Customer strategy, Research and segmentation, Products and pricing, Go to market strategies, Customer Experience, Loyalty and retention, Private Equity, Commercial Due Diligence, Operations, Strategy, and Value Creation

When we first meet with a client to understand their situation, we draw on all of our relevant experience with their industry and problem type. We listen intently to their challenges, paying attention to how different members of the management team may see the problem differently. We digest what we learned, do a small amount of our own research and then we meet again. We play back what we think we heard, adding our own perspective on how to frame and approach the problem. Ideally we leave our second meeting with a common view of what the problem is and how to solve it.

Once engaged, we spend time with an expanded client team gathering more perspective, some data and getting smarter about the company. By the end of this first short phase of work we aim to have a list of ideas to explore, some hypotheses on what the answer could be and, in some cases, a refined work plan.

We look for the data that will help us prove or disprove the hypotheses we generated in the ideation phase. We work with our clients to extract the data we need from their systems or we come up with a variety of proxies that will tell us what we need to know. Throughout our research and analysis, we remain in constant contact with our client team so that, together, we can interpret the analysis as it comes in. By the end of this phase, the answer should be starting to form.

We work hard to strike the right balance between playing the role of an objective outsider, and remembering that we don’t know our client’s business better than they do. We design a decision-making process that fits the organization’s culture and the context of the decision they are making. Sometimes a small meeting of top decision makers is most efficient. Other times, we use a series of stakeholder meetings and facilitated sessions to ensure that the whole team is bought into the contemplated changes. What is most important is that the team is committed to change.

We work with the client team to create a plan that is broken down into a set of initiatives, each with a timeline and owner. Clients often retain a subset of our team to shepherd the implementation of the plan to completion. Retaining our team through implementation enables us to remain accountable for our recommendations and tie more of our fees to results delivered.

Our leaders come from top-tier strategy firms and have experience as advisors and operators We obsess over details all the time We have deep primary consumer insight capabilities

We don’t assume we’re right Our work complements the experience and judgement of management We have proven ourselves with consulting-averse leaders

We scale our teams to provide an efficient and suitable structure for the client and project scope We share in the risk through broken deal discounts for commercial diligence and shared upside for strategy and operations projects

Our strategies are backed by realistic implementation plans We have extensive experience with strategy implementation and post-merger integration