Conpas Rating
-
Overview
At OC&C Strategy Consultants we have more than 35 years of experience at unpicking the most complex business challenges with simple, uncommon sense™. We’re an international consulting firm, spanning 10 countries
Number of Employees
501-1,000
Services Provided
Consulting
Conpas Rating
-
Overview
At OC&C Strategy Consultants we have more than 35 years of experience at unpicking the most complex business challenges with simple, uncommon sense™. We’re an international consulting firm, spanning 10 countries
Number of Employees
501-1,000
Services Provided
Consulting
Regions
Asia, Europe, Latam, North America, Oceania
Countries
Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, United States Of America
Regions
Asia, Europe, Latam, North America, Oceania
Countries
Hong Kong, China, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Brazil, United States Of America, Australia
Year of foundation
1987
Structure
Partnership
Industry
Professional Services
Year of foundation
1987
Structure
Partnership
Industry
Professional Services
Consulting Solutions By Industry
Construction and Infrastructure Services
Our highly skilled and dedicated teams focus on industry structure and competitive strategy as well as performance improvement and organisational design.
We address the challenges faced by a wide range of sub-sectors such as construction, property services, transport, energy, water, waste, and communications, we work along the whole value chain:
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Industrial Products
We have extensive experience across distribution and manufacturing of industrial products, as well as related services such as MRO or FM.
Our work across our various key sectors has exposed us to the supply chain ecosystems across a range of end-user industries, enabling us to successfully deliver corporate strategy and turnaround projects. We also have extensive experience of providing transactional support.
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Automotive & Mobility Services
The Automotive and Mobility sector is undergoing rapid change as a result of technological innovation and shifting consumer buying behaviours.
We have worked on a wide variety of issues across the full breadth of this eco-system, applying our fact-based and pragmatic approach to solve challenging issues for our clients. Our clients range from established industry leaders to digitally-enabled disruptors.
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Insurance
The industry is seeing an increasingly complex compliance and regulatory environment, and evolving value chain economics.
We continue to serve leading, innovative players enabling them to develop value added propositions, leverage (big) data, build scale through M&A, and streamline operations. Our clients tell us they value our experience, our ability to work in partnership with them and the quality of our practical, pragmatic advice.
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Consumer Goods
We are a team of people first and consultants second and enjoy building relationships with individuals from right across the spectrum of consumer goods – from insurgent manufacturers of breakthrough consumer brands to established world leaders looking to disrupt their industries.
Our in-depth knowledge from working with producers and manufactures at one end of the spectrum, and with retailers and leisure operators at the other, gives us a unique perspective on how to drive a step change in growth and performance.
The combination of our experience, passion and personal commitment, enables us to build winning partnerships with our clients to make decisive change across a set of critical issues as varied as the products in the sector:
Food & Drink
Food and Drink has been our heartland sector since the business started over 30 years ago. We serve Insurgents, National Champions and Global Leaders in brand, private label and agri-business.
We have extensive experience across the whole value chain, unlocking value from the source supply through to the end customer. Our work with retailers, foodservice businesses and the on-trade gives us deep understanding of the key customer channels.
We partner with leading digital businesses and have developed our own proprietary insights to ensure we are at the forefront of the technological and consumer behaviour changes that are creating opportunity for our clients today.
Beauty & Luxury
We have extensive experience in the beauty, and broader wellbeing sector, across the spectrum from mass to luxury.
We have supported luxury fashion, fragrance and equipment brands, as well as multi-brand luxury retailers.
We help clients deploy breakthrough business models to drive disruptive growth. Our deep knowledge of the impact of Digital and Direct to Consumer (D2C) together with emergent categories, helps unlock high growth opportunities.
Beer, Wines & Spirits
We have worked extensively with the leading players in the alcoholic beverages industry where our work, with the major off-trade and on-trade retailers and key drinks specialists, gives us deep understanding of the major customer channels.
Our team have extensive experience in category growth and route-to-market strategies, and supporting clients in channel focus, key account management, commercial effectiveness, trade terms and network optimisation.
We work closely with brand owners to translate their strategies into retailer "selling stories" and to successfully realise incremental profit at the coalface.
D2C Consumer Goods
Our clients in consumer goods are increasingly looking to build direct relationships with their end customers, across almost all categories. While this channel was pioneered by start-ups, now even the largest consumer goods businesses are starting to activate direct sales channels. We believe we are the right people to support you in harnessing the power of this rapidly growing channel.
We work with a range of businesses, from large multinationals to innovative start-ups, across a whole host of categories. Through this experience, we have built an unrivalled understanding of what it takes to win in this high-growth channel.
We provide support on a range of topics as broad as the categories in the sector, ranging from overall growth strategy and competitive positioning, to portfolio development, sales and marketing and more. We have also advised investors on some of the highest profile transactions in the space.
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Leisure & Hospitality
Our team have unrivalled expertise providing strategic and operational support to some of the biggest brands in consumer leisure. As a result of our broad experience, we often advise private equity investors looking to buy or sell leisure assets, or drive performance in an existing portfolio company.
Accommodation: We advise hotel and hostel brands, cruise operators, and holiday resorts on critical growth topics such as segmentation and brand positioning, revenue management, and loyalty and CRM.
Food & Beverage: We work together with restaurants, food delivery operators, cafes and coffee shops, pubs, bars, and clubs to drive revenue and profit through topics including pricing and menu design, proposition improvement, and location strategy.
Entertainment: We address business-critical issues for clients across a diverse set of consumer activities, including cinemas, theme parks, museums and attractions, sports and recreation, and gyms and fitness.
Gambling & Gaming: Our team advise businesses operating across a variety of models and channels, including fixed odds (e.g. casinos, lotteries), sportsbook (betting shops, online gambling) and gaming and e-sports.
Consumer Travel: We deliver strategic projects on behalf of tour operators, travel agents, and public / private transport businesses. We also work jointly with our Technology practice to advise upstream technology and distribution platforms, such as aggregators or lead generators.
Accommodation, Parks & Resorts
In accommodation, we serve leading and innovative players across the hotel and hostel industry, as well as cruise operators, holiday resorts, and caravan parks.
Our work in the sector spans a broad set of strategic growth topics including customer segmentation, brand positioning, proposition development, and loyalty strategy and CRM.
We are particularly well known for our experience in fixed-capacity revenue management. Our approach focuses on understanding the customer and competitive context before deploying appropriate commercial levers – rather than a black-box optimisation exercise - to unlock value. Examples of the types of sources of value include:
Food & Beverage
We help businesses across the food and beverage landscape – including casual dining restaurants, quick service, food-to-go, food delivery, cafes and coffee shops, pubs, bars, and nightclubs – tackle their most difficult problems.
The challenges we work on include:
We frequently support Food & Beverage transactions globally on both buy- and sell-side: our extensive experience in the space gives us a great understanding of the elements underpinning an advantaged operating model that delivers sustainable long-term value.
Gambling & Gaming
The gambling and gaming sector is undergoing rapid growth in many areas as the regulatory landscape continues to evolve across the world. In this changing context, we work together with organisations operating across channels and operating models:
Consumer Travel
We support businesses across the travel sector on a number of critical growth topics such as pricing (yield management, dynamic pricing, cognitive pricing), loyalty, CRM, segmentation, channel strategy, and performance improvement. To bring our best team to our engagements in this space, we often work together with our technology practice, which marries our deep experience of the broader consumer landscape with sharp insight of what makes for a successful digitally-led business.
Our experience in this space encompasses projects with travel agents and tour operators, aggregators, distribution platforms, and upstream technology providers.
Online Travel & Leisure
We work with some of the strongest brands across the consumer leisure landscape, helping them understand and adapt to the disruption that the digital age has created for them. Our expertise spans a broad range of travel, hospitality, and leisure sub-sectors.
Our experience is vast, ranging from accommodation and travel operators to foodservice and delivery, gaming and gambling, as well as gym and fitness solutions. We work with operators themselves as well as the distribution platforms facilitating some of their routes to market, such as OTAs, metasearch, aggregators, and transactional marketplaces.
This in-depth understanding of all parts of the travel and leisure landscape means we are uniquely positioned to support you on all things digital.
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Retail
Retail is one of OC&C’s longest-standing strengths –as recognised by our team achieving the highest possible score in the Financial Times' UK Leading Management Consultants 2018. We collaborate globally to serve clients of all varieties and sizes, from multinational grocery giants through to nascent online category specialists:
Our grocery team partners with market leaders in the UK and around the world to deliver strategic, transformational, and operational projects. Our clients tell us they see us as their 'go to' thought partner for the key strategic and commercial issues they face.
In apparel, we bring experience from across the value chain to help retailers successfully address consumers' rapidly evolving expectations. By taking a holistic view of proposition and supply chain, we deliver recommendations tailored to both client and customer.
Multi-category: We work together with 'big box' retailers and department stores to tackle the key questions facing senior management. Our experience covers a broad spectrum of questions including Category Strategy, Operating Model Re-Design, and International Expansion.
Speciality & Luxury: We have deep expertise across the broad spectrum of categories within retail, ranging from Discount to Luxury, and from Juvenile to Pets.
Digital Commerce & Marketplaces: Routes to market are changing fast: platforms, social shopping, and direct to consumer are core concepts today that were rarely mentioned ten years ago. We work with retailers to better understand customer needs and missions, and use this to design routes to market and operating models, which deliver real competitive advantage.
The retail landscape has changed immeasurably in recent years driven by a rapidly evolving channel landscape, rapid swings in global and local economies, and increasing globalisation of the consumer. Against this rapidly evolving backdrop our customer-centric approach, robust analytical mindset, and dedication to working in partnership with senior management have never been more relevant.
Grocery
We are a leading advisor to clients in the grocery sector globally on strategic and commercial issues. Our experience covers the entire grocery ecosystem –including core grocery, non-food, online, convenience, wholesale, and forecourt retail - and a broad spectrum of functional topics, including:
As part of our grocery engagements, we often work together with our in-house Analytics team to uncover the most critical insights for our clients: our unique integrated working model brings together the best of big data and statistical capabilities with the sharp strategic thinking we're well known for.
Apparel
Changing customer needs, tastes, and expectations often make the consumer landscape challenging to serve in apparel. As a result, our focus is often on helping businesses adapt to evolving consumer trends and keeping brands relevant and well-invested.
To support our clients, we bring experience from across the apparel value chain: taking a holistic view of both customer proposition and supply chain enables us to deliver recommendations better tailored to both client and customer, while ensuring they are sustainable for the long-term.
Our capabilities include:
Multi-Category
Multi-category retailers continue to face a variety of challenges including footfall decline, rapid digital disruption, and increasing expectations of service and convenience from the consumer.
We work together with 'big box' retailers, department stores, and digital platforms to tackle the key questions facing senior management teams. Our projects in this space can often involve significant changes to business strategy for our clients: we're confident tackling difficult questions and approaching difficult answers.
Our expertise in the space includes:
Speciality & Luxury
Our team has global experience across the broad spectrum of retail categories – from baby products through to travel retail. We combine our knowledge of retail excellence with deep experience of consumer brands to deliver winning strategies for our clients.
We also have expertise in the luxury sector from working with brands and retailers across categories, including apparel, department stores, collectible assets, and personal services. Our knowledge of the nuances of different international luxury consumers helps our clients succeed across the world.
Speciality and luxury retail continues to be a particular focus for investor activity: we understand the levers to create value in these industries and regularly provide buy- and sell-side commercial diligence of category specialists, luxury players, and discount retailers on behalf of private equity and other institutional investors.
Digital Commerce & Marketplaces
With digital platforms now almost ubiquitous in many markets, businesses are starting to contend with the next wave of innovation and change – with disruptors starting to find themselves being disrupted. Winners and losers are emerging at a faster pace than ever before: companies are required to be nimble and respond boldly to the opportunities and challenges that new technology and platforms present, while maintaining sight of their core customer, mission, and behaviour.
We work with brands and retailers, both established bricks and mortar operators and innovative digital pureplays, to harness opportunities across channels and ensure operating models are ready to deliver against customer expectations. Our capabilities include:
We also support marketplaces themselves in innovating to remain relevant and to maximise the value they are able to create - as well as working with investors on some of the highest profile transactions in the space.
This is a fast-moving area where our experience and insights are evolving rapidly. If you're looking for a fresh perspective on your digital retail strategy, be that as a brand, a retailer, a manufacturer or an investor, get in touch to learn how we can help.
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TMT
Our global TMT team covers all aspects of Telecoms, Media, and Technology – regularly collaborating internationally for our corporate, investor and financing clients.
Our Media Entertainment and Consumer Internet team knows media and entertainment inside out, with operating experience right across our team. Our clients include some of the world's biggest media and entertainment brands in areas including television, broadcast and production, book, newspaper and magazine publishing. They tell us they like our passion, the way we talk their language and work with them hand-in-hand.
Our Business Information Services & Media team has a strong track record working with corporate and investors globally on all areas of business media – from publications to data, conferences, networks, and education and training.
Technology - We bring deep commercial and financial insight to a fast-changing sector, where we are widely recognised as a leading advisor to vendors and investors on the strategic, operational and M&A issues they face.
Our experience covers all areas from devising long term, sustainable strategies to delivering value and turnaround at a business level. We are renowned for our highly analytical but pragmatic approach to working with our clients.
Technology
We are a leading advisor to clients across Communications, Software and IT/Cyber Services domains. With decades of experience of working with Management teams, investors and finance providers, we have deep expertise across:
Our clients include many of the blue-chip global leaders as well as fast-growing challengers. They value our blend of sector insight, commercial, technical and financial understanding, and working approach to drive growth and success.
We have particular expertise in helping clients navigate the value shift and implications of the transitions from on-premise/physical-based products and services across Technology domains, underpinned by our work encompassing in particular on:
Business Information Services & Media
Understanding the needs of consumers of information services products is at the heart of our Business Information Services & Media practice, and guides our approach to advising clients. In the fast changing end markets that information services businesses operate, getting clarity on what data and information is required to enable key decisions, and when, is fundamental to success.
We work alongside our clients from large conglomerate Business Media companies to more specialist niche players, and from publishing business models to market research, to workflow solutions. We work with our clients to completely transform their business strategies, help them profit from new technologies, channels to market and underpinning business models. Our work encompasses:
Driving go-to market strategies such as pricing and sales force strategies. We work alongside our clients, from long-standing media leaders to newer entrants, to completely transform their business strategies, pursue new technologies and business models, launch new channels, redesign their organisations, find new ways to cut costs and execute acquisitions.
Media, Entertainment & Consumer Internet
Consumer media and entertainment is undergoing a period of unprecedented change. With old business models under extreme pressure, media and entertainment companies must preserve and optimise their core businesses while innovating fast for the future.
As a result, our clients come from both sides of today's media and entertainment world. On the one hand we work with leading, established media and entertainment brands across television production, channels and platforms, publishing, news, film, and other 'traditional' media including music and outdoor. On the other hand, we also work with many leading consumer internet business who are disrupting the space, including portals, online-classified players, price comparison/ lead generation and marketplaces.
We understand media and internet businesses inside out - how they work, how they connect, how they create and how they get things done, with operating experience right across our team. Clients tell us they like our passion, the way we talk their language and work with them hand in hand.
Our experience includes:
Online classifieds, platforms and price comparison
The way consumers research and buy products is rapidly changing across almost every category. Digital platforms have become some of the key gatekeepers of consumer relationships in many markets. This creates a wealth of opportunity for the businesses at the start of this journey, but as others begin to mature, they will be forced to rethink their strategies.
We work with many of the world’s leading online platforms, including online portals, classifieds, price comparison and lead generation businesses. Our clients range from nascent businesses in emerging markets to some of the largest and most mature digital platforms, working on topics such as growth strategy, business model innovation into transactional, category and market expansion, customer segmentation, pricing, transaction support and more.
Digital Consumer Media
Digital disruption in traditional media seems unstoppable – from TV, to music, to publishing, many former household names are coming under pressure as a new generation of digital natives rise to dominance. We work with clients on both ends of this spectrum, helping them adapt to this ever-changing landscape.
Our experience spans all aspects of digital consumer media, working with clients in TV and OTT, consumer news, magazines and publishing, sports, music, radio, and others. We work with leading established media and entertainment brands, helping them navigate the digital ecosystem, as well as many of the platforms driving change and disruption.
We understand media businesses inside out – how they work, how they connect, how they create and how they get things done, with operating experience right across our team. This is why our clients trust us to help them tackle some of the biggest challenges they have faced in decades
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Outsourcing
We provide and develop superior insight to the winning business models in complex, people-oriented businesses - often the subject of multi-year outsourcing contracts – a complicated arena with many examples of failure as success.
Facilitated by data-driven insights and the application of new technologies, we are seeing growing diversity in operating models and providers. Stronger platforms and more distinctive brands are being built, and increasing focus on “transformation” rather than “transaction” is growing the scope, depth and length of outsourcing projects.
We offer highly experienced, specialist teams that lead the market in developing strategy and commercial effectiveness for outsourcing organisations.
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Consulting Solutions By Capability
Analytics
We believe the best strategies are data-driven and the true potential of our client’s data is unexploited. OC&C embeds analytics specialists in our teams to unlock the power of analytics, AI and big data and turn these into clear and actionable insights for business strategy decisions.
Our Analytics team addresses the most complex strategy questions such as:
All of these problems require unpicking vast amounts of data to get to the heart of the question. We operate on an accelerated timescale using advanced analytics techniques and innovative new approaches such as AI and Machine Learning. To do this, we put our analytics expertise at the front of our teams so you can benefit from analytical horsepower combined with commercial focus.
For organisations looking to scale their own analytics capabilities, we build futureproof strategies for taking advantage of analytics and AI. This includes:
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Testing, Inspection and Certification
We are global experts on Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) strategy.
Our extensive project experience ranges from Tier 1 global providers to niche service providers and potential investors. We underpin our project insight with our proprietary "TIC 101" database of the performance of the 101 leading global TIC players, publishing regularly on a broad range of issues in the TIC arena.
We address a wide range of strategic topics including market entry strategy, go-to-market planning, opportunities from digital disruption, and portfolio strategy, as well as transaction support and business planning.
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Digital
We bring together a range of sector and functional experts from across OC&C to support our clients in some of their highest priority business concerns when it comes to digital. This mix of expertise enables us to design bespoke, innovative solutions to our client's most pressing issues.
We can help you address a number of business-critical questions:
Looking to build the best plan to grow?
From start-up to scaled-up, growth strategy is one of our core capabilities. We work with digital businesses ranging from start-ups to multinational giants, often supporting them through the entirety of this journey.
Looking to acquire, divest, or IPO?
We are experts in mergers and acquisitions, supporting both Private Equity investors and corporates across all stages of the investment cycle – ranging from identifying and assessing potential investment targets, to seeking out minority or majority investors, to IPO. Our team has developed a set of proprietary tools to answer the most pertinent questions on buyers’ and sellers’ minds when it comes to digital businesses.
Looking to expand internationally?
Opportunity abounds for digital businesses – but international expansion brings with it its own set of challenges, with key questions around a number of themes such as go-to-market strategy, proposition design, and operating models. We help our clients answer these key strategic questions while ensuring pragmatic execution, and our ‘on the ground’ experience in a number of major global markets helps us to craft strategies that are genuinely bespoke.
Designing new propositions?
Whether a digital native business or an offline business finding its feet in the digital world, we help our clients understand what their target customer really wants and how to build propositions around them. We deploy industry-leading customer insights to really understand customer needs, build effective customer segmentations and design propositions and strategies around this.
Optimising your approach to sales and marketing?
We have extensive expertise in all aspects of sales and marketing – marketing analytics, salesforce effectiveness, pricing, and many more.
Rethinking customer journeys?
We work with digital businesses to understand customer needs and to ensure that they are ‘joining the dots’ across all of their routes to market in order to meet them. For many of our clients, this goes both ways – we regularly support digital businesses in building the right offline presence to support their online business.
Transforming your operating model?
The right operating model is a key enabler for executing a digital strategy.
For the digital-first, your operating model and organisation has data and digital at its heart. But scaling from start-up phase to a more structured, mature and even international business can be hard. We work with digital native companies to help them scale, putting in place the tools, operating model and organisation to take their business to the next level.
If your heartland is offline, we can help you transform your operating model to embed digital at the heart of everything you do, making sure that you are well-placed to meet the rapidly evolving needs of your customers. If you are a digital native business, we can support you in professionalising and scaling your model as you grow and expand your business.
Our experience and client base in digital spans five areas:
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Private Equity and M&A
OC&C are experts in providing commercial advice, delivering value for investors across the globe. We work with private equity (across a range of fund sizes), other asset class investors and corporate acquirers, helping them on acquisitions, portfolio support and exits. Sector expertise is at the heart of what we do, with our teams constructed around relevant topic experts to provide global topic expertise combined with local insights. Proof that this is a compelling proposition is demonstrated by the rapid growth of our private equity practice across all our industries and geographies.
Acquisition scan
We know our stuff, and can leverage sector insights and deep transaction experience to help investors to answer the question “what should I buy?” We work with clients to prospect across industries where we have sector experience, help to develop an investment case, and assess target attractiveness and outside-in synergy evaluation.
Buy-Side Due Diligence
Assessing a business’s commercial performance and future potential is a core part of our offering. We develop a comprehensive and fact-based outside-in perspective, using secondary and primary research, including industry expert and customer interviews. We have developed bespoke analytical methods and tools to help to mine large datasets for unique commercial insights in the rapid timelines required for due diligence. Where possible, we work with target management and other advisors to build a detailed view of the target’s performance and opportunities for driving future profits.
Synergy Evaluation
We have extensive experience in synergy evaluation for target assets and existing portfolios. We have undertaken numerous “black-box” exercises as well as detailed work in revenue-optimisation and cost-optimisation projects for clients.
Value Creation Plans
Investors need returns, and the early days of ownership are crucial for successfully implementing plans for driving growth, profit and value. We work with investors and management teams, helping to identify, prioritise and action performance improvement opportunities. We also assist corporates with the post-merger integration of targets into existing assets.
We help our clients with acceleration or turnaround strategies, provide support for re-capitalisations, and drive performance in business mid-ownership.
Exit Planning & Sell-Side Due Diligence
Finally, we assist with the exit strategy – preparing a business for sale through developing and testing a growth plan and rehearsing the narrative. We consider the likely buyer profile, optimal timing, testing of crucial future growth drivers and anticipating the concerns and interest areas of prospective buyers. We assist vendors with developing sell-side commercial due diligence (CVDD) to support vendors in realising their assets’ maximum potential value.
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