Don’t Let Your Growth Get Stuck
Many businesses with a growth strategy think of “value add” in terms of bringing new solutions to the market or providing high quality products that are both cost effective and supply chain efficient.
Why do they sometimes fail at achieving either of these goals?
We recently worked with a client who had become stuck in attempting to reverse their declining growth situation. Utilizing our growth assessment tools, we found that they had lost their edge both in new product development and in customer-centered solutions development, and surprisingly, in their customer-centered behavior, as well.
Operationalizing the Business
We helped to first “operationalize” their organization into a more effective and efficient enterprise. This enterprise was focused both on their growth initiatives and their everyday operations that
- Increased their cash flow that enabled a will to continue the operationalizing effort
- Strengthened their position with existing customers
- Identified key growth initiatives utilizing a robust market investigation
- Enabled either a product-driven or a market-driven capability, depending on the nature of their markets and customer selection strategy
Operationalizing is not a generic process. There are no quick fixes. Business leaders must first understand the reality of their current organizational design and performance gaps required to address each initiative. After identifying their current state, we helped the business develop and operationalize their future state. We used our framework, which addressed interdependently the future state revenue and earnings expectations; the segments and customer requirements to achieve that earnings position; the core work processes require to serve these customers; and learning and improvement tools.
The output was a family of defined work objectives, each with learning and development focused on the business and work to be done as needed. Thus, all their learnings and developments were part of their work processes. No theoretical workshops.
