Business Consulting

A Strategy Development

Do you have long-term goals? Have you chosen the best way to achieve them? Does the company have a shared and consistent understanding of long-term development? Are you satisfied with the forecast of business results in a long-term?

The strategy contains the crystallization of knowledge about the business you are running, understanding current and future sources of competitive advantages in this business, and determining a plan to conquer and maintain a sufficient strategic position in the long term.

Whether you are trying to understand and influence the reasons for poor business performance, develop a response to competitors’ actions, or looking for ways to reduce risks in the long term — proper strategy will help you do so and act as an axis that unites the efforts of each employee in general moving towards goals.

When developing a strategy, I usually use such tools as vision and mission, strategic sessions, scenario modeling, a detailed strategic forecast, … (the list is far from exhaustive). In addition, since the best strategic opportunities often lie outside the current business model, I can help with updating the business model or building a new one.

My publications on the topic:
Seven points that every manager should know about business strategy
Three typical crucial mistakes in strategy development

A Sustainable Growth Strategy

Have you ever thought about what your company and business will be like in 10-15 years? Will it retain its current position? What will happen to the market and industry on the long horizon?

Continuous sustainable growth is the goal of virtually every company or group. But the search for growth has never been so difficult. Markets are becoming more saturated, competition is growing, sales growth is declining steadily from year to year.

By combining creative and analytical approaches, I will help you overcome the internal and external obstacles to sustainable growth. Typical methods that I use to help with growth strategy are analysis of existing development plans and projects, fine-tuning of such projects and plans, analyzing related markets / industries, finding trends and points for potential growth in the future, generating new ideas, etc. (the list is far from exhaustive)

If you are just starting to think about sustainable long-term business development, I will help you to correctly address this issue, bring expertise and best practice, set up methodological tools and organizational mechanisms. We will jointly go the way of business strategy development to ensure long-term and sustainable prosperity.

My publications on the topic:
Growth strategy — does your company need it?

Strategic Management: Setup and Tuning

Do you manage the company strategically? Do you achieve long-term goals? As early as 15 years ago, about 90% of international corporations recognized their strategies as unsuccessful or completely failed.

If you need to confidently manage a business in the long run, only to adopt a strategy is not enough. You need to manage its execution over the long term. If you make only situational tactical decisions with a horizon of a year or less to the detriment of a strategic position, your competitors joyfully rub their hands.

Timely building strategic management in a growing business ensures the accumulation of the basic competences of the organization to win in the long term. By applying advanced international expertise, I will help you set up strategic management so that your company will be able to achieve ambitious goals and strengthen its leadership.

As part of building and / or fine-tuning strategic management, I usually use well-established and proven methods for managing a strategy execution, which are integrated into a whole process, as well as organizational solutions and, of course, trainings and seminars.

My publications on the topic:
Strategy execution — how to implement decisions into the reality

A Structure of the Company and the Business

Has your business grown and is now there are several business lines? How effective is each of them? How to compare the profitability of business streams with the accuracy necessary to make a strategic decision?

Typically, one of the main reasons for a slowdown in business growth is an inefficient structure that has developed spontaneously with the growth of a company. It slows down activity, prevents clear analysis of results, and weakens the foundation for further development.

Perhaps it’s time to think about restructuring the company. Sometimes it is not enough to adjust the organizational structure if you need to change the existing business processes and decision making rules, which entail major changes. It is important that such changes do not jeopardize the business.

To eradicate the roots of losing momentum and provide a solid foundation for future growth, I can help to align the structure of the company with the current situation and / or long-term plans. My experience allows me to design competently and accurately a new, targeted company structure, reducing the changes to necessary and sufficient.

And, of course, reliability of business operation is the main priority when designing changes.

Market Analysis and Competition Research

How well do you know your market? And its segments? Do you have a clear, detailed idea of ​​competition? Does the opinion of your company’s employees coincide with yours on these issues?

Unlike the developed countries, we work in a situation of information hunger. The statistics are incomplete, distorted and most often do not reflect your real needs. Insufficient quantity and quality of information leads to weak, sometimes erroneous, strategic decisions. You should not rely on patchwork information from the experience of individuals, because in fact, these are rumors.

If you have certain structured and clear information about the market and competition, how well do you analyze it? Is it enough to make complex and expensive decisions? Do you make complicated decisions, look for new growth opportunities, clarify operational plans and tactics, develop a response to competitors’ actions – I can help you to be prepared.

My experience in finding data for developing strategies will help to obtain the necessary information and to structure it in a format that you understand to make the most decisions in your business.

Strategy Audit

Strategy audit and its assessment helps to objectively look at the situation with the strategy in the company. How satisfied are you with your company’s formalized business strategy? Is your company able to execute the developed business strategy?

Such questions are especially relevant when you are just starting to build strategic management.
If your company already has this defining success function in place, it is important to avoid the pitfalls and to manage your business with confidence over the long term horizon.

Strategic audit provides objective answers about the integrity of the developed strategy and characterizes the quality of the strategic management in a comparable to other companies format. My knowledge, experience and methodology, developed and tested on several companies of the BRICS countries, allow me to assess how strategically your business is being managed.

Strategic audit helps objectively characterize the strategic management situation in the company, to clearly see the gaps and weaknesses in this critical business area, and to provide comparable benchmarks with other companies.
My knowledge, experience and methodology developed and tested in several BRICS companies allow me to evaluate how strategically your business is managed. Additionally, methodology can be applied to assess the quality of the developed strategy before its adoption.

Audit results will reflect realistic state of affairs and will help to adjust in a timely manner both the strategy’s decisions and the processes for its execution, taking into account the changing situation, strengthening confidence in the company’s leadership. As a result, you will have a complete list of controversial issues and questionable conclusions from your strategy and a solid action plan to address them.

My articles on the subject:
Three typical crucial errors in a strategy development
Example of the accomplished project “Assess a Level of a Strategic Management for Global Investors”

Understanding the Customers

How well do you know your customers?

Unique information about your clients is crucial for creating a strategy, its successful execution and a variety of tactical and operational decisions. Deeply understand what is important for your customers, and guide their behavior are necessary conditions for finding growth points or developing new products / services.

It is not enough to rely on employees’ perceptions of client behaviour alone. Employees who work directly with clients certainly have valuable information about customers behaviour. However, decision-making requires systematic, structured, verified and carefully analyzed information. Only in this case, you can be sure of sufficient accuracy of decisions made.

I can help in this situation in two ways:

1. prepare information ad-hoc, one-time only to make serious decisions
2. build a process of regular providing information for typical decisions of any level – from daily to strategic

In any of these cases, your business awareness will take a whole new level of detail and understanding. Decisions made on the basis of quality information will be the basis for long-term growth.

Cost Optimization

Is your market stop growing or is it shrinking? Do you work in fierce competition and it is getting worse? Or do you expect this to happen in the future soon?

You are definitely facing the challenges of operational efficiency. It is worth thinking about improving the efficiency of the operations. Only by successfully keeping costs below competitors will you be able to generate enough profits for further development.

There are a variety of proven methods to address the challenges of improving operational efficiency: optimization / reengineering of business processes, lean manufacturing, six sigma, ISO 9000, etc. Some of them have advantages over others in certain circumstances and vice versa. Each method has effective tools that may be more useful in specific situations.

To increase operational efficiency, full-scale implementation of a particular method may be redundant. It is important to choose a balanced set of tools to get rid of a burdensome unproductive work and to focus activities on the priority aspects for long-term success.

My articles on the topic:
Cost optimization: how to trim costs

Virtuoso Performance Management

Do you need a new level of accuracy in managing the business? I will help you design, implement and fine-tune a scorecard of any complexity to suit your needs.

It is impossible to manage what cannot be measured. Managing “by feeling” in the manual mode, of course, delivers a lot of drive, but requires extraordinary talents, a huge amount of time and titanic efforts. Moreover, the accuracy and efficiency of management is determined by the achievement of the planned, which is, again, difficult to assess without measurement. And the larger the scale of the organization, the greater the requirements for the accuracy of each decision and action, because collectively, it affects the business as a whole.

Results can be a top-level dashboard, a KPIs system for monitoring distributed offices and branches, sets of performance indicators for the marketing and sales department, evaluating the effectiveness of the company as a whole, its areas, business lines and departments, or each individual employee position.

Depending on the nature of the business and the challenges facing your company, I will help to create a virtuosic performance management system that suits your needs and tailored exactly for your circumstances. I will also help set up necessary and sufficient indicators to make most decisions right in your business.

Budget and Expenditure Control

Does your company have budget management? Are you planning expenses on an annual horizon? o what extent is your budget being met? What is the percentage of deviations for the actual values ​​from the planned?

High-quality cost planning in company departments is the first step to their effective use. The budget allows you to allocate resources and prioritize activities, as well as help in preparing information for a retrospective analysis.

For accurate cost management I will help design a system of planning and budget management, run it, including training and seminars.

If there are budgets in your company, I will help “fine-tune” their work and improve the accuracy of planning and execution of targeted budget.

And even for companies with a project nature of activity I can help more precisely manage the economic of business on the horizon a year and more.

Optimal Organizational Structure

Your business has grown, but you feel a lack of structure efficiency? Too many questions need to be solved personally and not enough time for strategic development?

Business losses from an inefficient structure can reach 30%, not counting the inconvenience for employees, for whom this is an additional stress that prevents productive work.

If the size of your business has grown, and you still rely on a structure that has worked before, it’s likely that you will be able to ask how the structure fits the reality. Perhaps it is time to think about the quality structure that supports your business. The most correct approach in creating an organizational structure is to base your company’s business processes.

To improve the effectiveness of the company through structural adjustments, I can help

• to structure a business to increase its efficiency – if you have different products and business lines
• to design a new organizational structure for a company – if the existing one is not suitable for certain reasons
• analyze and make adjustments to the existing organizational structure – if a professional approach by an experienced consultant is required

If you have already designed a new for the restructured business or company, I can help with the organizational changes: suggest what will work, where there will be serious challenges and how to avoid them.

Successful Change Management

Are you aware of the inevitability of changes that your company needs?
Most successful organizations are in constant adaptation to a changing environment, both external and internal. The success of timely changes often determines the future of a business and, at times, its survival over a long term.

Less than 50% of the changes are statistically considered successful or satisfactory in achieving their goals.

The reasons for the failures of the planned changes are various and, as a rule, complex. Among the most frequent are erroneous / inaccurate / fuzzy target state, key steps are missed / poorly implemented when making changes, a high level of resistance due to fear of uncertainty, etc.

Experience is required for successful changes.
And while it is indeed the work for a company’s management, I will help to avoid typical mistakes, to apply organizational methods that smooth out sharp angles, and contribute to reduce resistance, which increases with the scale of changes.

Support for an Integration of an IT-System

Have you decided to implement an IT system in your company? Such a decision requires a certain amount of formalization of your company’s activities.

Business processes, financial and organizational structures, customer relationship management and more should be clearly defined and fixed for successful automation of operations. The choice of the ways the processes flows and decisions are made must be done BEFORE fixing them with automation tools.

A simple but controversial solution would be to address these questions to the IT company that has sold you the information system. Are you ready to change your business as IT an professional believe it should be run? Are you sure that they will choose a way to fix operations that will bring benefits to your business instead of simplifying their life? Or will it be “like everyone else” without unique competitive advantages?

I can help you in the selection of an IT system, when preparing a functional requirements and technical design specification or analyzing it, supporting implementation, quality control of results. In this issue, I speak on your side.

In comparison with the cost of implementation, professional assistance of a management consultant will cost you less. If we take into account the possible losses from operations redesigned by IT specialists (not in-depth business aware), the rate of return on such support is the best investment decision that can be made when deploying an IT system.

In addition, I can offer to make useful for business enhancements that solve old long-standing problems and difficulties accumulated over the years of growth.

A time span to prepare for an IT tool implementation is a good time to cleanup and arranging business back to order. Once implemented, it’s much more difficult and expensive to do.

Optimal Finance Structure

How efficiently is the company’s financial flow being used? What is the reasonable level of financial leverage can be applied to your business?

Companies that use only own capital often mistakenly believe that they get it for free. Attracting debt increases the risks, but also allows to increase the effect of your business model . This opens up opportunities for more dynamic growth and unique competitive advantages .

Determining the right financial and capital structure for your goals requires finding a comprehensive optimal balance between all the company’s liabilities and its capital that meets business goals with minimal costs.

In order to effectively use the possibilities of borrowed capital, I will help calculate an acceptable level of debt-to-capital ratio, as well as, if necessary, improve the business model and correctly assess the risks.

Setup and Manage Finance and Investments

Your business has grown and generates sufficient cash flow . Are you thinking about expanding of an existing business ? Planning to try new directions or business line? Thinking about long-term investment opportunities? Then you are faced with proper investment management .

Intuition is a good helper when searching for business ideas and discussing a business model. Alas, intuitive investment solutions work well only in insufficiently saturated underdeveloped markets with not much competition.

Before making an investment decision, it is useful to understand with high precision the volume of all investments, the timing of the return on invested capital and to assess in detail the market opportunities for revenue forecasting. It will also be useful to digitize risks — an integral part of your investment.
Leaving out key aspects of the investment process quite often leads to capital losses.

A properly set and well-placed investment process will help to significantly reduce losses and lead to higher return on capital.

To build such a process I will help you to adapt the necessary assessment and analysis techniques, design the process, implement and launch it as well fine-tune it on the run.

The results of my services may be either a running full-fledged investment process from generating ideas to controlling investment made, or individual elements of the process that are crucial to your business. As a result, you will be able to make investment decisions that have gone through all the necessary preparatory steps, eliminating the typical and most critical mistakes.

And even if you invest “in people”, it’s very useful to understand the pros and cons behind costly decisions in numbers.

Prepare to Sale a Company or a Part of It

Becoming offers to sell the company or its share? Thinking about a successful and timely exit from the business ?

Before you respond to such proposals, it is important to determine how much it is beneficial to you.

It is necessary to prepare for the sale in advance, at least a year or two. In this case, it is possible not only to receive fair value, but also to avoid unnecessary costs for current operations and unjustified investments in modernization.

In a situation where you are seriously considering exit strategies, you need to find the right answers to many questions, among which are:

• What is the potential of the market and industry?
• Is your business at the peak of its capabilities?
• How to best prepare for the exit?
• When is the best time to sell?

To make the most beneficial deal, I will help analyze the market and related trends, compare your business with competitors and their capabilities, analyze the internal potential affecting the value of the company, draft a program of step-by-step preparation for the exit and advise on the choice of a favorable time

If necessary, I will help to prepare an investor offer and to find the most suitable buyers, as well as to organize a deal and to successfully close it.

Post-Merger Integration

Are you planning to growth your business through a purchase, merger or strategic partnership with another company? Thinking about potential candidates for acquisition? Or convinced that you have already found the best option?

Poor awareness of the details of the business you are buying or integrating with quickly turns the transaction into a very expensive one. When deciding whether to merge or take over, it’s important to know how the numbers of current and future performance are, as well as what’s going on with the market.

When making a transaction decision, you need to understand the impact of the market and competition on the company’s value, have a realistic cash flow forecast with a feasibility study, and ensure the reliability of revenue and cost drivers.

For the success of the planned merger, it is important to conduct a commercial due diligence and find accurate answers to questions, including the following:

• How to evaluate the potential of the company to be bought?
• How to choose the right company to take over from several options?
• What is the expected return on a long-term horizon?
• What is the optimal deal structure?

I can help take into account all costs, including reorganization and integration of a new business, calculate synergy of partnership / merger and develop a detailed step-by-step plan of its implementation, correctly assess the shortfall in income of the acquired business, find options for maximizing synergy and choose the best option. Also I will help to avoid wrong decisions, as a rule, overly optimistic, when preparing for a transaction.

If necessary, I can help in conducting a transaction, as well as translating the integration plan into reality, correcting deviations and avoiding pitfalls