SCALING STRATEGY & EXECUTION
Think BIG
Start small
Scale fast
Knowing what are exactly the qualities in my products & services that customers want most.
Building products & services in a way that customers want to share with their friends and are easy to share.
Making my business capable of providing back-up and managing tons of new customers in a blink.
The inability to scale quickly or globally could cause my company to go under.
Fastest-growing companies are in tune with their own strengths, weaknesses, and appetite for risk. They use this knowledge to devise customized recipes for growth and shape their decisions about markets and initiatives. The best among them set themselves apart by how well they understand how they want to grow.
Understanding your organization’s strengths and culture, and focusing heavily on the factors that drive growth provides your leadership with a sound framework for achieving your objectives in an accelerated time frame.
SCALING STRATEGY & EXECUTION
Ten
Essential Factors
that Drive Growth
Business model focus
Customer’s willingness to pay is intrinsically tied with the value that you deliver to them over time.
Market expansion
Seeking new customers and moving into new territories.
Formal growth strategy
Developing a long-term growth plan with specific steps for execution.
Investing and innovating
Developing and introducing new products and services and investing in scaling the business to support growth.
Business process
Integration of your front and back office and drive more cross-functional alignment business is focused on developing and maintaining your customer relationships, that involves subscription changes, add-ons and down sells, you need to be able to handle the order-to-cash process across the different stages of the subscription lifecycle.
System automation
Automation and enablement of your key processes automation and a disciplined processes through implementing a Relationship Business Management solution.
Embrace Agile Development
Agility is a shift in the mental model of what an organization is and how it operates. The goal is to move to organizations as organic systems, in which people collaborate quickly and effectively around tasks and projects.
Attracting & retaining staff and staff development
Having recruiting power, especially the ability to attract and keep top managerial talent.
investing in training, education, and career path development to allow talent to flourish.
Financial management
Accessing and managing capital.
Cost efficiencies
Identifying and capitalizing on operating efficiencies and maintaining internal controls. Operations must help drive down your CAC.
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
examine cost synergies
but focus deeply
on revenue synergies
and the benefits of an improved commercial engine
And produce the type of persistent rapid growth that lead to immense value creation.
Success in any transaction depends increasingly on the ability to create value through operational improvement alongside revenue growth. Effective value creation must be built around three core areas: staying true to the strategic intent, being clear on all elements of a value creation plan, and putting culture at the heart of a deal.
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
M&A
work
stream:
Revenue, capital and cost synergies
To maximize overall synergy value locate the most critical sources of value. Cost synergies are easier to track, improve the bottom line and deliver faster but revenue & capital synergies may deliver more value than cost synergies.
Define the base line
Building a baseline requires a clear identification of opportunities to create value. Set a clear synergy framework about what really counts and how to transfer the costs and targets and plan ways to execute the task & track and report results.
Structure transaction & financing
Organizations need to budget and set realistic targets for integration costs, predict one-time costs, and weighing synergies against the costs attached with taking them is essential to plan how to pay the deal. Moreover, if they have limited cash flows or that are looking for bigger transformational synergies because those deals usually require larger investments.
Due diligence
Financial due diligence focuses on justifying the deal. Now look for value beyond the value that justifies the deal and go deep and try to identify opportunities and set synergy targets providing a solid foundation for maximizing value. Inadequate due diligence limits companies and keep them out to capture truly transformational value.
Structure communications
Make it a high priority. The communications plan should build enthusiasm for the deal ensuring that the right messages are communicated and corrects any misinformation and myths that might arise about it. Generating a motivated employee base and engaged vendors, partners, and other stakeholders, all supporting the newly formed business success.
Integration implementation
Any deal is more likely to succeed if the company meets its synergy targets within 18 months postclose. Enable the true budget adjustments, increase accountability, and improve tracking needed to capture value. Measure the impact of margin expansion, workforce restructuring, and money savings.
Cultural factors and organizational alignment
For teams to work together effectively set priorities and manage and align how work actually gets done and how do hold people accountable at both companies. A comprehensive approach to cultural fit and organizational alignment are critical to the success of integration.
POST-MERGER INTEGRATION
start working on integration levers
at the same time you're conducting diligence.
Focusing on it early in the process leads to immense value creation.
Conduct an honest assessment of your organization's capabilities – If you're not confident in your organization's talent-selection capacity, its internal structure, its external orientation, and its bedrock of practices and controls, your deal will fall flat.
Conduct active assessment and due diligence – Apart from the trinity of finance, legal, and tax due diligence send four other due diligences, which would be tech, operational, customer, and people due diligence.
Design the operating model for the new company – Be sure of the post-close operational, commercial and financial performance of the newly combined company.
Understand the target's organizational culture, and proactively manage it – Pay attention to the alignment of the "bonus / malus" system to the target company's mindset i.e. how do they reward and punish employees in their organization and how it affects productivity.
Plan communications carefully – Ensure that the right messages are communicated to minimize the anxiety of customers, regulators, vendors, and employees, boost morale, and retain talent. This also builds enthusiasm for the merger and corrects any misinformation and myths that might arise about it. Reinforce communications around key milestones and decisions, particularly regarding your integration aspirations, vision, strategy and culture.
Then in the period between signing and closing the deal you start putting your pieces in place and this is how you devise a blueprint for creating value.
POST-MERGER INTEGRATION
Place detailed, rigorous value creation planning at center stage raises your chances of success!
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Staff the PostMergerIntegration team with the best people – having the right team in place from the start ensures the execution plan and strategic objectives will be upheld throughout the transaction. Must source from people who have experience in running process efficiencies and who have experience in managing transformations. Find people who understand integration very well, they have the ability to create value;
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Focus on building a high-performance organization – one that consistently achieves exceedingly better outcomes (financial and non-financial results), by focusing in a disciplined way on what really matters to the organization. One that is customer centric, exalts the quality of its employees, embrace continuous improvement and renewal, adopts a growth mindset, and has a long-term orientation toward sustainability and high-quality management;
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Design a workable organizational structure for the combined company – implement organizational structures and systems that align to the organization's core strategies. Shape the way life at work is structured and run, including team formations, shift patterns, lines of reporting, decision-making procedures, communication channels, etc., ensuring that the organization is set to thrive;
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Maximize revenue synergies and optimize cost synergies – having a very clear value strategy defined up front: map out the customer profile you're targeting and identify the key customer journey you're going to support, it will give you a clear indication of what and where to sell as well as what sort of things to sell be it cross-selling, upselling, or coming up with a new set of solutions to increase your revenue. And bring in a process improvement framework using lean management or operational excellence management to unleash the hidden efficiency opportunities i.e. identify potential efficiency opportunities when it comes to processes, procedures, and operational governance of the organization;
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Make current customers an integral part of the PMI process – be aware that customer defections contribute to M&A's high failure rate and set ambitious goals for customer retention in the deal model: adopt the customer's view of the merger when making important integration decisions i.e. sequence and coordinate customer-facing changes in ways that create a better customer experience;
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Select, retain, and develop the best people for the new organization – acknowledge the need to align with the organization's purpose. Bring together individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who work collaboratively towards common goals, are very effective at what they do, innovative, and can produce consistently superior results;
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Manage the organization's culture with the same rigor and discipline as a financial and operational integration – put more focus on understanding the culture of the target company and figure out the cultural elements most important to reaching that deal rationale. Address the cultural differences between the two companies with precision, point out potential frictions and compatibilities and pick the areas you want to protect.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
You may have a long, rich history, but to have a successful future, you need agility and speed!
Success in automation is more often achieved with a systematic approach to deploying technologies.
The importance of digitization in driving commercial excellence and coverage efficiency will continue to grow. The price pressures faced by mature portfolios, coupled with rising talent costs, will force companies to find more efficient ways to sustain and broaden their coverage. Similarly, the increasingly competitive launch environment and complex landscapes call for more effective approaches to customer engagement.
You must be efficient in things like manufacturing, processing, delivery and service!
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
deploying
automation technologies systematically
Embracing disruption:
Create an opportunity for bringing in
New ideas;
New technology;
New business;
New markets;
New innovation;
And those are available not only to upstarts and new entrants but also for established businesses as well.
Rethinking 5 domains of strategy:
Customers, competition, data, innovation, & value.
Delivering change in real-time:
Data from all relevant sources; enterprise applications, sensors via IoT, manufacturing equipment, vehicle situational data and spatial data.
Automat(ion)ed responses triggering; escalations & workflows. Based on; kpi's & service level agreement (sla) performance
People clear situational data visualizations for; line of business (lob) owners, operational managers, customer advisors, agents.
Organizational change.
BUSINESS OPERATION IMPROVEMENT
powerful & game-changing ways for organizations to drive productivity
advanced analytics
digital performance management
cloud computing
automation
machine learning
role clarity
rigorous reliability processes
talent management & development
clear accountability structures
all aligned with the broader organization are essential components for success
Control your company, increase productivity and drive on a sustainable prosperity
There are many companies outgrowing their capacity mechanisms, they make some money but when they reach a critical size the flexibility of the early days is suddenly turned into internal conflicts. Because their KPI's framework is not in place, employees don't rely on clearly formulated processes in their work and they can't see the danger signs ahead.
Tune your company machine and be rigorous and flexible, establish the right incentives and control your business.
BUSINESS OPERATION IMPROVEMENT
KPI's
&
pro
ces
ses
The KPIs are your sensors, they show you your company's performance. See where you perform and where you need to improve.
Rationalize the data to the few critical metrics that really matter for performance, and report them on a simple dashboard.
The processes are your guarantee for being able to repeat and optimize whenever your KPIs are in the green. And to know how you can tune your company machine if they dive into red key figures.
Start by defining very precisely what the behaviors involve, on a practical, day-to-day basis, for all levels and tune them to perfection. Ask the right questions and coach effective problem solving.
Properly tuned in KPIs and processes allows you to scale your business in your growth strategy.
deliver what you promise
Only with proper processes, you can deliver what you promise to customers.
If your company's processes can't keep up with your sales efforts, you quickly work your machine beyond capacity.
Running a company, where you know your delivery processes and have tuned them to perfection, you'll also know precisely what and how much your organization can deliver over and over again.
This predictability will be apparent to customers when your sales team can present a properly formulated delivery plan. And they can close the deal everyone's assured that the organization will deliver.
be ready
for a changing market
Only having your sensors in place you can detect signs of a shift in the market long before it turns into a catastrophe and your clients leave. Give your company the flexibility and readiness by incorporate carefully thought out KPIs. If your organization controls its processes and everyone knows them by heart, than you can react to KPIs and quickly identify the problems in the organization. You know you can initiate corrective actions, and you can rest reassured they will be carried out. If you base your growth strategy on these principles, you prime your company to act with agility in the market even when you have multiplied your staff headcount. Because the team are on top of their measurements and processes, they have been continuously one step ahead of the game, and always ahead of the competitors and you will reach your targets, year after year.
START-UP MANAGEMENT
List everything that don't suck
(and you’re really passionate about)
List everything you might be good at
(things that people say you’re good at)
List everything people will pay you to do
Pick up the only things that people are willing to pay you for, that you are very good at, and you really love to do.
Turn them into digitally distributable products and sell them all over the globe!
Delivering experiences that are both world class to the consumer and deliver value to the business requires mastering the technologies and addressing the organizational disconnects, all while forging trust with customers and protecting their data!
START-UP MANAGEMENT
Implementing and integrating the right technologies, processes and skills create significant complexity and calls for a lot of coordination.
Package your passion
Ideas, wisdom, experience, knowledge, …
Build your products
Design the product framework, define the price range, and build the business model.
Place your business
Delivery model, payments model, ...
Tell your story
Stories are the Trojan horse of facts! If you want people to remember some key facts, wrap them in a story. The end feelings should allow people to relate to … and fell more inspired.
Promote your products
Market it, promote it, sell it:
customers – people pay for convenience & clarity;
community – audience super involved & engaged;
content – ask people to share their experiences / doubts / opinions …, encourage dialogue around your/their market challenges.
Organize your company
Define the vision that drives the company; design of policies, processes, and governance models – must reflect the values that guide the workforce, and the management practices, norms, and mind-sets that characterize how work gets done.
Scale your business
Create an ambitious agenda to invest to build capabilities, strengthen your brands, and add capacity to grow. Data & design must work in deep synchronicity to supercharge innovation—in products and processes to operations-wide. Outstanding customer engagement, super sales, great revenues & hight profits will come along.
Jump the unicorn trap
When having millions of users, cool brands and charismatic bosses is not enough.
Set up to high performance governance & sustainability models; moving to a higher-performance culture to achieve ambitious sales/growth/revenue targets & building the path to high profits.
TURNAROUND STRATEGY & EXECUTION
driving a
successful
turnaround
the quest:
▹ how to create value?
▹ how to capture value?
the drivers:
▹ transform business and operating models;
▹ shifting the focus of company’s portfolios from mature to innovative products;
▹ clear the value propositions;
▹ rethink the delivery models;
▹ add new capability requirements (including the ability to manage uncertainty and ambiguity);
▹ commit to instilling financial & operations discipline across the organization.
the tools:
▹ process efficiency, cost reduction, sales growth, & reporting accuracy.
TURNAROUND STRATEGY & EXECUTION
Raise the bar on workers' experience and delight customers with quality, innovative products and excel at providing service at an affordable cost. Increase margins in the process, benefiting all stakeholders and delivering significant future returns to shareholders.
the effect:
▹ higher employee productivity;
▹ higher audience engagement
▹ longer customer retention;
▹ better financial performance;
▹ shorter sales cycles;
▹ greater return on investments;
▹ stronger customer loyalty;
▹ soaring profits.
the challenge:
no change happens unless people change!
Six basic conditions necessary before employees will change their behavior:
▹ a compelling story, because employees must see the point of the change and agree with it;
▹ role modeling, because they must also see the CEO and colleagues they admire behaving in the new way;
▹ reinforcing mechanisms, because systems, processes, and incentives must be in line with the new behavior;
▹ capability building, because employees must have the skills required to make the desired changes;
▹ monitoring done right, because employees will fixate less on the measurement itself and more on how to make the most of what they learn; and
▹ a “no plan B“ approach to change, because must simply never entertain the idea of failing, and that mentality is critical.
RISK MANAGEMENT
Taking Risks is
a necessary step towards
Business Growth.
The only way a business can protect itself today is to ensure vulnerabilities are visible, prioritized and remediated with optimized processes.
Business Leaders Should Approach Risk Management With An Enterprise-Wide Perspective
No single leader or team can gain the complete perspective needed to be effective in the risk domain. No one group within a company could manage the number and types of internal and external threats, the complex technological landscape, and the many actions needed to address vulnerabilities associated with people and technology. The chief security officer (CSO), the chief information officer (CIO), and the chief risk officer (CRO), as well as the business units, they rather need to work together.
Known Risks demand straightforward actions, from identifying and documenting risks to instituting monitoring and regular reviews.
Unknown Risks are neither predictable nor quantifiable. Mitigating unknown risk is best achieved by creating strong defenses while building a risk-aware culture. That includes empowering management and employees to pass on bad news without fear of retribution.
Consisting of two layers, an enterprise risk management (ERM) framework and individual frameworks for each type of risk. But listing risk based on likelihood and impact is not enough, companies must assess their ability to respond to emerging risks. Capabilities and capacities needed to manage these risks should be evaluated and gaps filled accordingly. To be effective, the ERM framework must provide clarity on risk definitions and appetite as well as controls and reporting; risk classification, risk appetite, risk control process, risk reporting.
The risk operating model must be managed through with clear accountabilities. An enhanced risk culture covers mind-sets and behaviors across the organization. A shared understanding is fostered of key risks and risk management.
Crisis preparedness and response
Strengthen resilience, develop action plans and communications, train employees at all levels and put in place a detailed crisis-response playbook.
RISK MANAGEMENT
Take a look at g | s' vision to enterprise-wide risk transformation – with substantially improving risk management while also sustainably trimming costs.
Break risk down into knowns and unknowns
Develop an effective risk operating model (ROM)
Towards a robust risk governance, organization, and culture
A high-performing, effective risk operating model and governance structure, with a well-developed risk culture minimize the probability of corporate crises, but never completely eliminate them.
INITIAL COIN OFFERING
create a new and improved payments system for the world
One that’s secure, transparent, decentralized, fast, with low fees and privacy and uses crypto-currencies as a means of exchange
A currency for goods and services.
As a simplistic, stabilized, scalable, and secure mean for transactions and uses digital wallets.
regular cryptocurrency
stablecoins
vs
vs
vs
A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to centralized digital currency and central banking systems. The decentralized control of each cryptocurrency works through distributed ledger technology, typically a blockchain, that serves as a public financial transaction database.
A cryptocurrency is a system that meets six conditions:
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the system does not require a central authority, its state is maintained through distributed consensus.
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the system keeps an overview of cryptocurrency units and their ownership.
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the system defines whether new cryptocurrency units can be created. If new cryptocurrency units can be created, the system defines the circumstances of their origin and how to determine the ownership of these new units.
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ownership of cryptocurrency units can be proved exclusively cryptographically.
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the system allows transactions to be performed in which ownership of the cryptographic units is changed. A transaction statement can only be issued by an entity proving the current ownership of these units.
-
if two different instructions for changing the ownership of the same cryptographic units are simultaneously entered, the system performs at most one of them.
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency that is collateralized to the value of an underlying asset. What that underlying asset may be varies from coin to coin.
There are four types of stablecoins:
-
flat collateralized, or backed, by flat currency like USD, EUR, or GBP. Flat-backed stablecoins are backed at a 1:1 ratio, meaning 1 stablecoin is equal to 1 unit of currency (like a dollar). So for each stablecoin that exists, there is real flat currency being held in a bank account to back it up...
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commodity collateralized stablecoins are backed by other kinds of interchangeable assets, such as precious metals. The most common commodity to be collateralized is gold - however, there are also stablecoins backed by oil, real estate, and baskets of various precious metals...
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crypto collateralized stablecoins are backed by other cryptocurrencies. This allows crypto-backed stablecoins to be much more decentralized than their fiat-backed counterparts, since everything is conducted on the blockchain. To reduce price volatility risks, these stablecoins are often over-collateralized so they can absorb price fluctuations in the collateral...
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algorithm backed stablecoins are not collateralized to the value of an underlying asset, which might seem contradictory given what stablecoins are - the US dollar used to be backed by gold, but that ended decades ago. These types of coins use an algorithmically governed approach to control the stablecoin supply. This is a model known as seignorage shares. as demand increases, new stablecoins are created to reduce the price back to the normal level. If the coin is trading too low, then coins on the market are bought up to reduce...
price volatility linked to :
-
market size
-
user base dissemination
-
trading volume
-
circulation supply
-
fundamentals
low price volatility
extreme price volatility
INITIAL COIN OFFERING
Real World Applications For Regular Cryptos & For Stablecoins:
-
day2day currency for mainstream commerce. Stablecoins have the added benefits of being a digital currency that’s legally backed and secure. Cryptocoins are also especially beneficial for overseas payments, since there doesn’t have to be any conversion of different fiat currencies.
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p2p streamlining recurring payments. Allowing the use of smart financial contracts that can be enforceable over time. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts that exist on a blockchain network, without requiring any third party or central authority to enact it. These automatic transactions are traceable, transparent, and irreversible, making them ideal for salary and loan payments, rent payments, and subscriptions. This is especially beneficial for businesses that have employees all over the world, as it reduces the exorbitant fees and days long process of transferring and exchanging flat currency. Using cryptocoins, this process could take mere minutes and require just a small fraction of the usual transaction fees. The same idea can apply for automatic payments of loans (ie. with decentralized lending), monthly subscriptions, or even recurring donations to nonprofit organizations.
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remittances fast and affordable. Today migrant workers have to send remittances through businesses like Western Union to get money back to their families. This is a slow and costly process, where families end up losing a big chunk of their funds to high fees. Stablecoins provide a better alternative with fast transactions and low fees, without price volatility. Workers and their families across the globe could use digital wallets to receive stablecoins from anywhere in the world almost instantly.
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protection from local currency crashes. In the event of a flat currency crashing in value, local citizens could exchange their crashing currency for USD-backed, EUR-backed, or even gold-backed cryptocoins quickly before they lose even more of their savings, thus protecting them from further drops in value.
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improving currency exchanges. Very few cryptocurrency exchanges out there currently support flat currencies due to strict regulations. The use of stablecoins allow exchanges to get around this problem and offer crypto-flat trading pairs, by simply using a USD-backed stablecoin instead of actual dollars. This will greatly help in the adoption of cryptocurrency trading as a whole, as it makes the process of joining and obtaining cryptocurrency easier for newcomers, as they can continue to think in terms of dollars or euros, instead of in constantly-fluctuating bitcoin values. It will also reduce bitcoin’s massive influence over the market, as currently most exchanges require traders to hold BTC before they can exchange it for other types of crypto.