The CEO’s question to us
How to substantially grow this company in the coming five years? After turning around the company from a family run business, we need a strategic plan to take it to the next, and new level of performance and growth. The plan should also attract new investors to step in.
Background
The company turned over about 60 million euro, producing construction materials in Belgium, with sales offices in Belgium, Germany and France. The industry is very dispersed, and consists of a few international vertically integrated players, in combination with lots of small local and some medium sized regional players, combining different aspects of the value chain. When you combine this with the technological developments and the expected demand/power shifts across the value chain, it calls for a thorough look at growing the franchise of this business, beyond its current perimeter and way of operating.
The challenge as we saw it
- How to align a young and diverse executive team on the direction for the coming five years? And how to ensure readiness for implementation?
- How to grow the company by moving beyond the ‘operational optimisation’ modus the company has been in, and by positioning the company in the industry as a reference player, for its suppliers and clients, for investors and employees?
- How to build the capacity for this organisation to think and act strategically, and build a middle management cadre that can help to make the strategy happen?
What we did
- We first developed with the executive team an action plan to stabilise the company operations and performance, following some operational issues.
- We designed and delivered a sequence of working sessions, over a 4-6 month period:
- to understand the industry, technology, competition, society and environmental developments affecting them.
- to get inspired by other industries and companies, and transpose the insights to own paths for further development.
- to truly deepen the understanding of why the company has been successful in some areas and was struggling in some others (genuine introspection).
- to discipline ourselves to explore different alternative future directions for the company (avoid group think or confirmation bias).
- to make decisions on the preferred directions for the future, based on explicit and common criteria.
- to work out the future direction in concrete terms, substantiated with financial simulations.
- to involve the next level managers in challenging and enriching the clarity and credibility of the future strategy.
- to develop an engaging story to mobilise key people and teams, and to attract investors for the coming 5 years.
- to translate the strategic direction into concrete workstreams with tangible objectives and a clear working process.
- We coached the executive team on their style of interaction and interpersonal behaviours along this process.
- We built the key workstreams and the teams for making the strategy happen, step by step, using an agile and pragmatic way of working.
What client got out of it
- A stable and improving performance on relevant performance indicators.
- A clear, credible and compelling story that aligned, mobilised and committed the key managers, and helped to attract investors for the coming 5 years.
- A mindset and reflex to think value over the value chain, and take more outside/market-in perspective, rather than reason mainly production plant outwards.
- A rhythm, methodology and spirit to check progress on key actions and indicators, to decide on the key next steps, plan for action and allocation of roles and responsibilities.