The president of One-hour Delivery Service wanted some help to continue their positive growth trend. Using Business Insight to sensitize his management to strategic planning issues and to compare their business against the competition, he says, "Business Insight is the best tool I have found for getting my personnel to seriously address the strategic planning process."

One Hour Delivery Service, Inc. began business 13 years ago in Dallas, Texas. Today they are still a local business, but have grown to 50 employees, employ an additional 100 independent drivers and generate more than $5,000,000 in annual revenues. Over the years the company, owned and managed by Charles McLean III, has gained a good understanding of the local market and established a well defined niche. They are the largest on-call delivery service in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and offer 24 hour, 365 days a year service. They offer same day delivery throughout the U.S., customized billing programs and insured, bonded and uniformed drivers.

As his enterprise grew, Mr. McLean became concerned that his management and sales staff were not giving enough consideration to the longer term business strategy. In 1991 he purchased Business Insight to help analyze his strategy. He used it himself for awhile to get comfortable with the process and to better understand how to relate the specifics of his business to the data input questions. Then he had his management work with him to establish their strategy.

He has been pleased with the results achieved through this process, but he decided to take it another step. He involved his sales personnel and set them the task of using Business Insight to define the strategy of each of their major competitors. They gather the data input from information the sales personnel get as they communicate with prospects, from a Dun & Bradstreet data base and from public domain information such as revenue, number of deliveries for a given period and number of delivery vehicles.

Using the resulting analyses, both management and sales personnel are able to isolate the competitor's potential weaknesses and define counter strategies that offer them the best opportunity for acquiring market share and improving revenues. Mr. McLean says, "Business Insight is the best tool I have found for getting my personnel to seriously address the strategic planning process."