Vision and corporate strategy for FTSE 100 conglomerate ABF
- Development of a 5 year vision for the group, an iterative discussion among a wide team of senior directors and the CEO
- Portfolio analysis of the strategic position of each of over a dozen portfolio businesses
- Sophisticated financial analysis of where value was being created in the portfolio
- Framing of key choices. Process leadership of the journey to making them
- Result: Recommendations endorsed by the board. Group Share Price rose over 80% in 24 months after work
UK Growth strategy for The Economist UK, in the context of declining ad markets
With a new chief executive and a new world-wide structure, the client needed a plan to double contribution over five years
- At the same time, it became clear that UK print advertising expenditure - a major portion of revenue for all UK newspapers - was set decline by up to 30% in the coming 1-2 years
- Captive Strategic Leadership developed four profit growth options for the business and the potential each held for driving profitability despite challenging ad markets
- Result of the work: a radical restructuring decision was taken. Circulation and sales have continued to grow - one of very few newspaper groups to accomplish this
Organisation Design of the Global Ad Salesforce
for BBC Worldwide
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M&A process management, deal screening and due diligence for Channel 4
- Close support to the management board during an intense period of assessment of multiple alternative potential JVs and acquisitions
- Deal structuring
- Process leadership - with banks, tax, legal and accountancy advisers
- Screening and synergy analysis of five other separate deal opportunities
- Results of the work: bid/no bid decisions, clear offer terms
Cost reduction for Guardian Media Group (GMG)
- Detailed bottom up analysis of costs in the non-editorial parts of the business, on behalf of the COO
- Recommendations leading to sustainable £20m pa reductions in cost
Business Repositioning for a leading mobile phone retailer
- The client had aggressive growth targets for non-traditional revenue sources
- Captive Strategic Leadership ran a rapid process assessing the attractiveness of adjacent markets, the client's core competencies, and framing strategic options
- Four client staff formed an integral part of the project team
- Result of the work: clear prioritisation of options leading to successful launch of a strategic new product category later in the year
Organisation Design for one of the UK's fastest growing tech platforms, and youth brands, Verve.
- Verve (Renamed Pollen in 2019) is a peer-to-peer sales platform enabling youngsters to buy festival and other leisure tickets from their friends
- Between 2017 and 2019 it has grown from 90 staff, mostly in the UK, to 300 staff on two continents, and from one product to three
- Captive Strategic Leadership led the organisational redesign which has enabled Verve to grow this fast, absorbing three US acquisitions in the process
- Befitting Verve's unique culture of autonomy, the design drew on bleeding-edge organisation design thinking from firms such as Spotify, Zappos, and Google, applying selected agile principles in a system of squads rather than traditional hierarchy
- Impact: Verve was successfully integrated three US acquisitions and raised a $30million series B round. Work is on-going
Strategic Simulation, or 'Wargame' to support launch of 'Lightbox' by DeBeers
- Lightbox is a new company spun out of DeBeers to respond to the fast emerging synthetic - or 'Lab-grown' diamond industry
- Lab-grown diamonds have been used for cutting and grinding for decades. But large, clear, jewellery-grade stones are a very new phenomenon, and potentially highly disruptive to the natural diamond industry
- Captive Strategic Leadership designed and ran a War-game, played by the top 60 executives of De Beers world-wide over a two day period in London. Its purpose was to simulate the reaction of the market to the launch of the Lightbox proposition
- Impact: the simulation generated vital insights on previously un-anticipated second-order effects of the launch up and down the supply chain. Armed with these insights, De Beers was able to launch Lightbox three months later at the industry-leading JCK trade show