The playbook for growth in 2023.
January - the time of year when business strategy is formulated. Revenue objectives set. Marketing plans made. And budgets solidified.
Year after year, we fall back on the usual zombie ways of working - hoping for radically better results from the usual staid inputs.
Meanwhile, your business model is under continuous attack from the future. What made you red-hot relevant yesterday may have cooled imperceptibly overnight.
Someone somewhere has figured out a better way to do some part of what you do or how you do it.
Failing to spot these shifts turns out to be the single-largest cause of stalled growth. And advertising won’t necessarily help you fix it.
The better you can sense it, the better you can respond to it.
A different approach is needed. A Sprint (or a series of Sprints).
It starts with asking the question: Is what we are doing still relevant?
And then following it up with:
- Concise narrative: Boiling down to a concise and compelling narrative of your core proposition and communicating it so everyone in the company understands their role in the transformation.
- Clear process: Following a design thinking process to have the hard debates about what to do, in what order. And backing the things we believe in.
- Culture: Creating an environment where people from across the organisation feel safe to take decisions that are consistent with the overall strategic direction without fear of failure or fear of change.
Our Sprints can help you:
- Evolve your purpose, proposition and products ahead of changing demand;
- Diversify your business model away from traditional revenue streams, using it as a catalyst for innovation;
- Dismantle legacy culture so it doesn’t undermine organisational initiatives;
- Elevate a disjointed ‘me-too’ customer experience;
- Set the agenda for marketing the organisation can get behind; and
- Identify sustainable growth opportunities and reduce your environmental impact.
Sprinting means we DO:
* We figure out the right questions to ask and encourage thinking from new perspectives.
* We work side-by-side with your team to tackle the challenges you face.
* We share the process. We share the tools. We share the to-do list.
* We share what we know, and you share what you know.
* We find the answers together.
...We DON’T:
* Assume we know more about your business than you do.
* Offer prefab solutions that aren’t truly customized.
* Suggest approaches that aren’t possible (or possible to replicate) given your team, tech, and resources.
* Limit strategy to the theoretical level.
* Focus on short-term or one-off wins instead of long-term success.
We're looking for new clients. But not just any clients...
Clients who make the most progress, have these five traits:
1. Humble confidence: They'll admit they don't know enough or have all the answers.
2. Empowered: They are able to take decisions about the future of their firm or business unit. To really unlock growth they work with all functions of the company. We find that Founders, CEOs, Managing Directors, or Marketers who sit at the top table are best placed to lead the change.
3. Imaginative: They need to be able to see how the world will change and be able to imagine a different future for their business in it.
4. Action-oriented: While some firms pledge and spin themselves into oblivion, the winners are taking small, decisive and meaningful steps. And that starts with taking action.
5. Generous collaborator: No one person or company can innovate alone. It is a system-level challenge so you need to build a collaborative solution with talented partners. We'll only do this together.
