We help our clients create value for customers, employees and shareholders.
Farkas Berkowitz & Company assignments take a variety of forms, including intensive engagements lasting three to four months, annual retainers, quick-response due diligence efforts, and half-day consultations.
Our scope of expertise includes the following, click on any item to learn more:
Strategy Development
We help clients formulate strategic plans that strengthen competitive advantage in markets they currently serve and leverage the client's core competencies into new, attractive markets. Our approach is tailored to client needs and the CEO's preferences.
Sometimes we will conduct an extensive strategic and operational review, providing an independent assessment of the client's strengths, weaknesses, and market opportunities. We make specific recommendations for investment and divestment among different lines of business. Our analysis and recommendations then become a basis for involving the client's key executives in developing the strategic plan.
Other times, we will structure and facilitate a strategic planning process where the client's senior management team conducts the needed analysis and formulates strategic initiatives. We have developed and refined a collaborative planning process that is both analytically rigorous and efficient and that engages top and middle management in a fashion that ensures implementation.
Operations Improvement
We work with clients to improve organizational effectiveness by recommending improvements in structure, process, systems, and people. We also may coach the CEO and other top executives to improve their leadership and teamwork skills.
Assignments often focus on such specific objectives as improving the hiring and retention of staff, increasing profitability, enhancing service quality, streamlining or implementing information management systems to better serve staff and business processes, or augmenting the productivity of sales and marketing.
Leadership Development
Our Leadership Development Program includes three major components that may be undertaken together or independently, according to our clients’ needs.
Succession Planning: We help clients identify potential CEO and other top management successors and create a plan to ensure readiness at the time of transition.
Executive Development Planning: We help clients create a sustainable process to guide leaders to performance excellence and maximum achievement. We compare the leadership bench to leadership requirements, identify development needs of key managers, create an executive development planning process, and train the top team how to understand and implement those processes.
Leadership Training: We understand from more than 25 years of working with leaders that training efforts should be impact-oriented, active, and experiential. We help firms build and deliver a comprehensive leadership training program encompassing vision and strategy, business acumen and development, communication and engagement, and core management competencies.
Market Research
We conduct market research to inform major investment decisions and strategy development. We base our research in the private sector on a time-tested methodology that entails use of economic databases, telephone screening interviews, and face-to-face interviews with key prospects or customers.
Our commitment to interaction with professional societies and organizations central to our clients’ market areas provides a powerful understanding of emerging needs and trends in the marketplace and in technical operations. Public sector research relies on our extensive library and on interviews. Assessment of competitors is based on our database of over 400 firms plus face-to-face interviews.
Customer Surveys and Focus Groups
We conduct surveys of clients' existing and prospective customers. Our clients find these surveys to be invaluable in improving service and product quality, evaluating diversification options, and making marketing and sales more productive. Copies of interview notes also yield customer-specific marketing intelligence.
Surveys cover such topics as:
- Image and reputation
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Knowledge of the scope of client's products and services
- Competitors used and evaluation of the client relative to competitors
- Buying criteria and practices
- Forecast of expenditures for the next several years
- Identification of related unmet needs
- Evaluation of potential measures to improve quality of products and services.
We also design and facilitate workshops for our clients' customers. We design these workshops to help customers address common problems while also yielding strategic insights for the clients' top leaders.
Presentations
Firm experts often present market assessments on the markets we cover at national conferences. You can find samples of our presentations under the Market Research section of our site. If you would like to have one of our experts give a presentation at your conference, please contact us.
Mergers and Acquisitions
We provide sell-side and buy-side assistance with mergers and acquisitions. We represent clients that wish to be acquired by identifying potential acquirers, developing an offering letter and memorandum, and assisting in all phases of the negotiation process.
We provide advice on the value and the structure of the offer and assist in due diligence. For buy-side clients, we help develop an acquisition strategy and criteria and implement that strategy by identifying attractive acquisition candidates using our vast network of contacts within the industry, by screening potential candidates, and by assisting with the negotiation process. The firm usually provides its M&A services under a retainer and performance fee arrangement.
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