Speaker 1: Welcome everyone. I'm currently here in the west of Germany. It is Sunday evening and tomorrow on Monday we have a workshop with a very important client of ours, a client of BuildingRadar, the company that I currently work for. Next to me is Leopold, another colleague of mine also at BuildingRadar and in this video I decided to show you three things. Three things we will do. The first you can just follow me along for the day, see how we conduct the client workshop tomorrow. Thankfully the client tomorrow agreed that we can film also on site. But second I will also share some crucial tips and tricks from my time here at BuildingRadar but also before at consulting on how to interact with clients and conducting workshops. And third I will also talk about some general tips about being a manager in a startup company, interacting like that. So we just finished working on the document for tomorrow. It's already quite late so we're about to go to bed. But Leopold, thanks for joining me here. I do not only know Leopold from work but we also met already during university when we studied at our undergraduate degree. So I know that you had many other opportunities as well. You would also have had the opportunity to go into consulting, into banking, but you decided to start a business, start a startup after university. I trust that many of you also would be interested to hear what was your rationale for that. How did you think about that at that time?

Speaker 2: Yeah, first of all Heinrich, thank you for having me. And really for me it all came down to impact. Starting a startup is really all about impact. During my time at Google I really noticed, hey this is really great here, it's a nice tech company, it's a fast-changing environment, but I just couldn't figure out for myself what specific impact I had for the company. And I realized really the only way to have this impact you want to have as an entrepreneur is if you start your own company. That's why I decided to start Building Weather and our ambition is really to generate something big here.

Speaker 1: So we shot lots of material at our workshop at Custer and we created a little clip, a little mini video to give an impression how these workshops work, what we do there and how all this plays down. So I will just show you this video now to give an impression of how we do it at Building Radar. Our mission at Building Radar is to help companies in the construction industry to increase their revenue with revenue engineering. Many construction companies we talked to tell us that all of their functions have very detailed sales processes with the exception of the sales function. This is of course surprising because in the end of the day sales pays for the party. Revenue engineering is the idea that the sales process can be broken down in small steps like a manufacturing process and that then each individual step can be trained and can be improved in a systematic way. When we work together with new client of ours the starting point is usually a workshop week. In the workshop week we want to do three things. First we want to size the revenue potential of revenue engineering of this new and innovative way to conduct proactive sales for the organization. To do that we conduct interviews in this workshop week with different employees of the company across hierarchy levels. We also conduct a conversation with the managerial accounting team to collect all necessary data and also conduct interviews with the IT department to understand all dependencies. As a result of that we can come up with a very clear picture what the revenue potential for that individual company with revenue engineering is over the next two years. Second we look at the organization and capabilities of that client. So from all the interviews conversations and other data sources that we have we assess the current organization and understand to what extent it is already fit for revenue engineering what the potential gaps are that still need to be closed by the management by the team in order to be successful with revenue engineering over the next two years. Third we jointly develop a roadmap how a successful path towards revenue engineering can look like. Here we distinguish all the individual building blocks that this organization needs to have in place and still needs to come up with in order to be successful. We develop a timeline how that could look like and we also show different paths, different partners out there how the firm could actually get there. At the end of this workshop week we have a full day with the senior leadership of the company where we share our preliminary results, jointly co-create some of the missing parts that still need to be developed and then jointly agree on how the next steps in the journey for revenue engineering should look like. Today we conducted the last workshop day with the senior leadership of Köster which is one of the leading general contractors in Germany. We had a very productive day in exchange and are very much looking forward to the next steps. Workshops are a key part of working in consulting or so many other professional services firms and the key reason is that usually you do not just want to sit alone in the team room, work on something for several months and then at the end of the project send over the results to the clients because this will usually not help to really create buy-in. So instead what you want to do is you want to co-create results with your client and surely workshops are a great way to do that. So let me share three tips from my time here at Building Radar but also before in consulting at McKinsey on what you can do to improve your workshop game. And the first is really to draw from many many different data sources and information sources that then you bring to the workshop. And what very few people only do but what is often extremely powerful is to talk to other employees of the company. Because if you do that what you achieve is that then when you talk to the leaders, to the decision makers, you can also tell them what their employees told you and this clearly adds to your credibility. Because the truth is that in many especially of these larger organizations the senior executives, the leaders, they do not really know what on an operational level all the people are doing. They often have a certain preconception of that but it's not always accurate what they think of what is happening. My second tip is about creating the perception with the client that the workshop was a success and that some very very tangible results are coming out of that. Because as a matter of truth if you just sit there present something maybe ask a couple of questions. Ideally people have learned something but what most people will like even more if the workshop really created some tangible results that they can then later use and then build on and work with. And what we like to do both in consulting but also building radar is to in the workshop jointly develop things on the flip chart, come up with decisions, come up with results and then what we like to do is after the workshop we create a document with all the things we worked on, all the things we came up with and then we distribute this document with all the workshop participants. And this makes it very tangible, very clear what you have jointly developed, what the results were and this then often creates the perception in your clients that yes the workshop was not a waste of time but highly productive and something came out of that which surely was worth the time and the money of all the people that attended. My third tip is about how to make the workshop a memorable experience. And here my key insight that I learned over time is that the more different types of media, the more different types of formats that you use in the workshop usually the better and the better will be the memory that people have about it. And what I mean by that is the following. So if the whole workshop consists of you standing in front of the crowd presenting something, asking questions, this is not necessarily a bad workshop. But what's often even better if then you have parts of the workshop which are conducted in front of the flip chart. Now you're standing there, you're jointly developing something. Maybe you even have another part where you have a whiteboard or poster where you elaborate something that then comes together written on the poster. Maybe you have some sticky notes that people can write on attached to the poster. Of course you should not do this only for the sake of doing this. This should always also just add value and make sense in the overall context. But I would encourage you to really think about that and just to add something on top of just you standing in front of the people and presenting something. So now I'm standing here outside of our office here at BuildingRadar. Hope today's video was insightful to get some impressions at how we work and what it is like and some tips on how to conduct strong and successful workshops. And as always I want to say a big big thanks to all the sponsors and members of the channel. You're really making a big contribution. Thank you for that. If you took any value out of this video at all please destroy the like button for the YouTube algorithm and also subscribe to the channel to stay up to date on all the content. My name is Heinrich. I'm releasing new videos every single Saturday. So see you soon next week. All the best to you and bye bye.