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Notra is a Rauma-based company founded in 2019, specializing in industrial projects and maintenance. Its driving force is an experienced and skilled workforce combined with robust customer service. The company has been growing rapidly since its inception and has achieved a turnover of twelve million euros within a few financial years.

Clarity Leading to Growth Direction
In the fast pace of growth, it’s easy for the bigger picture to become blurred, making it necessary to clarify the overall view. In three financial years, Notra has grown significantly, more than tripling its workforce. Clearly, many things have been done right!

When Notra started collaborating with Aamu, it wasn’t entirely clear where to invest for future growth while maintaining profitability. With various business activities, particularly varying projects and continuous billing maintenance contracts, it was crucial initially to model what constitutes the company’s profitability.

The collaboration began with driver mapping workshops organized by Aamu. The idea of driver mapping is to break down the business into understandable cause-and-effect relationships that can be monitored numerically. These relationships are drawn into a tree model, helping identify concrete actions that impact the achievement of business goals.

“In the workshop, we, along with professionals, broke down our business into a process diagram. This helped us understand our business as a whole and the daily activities that lead to achieving higher-level goals.” -Risto Kuusisto, CEO

Driver Mapping Helps Understand What Can Be Managed in Business
In Notra’s workshops, the business and its components were thoroughly reviewed, and Aamu’s team helped identify concrete factors, or drivers, for effectively managing daily operations. For example, it was recognized that continuous customer relationships are crucial for profitable business growth. Part of the drivers was therefore aimed at increasing the number of monthly-billed customers.

In identifying drivers, it’s essential to choose concrete and manageable factors. If the goal is to increase the number of monthly-billed customers, one must identify specific factors that influence this target. Collaboration with Aamu significantly structured and enhanced Notra’s customer management. Regular discussions with customers were identified as increasing customer satisfaction, reducing customer churn, and offering upselling opportunities, thus increasing monthly billing amounts. Besides regular discussions, other growth drivers included additional sales by Notra’s teams and defining and managing sales pipeline metrics, such as the number of contacts made by salespeople per week. The workshop also acknowledged that sales cycles are long, requiring significant attention at the beginning of the sales pipeline.

With driver mapping, Notra now monitors these metrics and can intervene in factors that might increase customer churn and seize upselling opportunities. It’s worth noting that while drivers should be quantifiable in numbers, they don’t necessarily have to be purely financial; qualitative drivers can also be crucial for the company’s direction.

Data-Driven Management Aids in Making Correct Business Decisions
Notra has grown at an incredibly fast pace, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The collaboration with Aamu helped clarify which business areas are particularly efficient and the direction in which the company should continue. Managing daily operations is more effective with clear drivers that influence and track the business. These drivers are not limited to past financial data or planned budgets but include recognizing concrete actions that affect the business, such as maintaining customer continuity. Various actions are structured into a plan and scheduled so that their progress is easy to monitor.

For example, project costing was monitored alongside actual performance, significantly clarifying the company’s profitability.

Contact Aamu Partners if you seek support in business, such as through driver mapping. You can read more about Aamu’s client experiences here.