business

Michael Vinje, co-founder of a business and technology improvement consulting firm called Trissential, has business cards that identify him as the company's "chief essentialist."

He describes the company's business model as a simplified approach that focuses on three "essential" areas: a client's senior management, which develops business strategy; its middle management, which implements the strategy, and its workforce, which executes the strategy.

That pretty much covers the entire corporate landscape, of course, which raises the question of what's simple about it.

Whatever the heck all this means, the six-year-old company has attracted a blue-chip client list that has included the brawny likes of 3M, Supervalu and Boston Scientific, not to mention American Greetings, Siemens and Lands' End.

And it has grown its revenue at a brisk pace: In just two years from 2006 to 2008, the gross nearly tripled from $4 million to $11.6 million, whereupon the recession flattened the revenue stream at the same $11.6 million level.

But while revenue declined in the first half of 2009, it came back late in the year at a near-record pace, Vinje said. And with a $2 million project starting last month, he expects the 2010 gross to top $14 million.

Vinje, 48, and partner Keith Korsi, 40, came up with the name, Trissential, to reflect their three-pronged consulting approach, which involves examining the effectiveness of executive strategy, the efficiency of management and the productivity of the workforce.

First, the three elements

"Breaking a business down into these three elements simplifies the process of identifying and fixing internal problems," which most often include unclogging the lines of communication among the three levels of a business, Vinje said.

Examples abound. For one client, a large food company, the problem was that projects aimed at streamlining and growing the business were never finished on time or on budget, and those that were finished were rarely satisfactory.

It didn't take Trissential consultants long to figure out that senior managers were loading project after project on a workforce that lacked the ability or the resources to handle them all effectively.

The harder part was convincing the client. First, Trissential had to prove the workforce was overloaded, then it had to convince executives that they needed a refresher course on how to prioritize.

Then there was the financial products client whose efforts to create new marketing strategies were failing. Again, Trissential consultants quickly identified the problem: Project strategies were so complicated, and the required steps so unclear, that effective responses down the line were all but impossible.

The fault lay with the "unfocused and undisciplined" strategists, Vinje said. It took four months of "pulling the projects apart into simple, understandable and manageable parts" before middle managers and key employees could grasp the strategies completely.

As for management, the tougher job was "convincing them to make goals comprehensible and attainable," Vinje said.

A more difficult project involved the merger of two Fortune 100 companies with completely different cultures and systems. The toughest issue was different IT system software in such key areas as payroll, human resources, distribution and retail.

It was Vinje's area of expertise, based on his years of experience as an IT technician at Hughes Aircraft and Honeywell and IT director at UnitedHealth Group.

"We looked at costs, the maturity of the systems and the maintenance efficiencies involved, but most of the time we just acted as the moderator," he said. "It took almost a year to reach agreements; it should have taken less than six months."

The most arduous project, however, involved a small human resources company whose employees from top to bottom were unwilling to change the way they did business. The problem: Growth was severely hampered because of a focus on hiring expensive employees rather than investing in more efficient technology.

"Leadership finally agreed to make the investment, but it took a year to convince them," Vinje said. "But it's taken another six months to bring the work force on board," to get workers to recognize "how much better their jobs could be."

Happy with results

The work has earned grateful plaudits from clients: "Trissential has changed the way we do business," said Mike Osborn, operations vice president at Illinois-based Niven Marketing Group. "The bottom-line results have been more than I ever hoped."

Added Bob Eckert, project management specialist at Deluxe Corp.: Trissential's is "the best project management improvement content I've seen."

And all because of the three-way focus on strategy, management and execution -- what Vinje calls "picking the right work, managing it right and doing it right.

"This model, this language, allows clients to clarify and articulate their problems," he said.

Vinje and Korsi met at a small IT staffing firm, where Korsi was a sales executive and started Trissential in 2004. Since then, they have opened offices in Milwaukee and Madison, Wis., and grown from a two-man operation into a business with 70 consultants.

In keeping with Vinje's focus on simplicity, he sees a very simple reason for the success: "Business organizations have become so complicated and so burdened with communications gaps that the result is waste -- a lot of it."

He's offering "a better way to do things."

Dick Youngblood • 612-673-4439 • yblood@startribune.com