Strategy and Operating Model
Your business needs a direction the board can commit to, and an organisation that can deliver it. We set the goal and the plan with your leadership team and design the operating model that carries them out. If you want us to, we then lead the execution with you.
The problem
Some businesses need a new direction. The last plan has run its course, or a new owner or chief executive wants a goal the whole business can work towards. Other businesses have a direction and are not delivering it. Revenue is up and margin is flat. Decisions a divisional MD should close still wait for the founder. A business bought a year ago still runs as it did before the deal, and the savings in the deal case have not appeared.
The work is for chief executives, boards and PE operating partners, and for managing directors of subsidiaries whose parent has set a target the local business cannot meet. It is the wrong fit for an early-stage business, for a transaction that needs corporate finance advice, for market research on its own, or for an offsite with no plan behind it.
What we do
Where the direction is open, the leadership team commits to one ambitious goal and the choices that go with it, including what the business will stop doing. Where the decision concerns a division, we appraise the options for it, sale and closure among them, and the report says which one we would choose.
The plan turns the goal into a small number of programmes, each with an owner, targets and a financial case. Typically these cover the operating model, the structure and leadership team, management information the board can steer by, growth, and sales and operations planning. Where the business is not winning enough new work, the growth programme runs through Commercial Excellence.
For the operating model, we map where decisions are made, who answers for which results, how work is won and delivered, and where the business has drifted from its organisation chart. We then design the new model with your leadership team: the structure, the decision rights, the governance and the order in which the changes happen. If the goal needs a different leadership team, we say so and sequence the change.
As managing director of the UK subsidiary of a European Microsoft technology integrator, from 2021 to 2023, Stephen set its strategy and led the execution: one ambitious goal, a redefined operating model, better management information, a restructuring and a rebuilt leadership team. In that time revenue grew fourfold.
How an engagement runs
Senior people lead the work, and associates join where the brief needs them. The diagnostic runs for two to four weeks, sized to how much of the business is in scope. Design and implementation are scoped only if you decide to continue, and you can stop after any stage.
1Diagnose
We interview the board, the leadership team and key customers, read the management accounts and board pack, analyse the market position and the drivers of value, and spend time in the business to see how it runs day to day. The report sets out the few strategic questions that matter, with the evidence for each, and recommendations your team can act on whether or not we continue.
2Design
With the leadership team, we set the goal, test the options and choose. We then write the plan: the programmes with their owners and targets, the financial case, the target operating model with its decision rights, the management information the board will steer by, and a transition roadmap with dates.
3Implement
We lead the plan with your leadership team, as a continuation of the engagement or through an Interim Leadership role. We run the quarterly strategy review with the board and work with your managers as they run each programme. If you want them, we check at 90, 180 and 360 days that the change is holding.