really culminating in nearly twenty years as president in CEO of a mid-sized manufacturing company where we realized nearly 25 million dollars in annual revenue and we had, well, over 100 employees of several subsidiaries. So those were the first two thirds of my life and now I’m in the third-third of my life and I want to take the experience that I gained and the wisdom that I gained and really all the white hairs that I earned over that period of time, and try to share that with others to help them achieve their goals.

So how do you do that? So I understand that you help business owners, CEOs and executives too. Of course, if you grew a company to 25 million, of course you do. How do you help them?

Well, what I learned is you really need to know where you’re going in order to be successful and I think of it this way Elizabeth. When you pull out of your driveway and you’re trying to take a trip somewhere, you know what your destination is and you probably have a pretty clear route planned out in your head as to where you’d like to go. A business is really no different. A business needs a destination and it needs a route to get there and what I like to do is work with companies to try to define their strategy or their strategic plan, which is really determining what their vision is for their company or their destination if you will and then design a plan to help them get there.

And how do you design that plan?

Well, the strategic planning is really a process and what people have to keep in mind that there’s really not necessarily a cookie cutter plan but that there’s a process to develop a plan that’s going to be uniquely suited for each company and it’s going to be designed by the people in that company because they know their markets and they know their company better than any outsider can know that. So what we really try to do is focus on process. The first part of that is really coming to some grips with what your vision is, where you want to drive your business, what your mission is and what you’re trying to accomplish. The next thing to do is to really set out and discover where you stand, what is your current state of your business, what are your strengths and your weaknesses and those are internal characteristics that we can look at and analyze. Next, what are your opportunities and your threats and those are really the external factors.

Now, I’m sure many people have heard of the concept of a SWOT analysis and that’s really what I just described and we work with companies to sit down not only with the top executives but it’s critical to speak to people who are actually managing and supervising and even line employees to get their understanding of the business. We help them develop data to understand where they are and where they’ve been and we also help look at the outside competition so we know what the markets are and as I said what the opportunities and threats are. Once we’ve created that, we work with the leadership team at the business to try to help develop an appropriate strategic plan. That will establish objectives. It will establish strategic initiatives to achieve those objectives and critically it will also establish metrics and key performance indicators so we can evaluate how we’re progressing towards our goals and of course we have to design a process also that is going to assure that we’re always focusing on those goals and always being accountable to achieve those things. So really that’s the essence of the process that we do and it’s ongoing and you can always respond to changes by altering your objectives, altering your strategy but you have to continually be looking at it and evaluating your progress. Focus is really one of the key elements that you have to do, what you want to do step by step and then relentless. You have to be relentless about pursuing those things and keeping focused on your goals and how you will achieve them.

So when should they do this? When should the business create the strategic plan?

Well, there was never an inappropriate time to look at a strategic plan for a company whether a company is a startup or mature, whether it is in a chaotic state or whether it’s stable, whether it is growing or contracting. The short answer to the question is, it’s never a long time to have a strategic plan. Now, a lot of companies will wait until there’s some type of transformative event to start looking and say, oh, my goodness, we have to look at where we’re going and that transformative event could be a change of leadership. It could be a disruption in the marketplace or as we’ve seen lately it could be the impact of a pandemic that shuts business down in many respects and really transforms the way we have to do business. Well, those are certainly good times. The best time is now to do a strategic plan particularly if you don’t have one in place now. Companies that have a strategic plan are always going to be better positioned to deal with the type of disruptive events that I just talked about.

So what if you’re a successful company right now and you’re making millions of dollars and your balance sheet looks good, do you still need a strategic plan?

Well, I suppose it’s always nice to celebrate your success and we certainly had quite a bit. We were pretty profitable for a long time but it was really critical to have a strategy in place because what happened in the past as they say is no guarantee of what’s going to happen in the future. There are a lot of disruptions that can come about whether it’s internal changes, people leave, key employees leave, world defense as we’ve seen recently overtake things. So you really have to be prepared and if you have a plan in place, not that you’re necessarily frozen to that plan but you’ll be able to take that plan and adapt it to whatever the changing circumstances were.

So can a business do this on its own?

Well, a lot of large companies as I’m sure you realize have entire departments that are dedicated to strategic planning and looking at what the future holds and where the business is going to go, but most small or mid-sized companies don’t have the luxury of having an entire staff around to dedicate that time to do that and by the same token it’s quite a task for a senior executive CEO, an owner or a senior member of the leadership team to take the time away from the daily challenges of the business to try to focus on developing a strategic process as I just described. Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s really critical to have an outside perspective on this and somebody who can ask difficult questions without a lot of personal history that they have with others in the company or having someone get upset because they feel that they’re being picked on in some way in terms of the process. Honesty is really the key and it’s important to have an outside facilitator I think come in and try to guide you through this process who’s experienced in it and can help you realize what you’re trying to do, establish your objectives in some reasonable way and guide you through the process in a more effective manner.

So how can companies work with you?

Well, I could be that facilitator as I just indicated. I work with companies and helping them develop strategic plans and helping them implement those plans going forward. In particular, we can do a comprehensive type of plan where I spend time interviewing the key people. We come forward with an initial report that kind of establishes the state of the business as it is today and then I will guide the leadership team through the process of coming up with the appropriate objectives and really producing a document that will give them their roadmap to what I like to think of as a sustainable.. a road to sustainable profits so we can keep going into the future. We can do smaller versions of that for smaller companies where we spend a little bit less time but then once we have that plan in place I also like to work with companies on the implementation of those plans because a plan is only good if you’re going to execute it. Having a piece of paper or a book and putting it on the shelf is not going to be helpful. As I said before, you really need to be relentless with the implementation of that plan and stick to it. You need to be persistent and not quit, not walk away from that.

So what size companies do you work with?

Well, my experience is with sort of classically mid-sized companies. As I said we were about 25 million dollars in revenue and I ran a company for close to 20 years and they’re sort of unique problems that mid-sized companies have Elizabeth. They tend not to have big resources of planning department as we spoke about before and it’s really a tough position to be in. I remember I used to like to tell people.. I work half days from 7:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night and that didn’t include the weekends, which I was also showed up there then too. So I appreciate when you would come in in the morning and get a little work done and then for a senior executive at a company of that size, the line starts to form outside your door and people have a bunch of questions and they vie for your attention all day long and then about five o’clock it comes down again and you can get back to the list you had first thing in the morning but of course it’s the longer. So I understand the pressures that an executive at a mid-sized companies is involved in. So I have particular understanding, the expertise with sort of classically mid-sized companies, which I would classify as revenue from the high single digits up to 50 or 60 million dollars. Again, depending on the nature of the company that it is but I would also say if you’re a little smaller and you’re startup and you want to create the right foundation or you have aspirations of growing whether it is organically, whether you’re trying to set yourself up for an investment, a public offering or a sale of your business, it’s really critical to have a strong foundation in place that’s going to enable you to grow and also to attract outside investors or purchasers or enable yourself to go toward an IPO route as well.

You’ve spoken to a lot of business coaches and that is a totally different thing than what you’re doing. You are a strategist and that is different than coaching. So it’s almost similar to a COO but not exactly the same as that either. It’s kind of a special fit, right?

Well, it’s a little bit of a fit and there is a coaching element to certainly to what I do and one thing that I can also offer not only as an adjunct to the strategic planning that I just talked about but as a standalone service as well is that, again, having been in the position of running a small privately held company, I appreciate the fact that someone in that position could be awfully lonely. There are a lot of decisions that you need to make that oftentimes you just don’t have somebody to knock around the problem with. Even if you have a good and loyal staff, sometimes the issues may involve them. Sometimes you may not want to open a can of worms or you may not want to take their time because they’re often on other important issues that they’re doing for the company. So just as a company calls up their attorney when they have a legal issue or calls their accountant when they have a financial accounting issue, they should have a business adviser whom they can call to really help them sort through problems from a strategic perspective and I think that that’s really critical because so many companies don’t really have an active board of directors or an advisory board that they can call on. I really enjoy talking to executives and other business owners about how they can help their business and move their business forward. Again, sometimes you just need the confidence that you can breed in yourself by speaking to somebody to know that you’re on the right track or maybe ask a question you haven’t thought about or provide a perspective that’s a little different than you have when you’re too close to it.

Well, I strongly agree. I do believe the old adage, ’’Two heads are better than one,’’ is very true. I know my husband owns his own law firm and we have many of these discussions between the two of us.

Well he has you to rely on Elizabeth.

He does. You were saying something before we started this interview about looking around the corner. Can you go into that a little?

Yeah. One of my favorite sayings is, it’s really important to be able to see around corners. Somebody asked me one time in an interview what super power would I’d like to have and my answer was, ’’Gee, I’d really like to be able to see around corners.’’ I believe in preparation and trying to think of things before they happen. It’s part of being analytical. It’s part of having a strategy to try to imagine things in the future how they can come at you. If you can see around the corner, you’ll know what’s coming around the corner. Unfortunately, we don’t always see the things that are out there but if we try to spend our time strategizing and preparing for the future, we’ll be better able to handle those things that are perhaps a little unexpected like a pandemic.

Right, and you’d said something earlier too when we interviewed you for Passage to Profit on iHeart Radio about using the technologies, knowing what the technologies are and being able to use the technologies that are coming up right now.

Well, technology is really something that for every company should be an advantage. There’s so much that’s out there. Companies that were utilizing video conferencing before the recent crisis were certainly ahead of companies that aren’t and have been able to adapt more quickly and more rapidly. So you always need to be looking at the technology and from a manufacturing and distribution standpoint, which is where I have a lot of experience, the technology helps you to accumulate data and that data is really what you need to look at and to analyze and help inform your decisions as to where you’re going. So technology should be an advantage and companies that are focused on utilizing it are certainly going to be ahead of those that don’t.

Right, and artificial intelligence is one of those. People are using that to analyze huge pieces of data sets and they’re ahead because they’re using the A.I.

Yeah, you can use A.I. but there are certainly things that that will show you if you have large data sets but it doesn’t have to be that complex and the investment doesn’t have to be that great. Really, the key is collecting the data that is going to help inform your decisions, collecting the data to see how you’re working toward a goal or an objective. Are you achieving that? Are you making progress in that direction? I recently published a little piece on my website and blog and it told the story of a company that I worked with last year and you could tell that the people running the company were told by the ownership, which was a private equity firm, well, you guys need to analyze data. You need to look at data. Well, they collected a bunch of data but every month that they looked at it, it was presented in a different format. They added something here. They took something away there but you could never really discern a trend that you were looking at and it really occurred to me that the data was extensive but pretty close to useless because it was collected for the sake of collecting it rather than for the sake of informing their decisions and I think it’s really important. Well, A.I. is tremendous and there are great technology tools that are out there. If you have a huge amount of data, it doesn’t have to be that difficult. You have to do it religiously however. You have to do it consistently. You have to look at it all the time and be open to what it’s telling you and not confuse. As I like to say, data is not the plural of anecdote. It’s a little different and you have to not be caught up. Well, this guy told me this and one of the folks on the factory floor said this. Well, you really need to look at things more systemically and consistently in order to drive your decisions when you’re trying to determine your strategy and determine whether your strategy is working.

So do you help companies determine which data to collect and how to analyze that and present it?

Well, again, that’s really part of the process. There are some standard things that from my experience and most companies would know that you want to look at. There are some things that are pretty simple but most of the data really needs to be tied to the objectives that you’re trying to achieve and that circles back Elizabeth to the strategic planning process. You have to figure out what your objectives are and how you’re going to measure your project, your progress towards those objectives and that’ll inform the type of data that you want and what you want to analyze it and what your goals are. Do I want to increase something by 3%, by 10%, by 50% or do I want to reduce mistakes by 15% and we start measuring those things and looking at it and then you can start designing initiatives to try to achieve those things and that’s really how you get small improvements, which ultimately add up to great results.

So it sounds to me that you take a very scientific approach. I had told you I think that you have a very analytical mind talking to you. You take a very scientific approach and use it for a strategy and really that gives you the best results.

Yeah, well, we can all think we can be successful working with our gut instincts and it’s certainly helpful and there are people who are very intuitive but it sure helps to know what the facts are too and to analyze the facts and to think about them in a systematic fashion and in a rigorous fashion as well.

Yes. I believe that you really can’t know the full picture without the correct data as you mentioned. So that’s very important.

Absolutely.

Yes. Is there anything else that we need to say about M.A. 33 strategies?

Well, I’d be happy to help people build their businesses. As I said, M.A. 33 is signifying that I’m in the third-third of my life and that this portion of my life is to try to work with companies that want to grow, want to sustain their profitability and I guess the last thing that I would add is that what a strategic plan does more than anything else is give somebody peace of mind. I think business owners I know, executives lose a tremendous amount of sleep every night worrying about what their business is. I think you sleep a whole lot better when you have a plan in place and you have a direction and you know what you’re supposed to be doing. So I would love to work with companies that have that kind of philosophy that we’d like to achieve their goals and do so in a systematic way and then hopefully they can learn the lessons and someday pass it onto others just as I’m trying to do.

Wonderful. Well, thank you Marc.

Well, thank you. It’s great chatting with you.