The Center for Enterprise Development, Inc. (CED) facilitates organizational change through management education and training engagements targeted to small to mid-sized, closely-held businesses in the Chicagoland area. CED understands how business education can impact success and translates that knowledge through a step-by-step business management process we call Management Through Applied Planning® . MAPP enables companies to look forward and grow while retaining a critical focus on day-to-day issues.

Our approach, tools and techniques continue to be developed and improved through our classroom and field-work with hundreds of closely-held companies in most major industries. We believe that since organizations are lead, managed and operated by people, life long learning is the primary driver of success.

A significant portion of CED's work revolves around the Certificate in Business Administration Program (CBAP) at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. The program, created in 1985, offers business owners and managers an applied alternative to traditional business degrees.

Our Philosophy
We understand that you know your business – we simply help you focus on the most profitable areas to execute your sales plan, and lay the groundwork for you to constantly improve on these positions through an adaptive culture. Every business should plan for growth, and in the long run only those solutions that can grow the business profitably are truly viable. We help create an environment where a smaller investment of resources is needed in order to realize greater benefits than ever before.

As growth occurs, naturally or simply due to industry and economic conditions, it places more stress on current processes - your day-to-day operations. We’ll help you understand how you currently get work done, why you aren’t performing at the level you think you need to be and then work with you to quickly improve your operational performance to meet changing customer requirements. We’ll also help you create a management process of continuing improvement of your core processes to remain as adaptable as possible to all the changes in your environment.

Our methodology includes the intelligent combination of education and facilitation of proven tools and techniques. What this means is that we help owners and managers prepare their organizations strategically and then leave behind newly developed strengths to help others in the organization deploy the strategy and continuously improve its results.