Synergy was being used before its time. When I started The Synergy Group in 1987, very few people knew what it was. Then it became a buzz phrase.
Now we're encountering the same thing with the word alchemy.
I picked the name Management Alchemy because the changes we make with the businesses I work with are so profound and long lasting that they seem like they're magical. But they are results anchored.
When someone hears the name, that's what I want them to understand: a process that takes something potentially valuable and makes it more valuable. Outside observers call it polishing the diamond. That's the image.
Repeatable, not a one-off
Magic happens once. Results anchored in process repeat.
The point isn't one client. It's a repeatable performance that spans almost all of my clients over the past 25 years.
A gas detection manufacturer was making a lot of money and wasting a lot of money at the same time: in work and process, in overproduction, in over-offering to the market. Fourteen years later it had sustained a 450% EBITDA improvement through every business cycle, including 2008, confirmed in writing by its president.
A lighting manufacturer went paperless on the floor. Inventory down, work in process down, mistakes down.
A global luxury manufacturer was running satellite warehouses hundreds of miles from the plant. Most of what sat in them was mistakes. The network collapsed to a single site, because once the mistakes stopped there was nothing to store.
Different industries, different problems, same shape of outcome. Anybody can do it once. When it repeats, you have something.
That's the alchemy. Something potentially valuable, made more valuable, and it lasts. Again and again.
Dominic Luzi · Chief Answer Grape, Management Alchemy