We Work with Company Leaders to Develop Opportunities …
… and Build the Capabilities Required to Achieve Profitable Growth
You’re a chief executive ready to take a fresh look at growing your company. You run an established firm with revenues exceeding $100 million. Growing the business in a sustainable way with profit is an imperative. And you’re making no small plans.
You operate in competitive markets that may be complicated … by independent distributors with their own agendas, web-based competitors squeezing margins, and possibly by a high-touch point of sale. On top of that, customer preferences are always in flux so maintaining a strong competitive position and solid financial results, year after year, is a challenge.
You’re determined to improve your prospects for growth of revenue and profit. You may be considering one or more moves that will change what you deliver to customers, how that happens, or what it costs you. You may also be considering who you think of as a customer. You work closely with board members on priorities, resource allocation and expected financial results. So whatever goes forward is thoroughly vetted and massaged.
When you need significant change in how the business is working you face the issue of how the work will get done, and how long it will take. Initiatives designed to reshape benefits delivered to customers, reconfigure sales channels, or reinvent internal processes and infrastructure can be large and complex. You’d like for the thinking and doing to come from your own people. But chances are that plates are already full with matters that need improving on a day-to-day basis. So you’re light on reserves. But engaging a big consulting firm to do it for you is expensive, and brings its own forms of risk and disruption.
Compared with day-to-day operations, there is no roadmap for how to design and implement these sorts of fundamental changes. Your company is big enough to have the typical, functional “silos” in place … and potentially in conflict. Once you define the issue, a workable solution may require significant support from sales, marketing, customer service, finance, production, distribution and IT.
And the most critical concern is making sure you get the results you truly need. Initiatives that rely on joint action across organization lines are notoriously difficult to implement. When the work hits speed-bumps and conflicts arise, it is all too easy to trim the deliverables, add time or expense, or pass the buck. Breakdowns in execution discipline are the number-one reason that most strategic plans and initiatives fail to deliver the desired results.
At stake is developing and implementing initiatives that can fundamentally change your company’s prospects for growth. But if your firm mirrors our clients, even those approaching $1 billion or more in sales, you lack a go-to resource with the skill-sets and capacity to lead that effort.
Please go to Success Stories to see case studies based on our experience in the financial services, manufacturing and chemicals industries.
Companies That Stand To Gain The Most As A Result Of Working With Us…
…Have Leaders Seeking Profitable Growth—Long-Term and Today
Though we’ve worked with many clients through the decades, we’ve noticed a few things. The client companies who get the most profound results have unique leaders. These are the characteristics of leaders in those companies who’ve gotten the best results working with us.
- You are committed to achieving steady, profitable growth for the organization. Let’s be honest. Today it’s difficult for leaders to balance the push for quarterly results with maintaining focus on the longer term picture. It takes vision, patience and fortitude to build for long-term results. You have to be willing to resist crisis thinking and to commit resources. It takes guts to maintain support for initiatives with payoff periods measured in months and years vs. weeks.
- You’re a leader who recognizes that you don’t know everything about growth. You realize that some things have to change for the company to grow as it once did. The strengths and weaknesses of your organization could be more effectively refocused to support growth. You’re ready to address and solve some real (maybe deep) problems.
- You want an organizational culture that promotes planned and strategic innovation. It’s easy to stay stuck in small incremental risk-averse growth initiatives. However, you want a structured way to apply resources to bigger initiatives that move the meter in bigger ways. Innovate or die isn’t just a catchphrase. The business landscape is littered with leading edge companies whose failure to continue to innovate left them either irrelevant or out of business. Today’s or yesterday’s business model won’t work!
- You have a strategic intent to be truly customer-driven. This isn’t simply lip service. It’s core strategy—top to bottom. When you are truly customer-driven, it means getting to know what customers need in a way that borders on anthropological research. You drop all assumptions about customers, and find out—from customers—the problems they are having NOW. You know what they are trying to accomplish, and why they make the product choices they make. You ask and listen.
- You are open to new facts and perspectives about customers and markets. You’re getting slow growth with existing products and customers by executing programs that already exist. Perhaps the problem is that you believe you understand the customers better than you do. Believing you know everything you need to know about the customers makes you less receptive to considering what you don’t know. You’re looking for some outside input and expertise to move out of the status quo.
- You’re willing to be the leader who sets the tone for honest and open communications across the organization. To get the results you want, you might need to say, “We’re up to this initiative and we’re doing this together. This is how the organization needs to work together to make this happen.”
- You’re success-driven and want your people to be successful too. To maximize your growth you’re going to need to maximize your people. This means rewarding initiative, “ownership mentality”, and risk taking. You want creative ideas that turn into initiatives and end up with funding. You’re willing to recognize employees for their role in pushing on boundaries. To drive the company to the next level, you want employees who think differently.
Where To Next?
Now you have an idea about the kinds of companies we work with, the challenges they face, and the leaders’ characteristics. To learn the details of how we work, our values and the kinds of results you could get, click on How We Work.