Driving Value through True Partnerships

By admin,

Aurynion founder Michael Guethlein builds every client interaction from the founding values of the company: integrity, prudence, courage and trust. And, perhaps most importantly, respect. This approach affords him and his team the ability to truly understand a client’s issues — from their point of view — to drive functional outcomes that yield maximum value.

Question: Why did you found Aurynion?

Answer: I founded Aurynion in 2012 with the vision of bringing together a network of professionals and business partners who truly understand business needs — from the client’s perspective. I always thought I was an entrepreneur at heart and after working for 15 years at a global management consulting and services company leading and managing projects to support companies in their overall strategic planning, M&A, business analysis, outsourcing and performance optimization, I knew I had the experience to start my own firm.

When the time was right, I founded Aurynion, and I vowed to build this company with one main goal in mind: to truly partner my clients. The name Aurynion means “Positively Charged Guidance.” It consists of two words: “ion,” the positively charged part of an atom; and “auryn,” which traces its roots back to an ancient word meaning “guidance”.

Question: Describe what you mean by “truly partnering.”

Answer: I decided to strike out on my own because I wanted to be able to help clients for the long-term, and the way I could do that was to work on projects in which I knew I could tend to the client’s needs and create real value. Our approach is different because we tap into the client’s resources to help drive projects. We gather people from their teams — with relevant experience — and work with them to create deeper knowledge and expertise and achieve sustainable results.

We act like entrepreneurs and business owners, and we go the extra mile to make every project successful. When we created the company I established four values that we would stand for: integrity, prudence, courage and trust. They are a critical component of our approach and success.

Question: What services does Aurynion provide?

Answer: Aurynion focuses in three primary areas: Business Growth, Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and Business Optimization. Our business growth practice focuses on achieving sustainable company growth. Our team works with the client to develop a strategic operational foundation with performance measures and actionable plans to realize goals while minimizing risk and effort.

Our M&A practice provides overall strategy, during-the-deal planning and implementation and post-transaction integration to create and increase value for your company through the whole M&A cycle.

Business Optimization helps companies determine what is working and what isn’t working inside their organizations. We identify and recommend improvements and opportunities for consolidation, eliminating redundancies and improving overall efficiency and performance.

Question: What piece of advice would you give to others?

Answer: I try to step into my client’s shoes. I want to understand how someone thinks — from an entrepreneurial perspective. By having that mindset, we are able to achieve the best outcomes because we’re starting from the same place and working toward the same goals. It’s because of this that we are able to provide value and understanding.

Assessment for Improved
Customer Service

By admin,

A medium-sized IT-Service Company encountered many organizational and internal process issues preventing them from achieving their strategic of recent years goals to provide strong customer orientation.

The organization encountered several issues in its Business Development, Sales, and Operations departments while attempting to take on new business.

The Management Team was deeply involved in the day-to-day business operations and managing operational crises rather than advancing the company’s overall strategy and concentrating on business development and sales expansion.

The organization’s executives reached out to Aurynion for support in assessing their business operation and processes and finding improvements, prioritizing the optimization areas, and developing robust action plans and a roadmap to implement the approved changes.

Our Methodology:

As an initial step, we conducted several interviews with management using a structured interview methodology to assess key activities with several business functions. We also conducted individual key team members interviews to identify and assess the company’s strengths and improvement areas. During our in-depth review of the business, we identified and prioritized improvement areas, and their benefit potential through data, best practices and interviews. Using these results, we developed the “to-be” situation to achieve project goals:

  • Redesigned Account Management activities to achieve greater product diversification and increased cross-selling opportunities
  • Optimized client segmentation structure to redirect the limited resources towards key clients and to increase customer retention and satisfaction
  • Defined and clarified roles and responsibilities.
  • Improved Governance and Project Risk Management in daily operations
  • Identified complexity reduction and transparency increase in relevant business areas, e.g., Customer Service, Business Development, Commercial, etc.
  • Developed a realistic and detailed activity and implementation roadmap, including action plans
Impact:

Our solid methodologies and the delivered solution was a successful achievement for their client base. The key client accounts saw a much faster response to their service inquiries due to increased customer service quality and process improvements.

A different and more individualized focus on key clients created higher customer satisfaction, customer intimacy, and an increase in the company’s revenues.

New client onboarding could be done much faster, and the revenue stream was realized earlier than before. Internally, internal crises have decreased, and employees were more engaged due to clear roles & responsibilities and tasks they have to accomplish.

Finally, employee satisfaction and retention have increased due to overall improvements in the organization.