In addition to the information available on the Online Business Advisor site, we occasionally make our consultants available to you via email. Accessing our consultants with a specific question or request for help is not as hard as it may seem. Depending on availability of consultants, we will provide basic feedback on issues dealing with managing people, sales management, sales compensation, marketing, profit enhancement, strategic planning, writing a business plan, writing a marketing plan, conducting performance reviews, and other facets of your business. There may be occasions when our consultants will not feel comfortable responding to a particular request for help. If this should occur, we will contact you immediately by email.

We do not provide legal advice nor do we carry out extensive data analyses or research in responding to your questions/requests. Please be as specific as possible when asking for help. The more pertinent information we have the better. It will help us avoid trading emails to gather additional information. Please be concise and to the point and do not provide actual employee names in your request. Address only one overall issue in your request. We will attempt to respond as soon as possible after receiving your question/request. But please keep in mind that our consultants are quite busy and your request for information may not be responded to immediately. If you have an urgent situation, please note that in your email and we will do our best to respond sooner. However, this is often difficult due to the work load of each of our consultants. Your question/request should have your name, company name and email address as the first line of the message.

The following example illustrates how to submit a question/request:

John Doe/ABC Company/jdoe@enf.com

I have an employee I'll call Jim. Jim is a sales rep in one of our better territories in terms of potential. He has been with the company for roughly 4 years. He is a very inconsistent performer. In one quarter, Jim might be in our top 3 as far as sales are concerned. The next quarter he might be in the bottom 3. He never seems to sustain good sales results. In terms of gross profit, Jim struggles. Our reps are allowed some flexibility with pricing because of the nature of our business. He seems to make price concessions too readily. I think Jim gets lazy after having a good quarter. He is well liked by employees and customers. Our reps are paid a base salary and a commission based on sales. Jim is also usually late with his weekly reports. I have spoken with him a number of times about this situation and he tells me he will do better. He does for a while but slides back until I talk to him again. What can I do to make Jim a more consistent performer? Should I waste my time with him?

ALL INFORMATION SUBMITTED BY YOU IS TREATED AS HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL AND IS NOT SHARED WITH ANYONE OUTSIDE OUR FIRM!