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Cogent Analytics

Delivering Powerful Business Solutions

Vertisys Letter

To whom it may concern,

It has been with great pleasure and benefit to work with Cogent and Mr. Vogl over the past six weeks.

During this time we have accomplished much and laid out plans to accomplish much more in the coming months and years.

Once you have recognized your need to make changes for your business to improve, I recommend you call Cogent Analytics.

 

Regards,

Matt Baldwin, President

Still Lumber Letter

To Whom it may Concern,
Still Lumber Company had a very good experience working with Cogent Analytics. We wish we would have engaged them several years ago. They helped us with all aspects of our business.

During the short time that we worked with them, we saw immediate results and improvement in our operation and planning. Our service improved, and our customers noticed right away. The structure of our business, the function of our team, and the strategic planning for our short term and long-term success improved.

The team from Cogent was very professional and adapted to our personal style which made the interaction work perfectly. We highly recommend Cogent to anyone looking to improve their business.

Sincerely,
Jason Hill
President
Still Lumber Company

Metro PHAC Letter

To Whom It May Concern:
We are extremely pleased with the value Cogent Analytics has provided our business. Working with Cogent was truly an eye-opening experience for myself and our upper management. Metro is an established and thriving company, but we knew we had several areas for improvement.

Our Project Director, Matt Baker, spent time learning and evaluating our existing business, business practices, processes, pricing, and structure. He explained the areas we needed to address and related them clearly to our larger goals. Working with Matt helped us define and implement processes, fine-tune our organizational structure in preparation for future growth and transition, and changed the way we review and track our financial
performance.

In the seven weeks we have worked with them, we have seen measurable improvements. We are seeing positive changes in our company culture, inspiring improvement throughout all levels of our organization. Metro Plumbing, Heating & Air looks forward to a continued relationship with Matt and Cogent through the Lifecycle Management Program.

Sincerely,
Mark Hardin
Owner

Hotsy Equipment Company Letter

The year 2015 my whole world changed. My husband, Larry, who owned an established equipment company, passed away. With the business being left to me, I now had twenty people depending on me for their livelihood. Talk about a deer in the headlights!

My husband left me a great team but no experience on how to run his business. We continued to serve our customers at a high level, but I was feeling overwhelmed and losing sleep because I didn’t feel confident about the future and me running the business. I received a phone call from Cogent and agreed to meet with Tim, and when I did, I told him I would listen and would not be signing anything today and I didn’t. He returned and convinced me that I had everything to gain and nothing to lose going through the discovery … and he was correct.

Brian came in and looked all over the company, interviewed the employees, and gave me a different view of my company. What really struck me was that the company didn’t hit break-even untill the end of November the previous year, and that was the year business was coming back and we made some strides in the business. When it came time to move forward with a consultant, I wasn’t ready.

Rob, the owner, reached out to me and I was struck by his sincerity and desire to help me improve me and my company. I struggled with this decision for about two weeks before I agreed to bring on a consultant. They sent me Mick.

I immediately felt comfortable with Mick. He reviewed his notes with me and what he knew about the business. Then we immediately started having meetings with my key employees to improve communication. I began to look at my P & L in a whole different light. I still have work to do.

Mick was also introducing Activity reports to my Shop Manager and we were going to finally have a base for what that department was producing. Mick was becoming my trusted advisor and business was progressing.

Mick started to work with AP and AR and he was helping AP set up a cash flow spread sheet and we were also addressing the lack of activity in AR with collections. The challenge began when over Memorial Day weekend, our AR and AP employees were in a severe car accident and would not be able to work for over two months. Sheer chaos!! I was so thankful that Mick was on board and helping the company work through this challenging time. He immediately took charge. We hired temporary employees and Mick was able to get them on board and having that office running efficiently. We realized that our AR person was not keeping up with his job responsibilities and we had to let him go. We collected $100,000 in outstanding debt staying on task, which brought our receivables down significantly. Challenges can also be opportunities in disguise!

Our Selling Sales Manager has now become a full-time Sales Manager. Weekly meetings, one on one meetings with each sales rep. They now have goals and progress charts to keep them on task. We let go of two sales reps and replaced them with an employee that was on board but had to leave due to family responsibilities and a sales rep that has sold 2 machines in one month. We celebrated our July financials as we had the best month since the oil boom of 2014.

Mick and I have established a great business relationship and I am sad that my project is coming to a close. He has informed me that he will be checking in with me and I will be sending him reports to keep him and I current. He will continue to be that trusted advisor and help us thrive.

With gratitude,
Joanne Loftus
President

Power Engineering Services Letter

I wanted to give insight into my experience with our Cogent Analytics project, coordinated by Bob Hahn.

I was introduced to Bob Hahn and was very impressed with his business knowledge and experience. Upon starting our project, I was skeptical of how much help Cogent could provide, not knowing the technicalities of our industry. However, I still trusted in Bob’s process and decided to see it through to completion. My skepticism was disproved; every week that passed I felt more confident in Cogent’s capabilities and looked forward to each additional week to come. Bob forced me to make the changes that needed to be made and in a timely fashion. Knowing that you need to restructure, or do things a different way, is important. Most managers may put these items on hold because they feel too busy and never complete them. Bob’s short time here forced me to make these changes promptly, and without the typical excuses that may have accompanied them.

I believe most small businesses are run by people with great technical knowledge of the industry they are in. However, these owners (myself included) may not have the business knowledge required to properly and effectively run the company. Cogent Analytics has the experience to properly restructure small businesses to these Fortune 500 standards and set the baseline for effective growth and expansion.

Overall, I am extremely happy with the Cogent Analytics experience and recommend them to any business looking to get to the next level. My word of advice to other skeptical business owners is to be open-minded. While you may know all the technical knowledge of your industry, Cogent can provide you with the business expertise to take your company to levels you never previously imagined.

Cogent has positively affected our business and my personal life. Cogent forced me to make difficult decisions like “letting go” of the micromanagement and enforced delegation through the company. By delegating more tiers of management, I have noticed a substantial decline in the amount of workload and stress each day. Because of the Cogent project I took a week-long vacation and the company ran itself! For the first time ever, I didn’t have to run every aspect of the company. My new managers handled every issue that arose, and I was rarely bothered the entire week. I finally have a separation between work time and personal time. This is an invaluable benefit I received from Cogent Analytics and I will be forever grateful.

Bringing Cogent Analytics into PES was the best decision we have made in our 25 years of business.

Sincerely,
Daniel R. Staudt
Senior VP of Operations
Power Engineering Services, Inc.

Michiana Equipment Letter

To Whom It May Concern,
We are extremely satisfied with the value Cogent Analytics has provided our business. As a young, inexperienced business manager, it would be difficult to put a dollar value to the hours spent working and talking with Roy Mendez, our Project Manager. It was a business coaching experience of a lifetime!

Before we hired Cogent, everyone in the company knew we could improve greatly in a lot of areas. Roy took time to analyze how we made sales, handled phone calls, provided customer service, job bidding, Invoicing, purchasing, and marketing. He explained the ways we could improve and took action to fix it. We started at the top of the organization and worked our way down.

I have seen great results in all areas. To name a few …

We were making plans to hire another guy to help with Job Bidding but by creating a Job Bidding template we Just freed up a guy and didn’t need to hire after all.

We are filling out KPI reports weekly. I find that to be a very helpful tracking tool.

Our A/R account has improved greatly, by asking for payment when picking up parts. We also have a guy set to call all A/R customers weekly asking for payment.

We are giving our company great exposure through our new marketing strategy. Helping our overall sales. Overall organization. Speaking for my Dad, the owner, it has taken a lot of stress off our shoulders! We have confidence the business will run smoothly in our absence.

We are looking forward to building our relationship with Cogent in the future.

 

Sincerely,
Jay Dee Graber
Business Manager

Allison Park Group Letter

APG was started 28 years ago as a part time, one person industrial programming company. Over the years we developed into a manufacturing firm with multiple lines of enclosures and mounts for the machine vision industry. We are in a somewhat unique position in that we have created a niche with minimal formal competition.

We have seen steady growth over the years, and 2017 saw us at 5 million in sales, with 15 employees. Unfortunately, although I’m good at creation of new products and managing their production, I’m not so good at people management. With 6 or 7 employees, this wasn’t much of a problem , but with fifteen I was starting to feel the company stumble due to lack of structure and accountability. We had also let our inventory management get away from us, though I didn’t understand how bad that had gotten. I also wasn’t sure how to effectively deal with the problems I was starting to see.

Then Cogent got in touch with us, with their unique offer. Arlon came in to do the discovery process, and pointed out our need for a formal management structure and the need to get control of our inventory. He also mentioned that we may need to change accounting packages to better handle our accounting challenges. These were things I understood on a gut level, but had not quantified on paper.

The real prize, though, was having Floretta Jackson come in to do the onsite work. Rather than just doing an evaluation and handing us a set of guidelines & recommendations, Flo worked with each of us one on one to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses as well as the company requirements. She then made recommendations for a formal management structure and worked with key individuals to train them for their changing roles. She also determined that our existing accounting package had some limitations that were contributing to our inventory tracking problems. She shepherded us through the conversion process to a new package, and has been working with each of us to develop procedures to correctly handle the day to day information flow through the company.

Other major changes put in place included hiring a General Manager, allowing me to concentrate more on engineering projects, and less on the day to day company management. Flo is spending her last week onsite to assist the new GM in getting up to speed, and to transfer what she has learned about APG and its employees .

We now have complete and accurate job descriptions for our various positions, giving each employee a more formal structure to work within . I have a custom dashboard with weekly key indicators showing me how the company is really doing. We also have formalized problem tracking to allow us to rapidly get to the root of production problems, so that we can more rapidly correct them.

We have a much more accurate inventory count, and procedures in place to ensure the count and value stays accurate.

We are extremely glad to have had Cogent come in and rebuild our accounting and employee foundations. Without these improvements, I’m not sure where APG would have been in 2-3 years. I highly recommend Cogent’ services for small companies like mine.

Sincerely,
Christopher C. McGeary
President, Allison Park Group, Inc

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