Strategy
In an era of rapidly changing environment with technology disrupting every business, the key to winning is predicated on perceiving how the environment is likely to change and how it may alter the bases of competition and leveraging that insight to create a business model that delivers sustained value. We help businesses ranging from start-ups to Fortune-100 companies place bets and make hard choices, the essence of strategy!
Our Services
We help organizations crystallize their vision for the future and how that translates into aspirations, analyze and test the rationale for the business portfolio, identify growth engines to realize aspirations, and assess organization’s ability to connect strategy to the value creation process, including determining the optimal allocation of capital across the portfolio.
We help organizations deploy capital in the most optimal way to drive growth, create and sustain competitive advantage, and produce shareholder value. We employ a 3-step process:
- Research oriented approach to deliver unique insights into markets, customers, competitors, and profit pools
- Conduct a critical assessment of the company’s performance and sources of competitive advantage
- Help set goals and align the organization around these goals to enable execution
As an extension of the growth strategy, we analyze the critical gaps in areas such as products and services, market access etc. to create an M&A strategy that prioritizes areas for investment through acquisitions and divestitures. Additionally, we develop a plan to pursue programmatic M&A and create preliminary business cases and integration approaches for each integration theme, develop a screening framework, and support target search exercises.
For both corporate and private equity clients, immediately following a transaction, we help align the management team(s) on strategic priorities and prioritize focused initiatives. Our value creation blueprint includes the following elements:
- Identify and quantify the full potential for the business
- Determine priority initiatives and their phasing
- Develop detailed action plans for the highest priority initiatives
- Create dashboards for tracking performance to plan
In a recent engagement for a PE client that had made a platform investment and soon after bolted on an equal sized business, we conducted a structured and interactive management workshop for the deal team and the management teams to develop a value creation plan.
A strategic plan is more than a 3 or 5-year plan or annual budgets! In the tech and telecom sectors where most of our clients are, stability and predictability are anything but the norm. From working on a rigid, trimester-based strategic planning process for a Fortune-100 company in the mid-2000s, we have progressively mutated our approach to agile planning that incorporates:
- Span time: Allow distinct examination and development of short, medium, and long-term strategies
- Democratization: Engage a broader set of stakeholders in the strategy creation process, “down and out”
- Reinvigoration: Redesign the process as necessary by focusing on an ever-changing set of strategic issues
- Visualization: Leverage live dashboards to track progress of strategic initiatives
Source: Empirical research by Bain & Company and defined as companies with real revenue and earnings growth of over 5.5% annually, and average annual shareholder return higher than cost of equity over a 10-year period
