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Our projects and clients are quite diverse. Click on any item to get a better understanding of how we serve our clients:
Facilitating the Board of Director’s Development of an Investment Strategy The new (non-executive) Chairman of a publicly traded engineering and consulting firm wanted to involve the Board in the development of a long-term strategy for the firm. Heretofore, the Board had focused on operational issues. The Chairman also wanted to improve the Board’s decision-making process, and he believed that a strategic retreat with professional facilitation could help to break the past dysfunctional pattern of Board deliberations.
We were retained to facilitate a two-day strategic retreat of the Board and to inform that retreat with our independent assessment of the principal markets the company served, our evaluation of the firm’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and our assessment of a reasonable five-year financial pro forma. In consultation with the Chairman and CEO, we developed an agenda for the retreat. We also interviewed, on a confidential basis, each of the Board members and senior executives participating in the retreat, and we assisted those senior executives in preparing presentations for the Board.
The retreat was successful in resolving all of the strategic investment issues faced by the firm. The Board identified one market that would be the focus of investment over the next several years, decided to exit a business that it no longer considered attractive, and to harvest another major business and consider divestment of it in two year’s time. In addition to these positive results, the Chairman saw the retreat as establishing a far more deliberative process for Board meetings, a process that he felt would enable the Board to function much more effectively.
In 1999 the CEO of an ENR Top 100 Design Firm selected us to guide them through a strategic planning effort. This firm had used other consultants in the past but was never fully satisfied with the results. Ten years later, we continue to serve this firm as their strategic planning consultant. In all we have guided this client through six strategic planning efforts.
Over ten years that we have been working with them, our client has achieved an average annual rate of organic growth of more than 15 percent, beating the growth performance in the markets they serve of all of their competitors. More importantly, this firm’s profit performance has consistently been in the top quartile of all engineering firms over many years, according to the most comprehensive and respected financial performance survey in the engineering industry.
One of the many reasons for their success is sound strategy, and the strategy they have pursued has been their strategy, not one that we recommended. But we have informed their strategic planning with our perspective on the markets they serve, and we have facilitated a process that naturally led to implementation because it engaged top management in plan development and provided a solid basis for accountability.
In 2009 we worked with this client in a manner that was far more rigorous and labor intensive than ever before. We supplemented our typical planning process with an in-depth assessment of their changing external environment and an objective evaluation of internal issues. The firm has embarked on far-reaching changes designed to enable them to sustain their success in the decade ahead.
The CEO of an ENR Top 50 Design Firm asked us to assist him in restructuring the firm to more effectively deploy their senior managers, to position candidates to succeed him, and ultimately, to improve financial performance. The CEO wanted to ensure that when the time came for him to retire, he would be in a position to hand off the baton to an internal candidate.
We conducted confidential interviews with 27 senior executives, participated in the design and reviewed the results of 360 degree reviews on the top 12 executives, evaluated CEO candidates in terms of eight attributes, and worked with the CEO to develop an organizational structure that would more fully exploit the talents of key executives and put CEO candidates in positions that would enable them to address their professional development needs. The new organization featured the creation of three new positions: chief operating officer, chief administrative officer, and chief marketing officer.
The CEO subsequently reported to us that he was pleased with the performance of his new organization. In addition, several years after this assignment, the CEO retired, and one of the CEO candidates whose position had been changed as a result of the reorganization was elected CEO.
top The top management of an ENR Top 100 Design Firm asked us to assist them in re-engineering their design process to improve quality while dramatically reducing costs. The effort was designed to address their concerns over the commoditization of engineering and to benefit from the opportunity to shift their business model from time-and-materials to more fixed price. They saw the opportunity to do more fixed-price work for both straight engineering and for design-build projects.
We helped this firm to organize a task force composed of individuals who represented a wide variety of perspectives and whose support could help motivate fundamental change. We then facilitated task force meetings, every two or three months, over a two-year period. The effort led to the use of greater standardization of design, the tailoring of the design effort to the needs of the client, and a complete upgrade in the use of 3-D design software. The task force not only developed the needed changes but took on the job of selling these changes to the organization. Engineering design costs were reduced by more than 35 percent, giving the firm a powerful source of competitive advantage and allowing them to maintain their record of top-quartile profitability.
We interviewed a cross section of women and men who were considered to be rising stars in the organization. We also interviewed the members of the firm’s compensation committee. This committee served, in effect, as a gatekeeper to advancement to the top ranks of management. We also compared the career paths of men and women, and we evaluated the paths of those who had been promoted into senior positions.
We discovered that the voluntary turnover rate for women was twice the rate for men, and that frequently issues regarding family and work-life balance were behind these voluntary departures. We worked with the compensation committee to craft a formal policy that recognized women’s greater need to work part-time during portions of their career without limiting their advancement in the firm.
We also revealed a significant disconnect between what the rising stars thought it took to get ahead and the attributes that the compensation committee found important. Our assessment also revealed the need to significantly strengthen the firm’s mentoring program, including disseminating the best practices of good mentors. The programs we helped to develop should not only ensure that women will advance to the top ranks of this company, but that all top talent will have greater opportunity to succeed.
We first developed an assessment of environmental and adjacent markets. We presented this analysis to the client with recommendations on the most promising markets and a strategy for qualifying specific candidates within those markets.
We identified approximately 100 firms that met the client’s size and market criteria. Leveraging our wealth of relationships, we reached out to the senior management of each of these firms first to see if they were interested in receiving private equity investment and second to prequalify them as an acquisition candidate. For those firms that were interested, we collected relevant company information under a confidentiality agreement. We then introduced our client to those firms we deemed appropriate. We provided our client approximately ten pre-qualified candidates, and our client ended up meeting with approximately five.
Forecasting Market Performance to Assist in Due Diligence A domestic private equity firm was at the final stages of investing in a mid-size engineering firm. The private equity firm undertook all financial due diligence, but asked for our help in assessing the markets that the engineering firm served.
We did so by speaking with major clients, competitors, and other market observers familiar with the targeted engineering firm. Based on our interviews, we developed a forecast for each of the major markets served by the firm. Although our assessment of the markets was positive, the private equity firm was not able to come to an agreement with the engineering firm over the terms of the investment.
We worked with our client to create a telephone survey with both open- and closed-ended questions. Topics included: image and reputation, strengths and weaknesses, quality of services, competitors used, evaluation of firm relative to competitors, client buying criteria and practices, forecast of expenditures for similar services, identification of related unmet needs, and potential measures to improve quality of service. We administered the survey to over 100 clients in different geographic regions and submarkets. We designed the survey so it could be administered in 20 minutes, but often our conversations with respondents lasted as long as 45 minutes.
Not only were we able to provide our client with aggregated analyzed results, but we also were able to provide them with the individual interview notes that contained a wealth of client-specific competitive intelligence and a database of all the survey data. The individual interview notes allowed the firm to address specific client concerns. In addition to all the knowledge our client gained from the client survey, they also developed a wealth of goodwill. Clients like to be asked their opinions.
The ultimate result was that our client did have to address a few concerns in order not to lose clients, and they did so effectively, thereby helping them to realize the full value of the acquisition.
We conducted a telephone survey of 190 municipal decision makers from over 20 states whose communities depend on groundwater. We were able to gauge whether the municipality recognized that it had a problem, whether the municipal officials were committed to addressing the problem, and whether the municipality was amenable in principle to a fee-for-performance arrangement.
We ultimately found that the market for services to remove contaminants from groundwater was highly competitive and neither large nor rapidly growing. Our client decided not to offer this service.
A large privately held environmental waste services firm asked us to estimate the size of one of their small but profitable market segments.
They had done a cursory analysis of available government data. We analyzed the government data in detail for the past five years, and concluded that the market estimates were too low. In telephone interviews with our client’s six most significant competitors we verified our conclusion, derived defensible correction factors, and gained insights into alternative market strategies. Based on the information we provided, the client decided to pursue the market opportunistically. |
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