Client Stories

Chris spent well over a decade helping an established film manufacturer, caught in the midst of a digital revolution, adapt to a new digital technology and transform its core business from film manufacturing into a digital image marketer. The challenge for the company was and still is formidable. Originally, the functionally structured company needed to create new business units. We pioneered the first such structure, taking a ‘skunk works’ project to market leader in four years. The entire R & D portfolio was radically restructured, requiring a major culture change in that function. New product categories were grown, again from weak positions to number one in the US market.

Chris has spent six years with a large commercial insurance brokerage which experienced the large scale changes due new regulatory requirements. The impact of the regulation and the subsequent response of the once-proud business have brought it to its knees. The problem was how to develop a growth strategy in the face of a softening market. In response, Chris worked with the client to design a growth strategy for each business unit, coach over 30 leaders across the country and instill management disciplines. The result has been preserving the essential innovative character of the brokerage and the growth of the topline, despite the softening market.

Chris has spent several years working within a large global advertising company which has weathered seismic shifts in the industry: the digitization of media, globalization of service delivery and intense procurement impact of its clients. The effect? Eroding profitability and revenue growth of its global clients. Chris and his client have built an internal focus on the largest global accounts, representing half of the business, and a way to manage these clients. He has helped to re-invent the business model to drive profitable growth in the largest accounts ($70M-$150M). The road ahead includes coaching global account leaders to be equipped for the complex task ahead of radically redesigning the business model for each client to meet their unique needs.

Chris and Marv have spent the last couple years working with a company that experienced the transformation from a member-based culture organization to a more corporate-culture business. This transformation included the reconfiguration and merger of separate boards. The board dynamics included blending two different board cultures and establishing trust and effectiveness as one governing body. They built a board competency model from scratch using current, well-accepted good governance models and board best-practices found in the literature. Working with they client, they transformed the research into a custom designed 360 feedback mechanism which allowed board members to deliver peer feedback for development purposes. The result was a set of meaningful conversations with board members which allowed them to gain perspective on their boardroom behaviour and focus on building their skills for the future.

Marv has spent the last year with a data processing company who has been considering what to do with their aging back-end legacy system. The volume of work has steadily grown but the capacity to handle the work has not. The result has been the threat of the inability to deliver product in a timely way to customers and a work force that was getting tired with an ever-increasing workload. As Marv worked with the client it became clear that an additional challenge was the need to develop a capability and culture for innovation in the company. In response, Marv worked with that client to design a strategic planning process that involved broad employee and stakeholder engagment through various formal and informal structures. The results look promising – we are not just making plans for the next five years to modernize database technology, but creating a process that is facilitating the growth of a culture of innovation and the buy-in to make it happen.