Services.
Practical Strategy provides a full range of strategy consulting services designed to help any organization achieve its goals. Based on our decades of experience with both public and private equity backed companies, we will work with you to design a customized flexible project that can be executed and fit into your organization.
Growth strategy
We will work with your team to map out all of the potential growth opportunities.
In these strategies we can validate and value multiple types of growth including new products, new markets, new geographies. We will also help with an execution plan and help you put in place any risk mitigation required such as managing channel conflicts. Often a growth strategy requires choices on whether the growth will be entirely organic, entirely in-organic or a combination. We have decades of experience in all facets of growth.
M&A strategy
We will work with your team to map out the strategy behind your M&A plan and then help you identify the best M&A opportunities to fit your strategy.
We have worked for dozens of private equity backed businesses of all sizes and helped them execute highly successful add-on M&A plans.
Corporate and business strategy
We will work with management teams and boards on corporate strategies or with specific business units or functions on their multi year strategy.
We are thought leaders on corporate portfolio management. This usually starts as a project around which business units should be prioritized for future investments and sometimes evolves into how to re-orient the portfolio. See our article in Harvard Business Review.
Value creation planning
Over the last 20 years as private equity has grown, traditional corporate strategy has been augmented or in some cases replaced with Value Creation Planning.
We developed one of the most widely used and respected models for value creation planning. At its core a value creation plan is a multi year plan that lays out exactly how a company will create value in a specific time frame. For a private company these plans ultimately translate into EBITDA, multiple expansion and cash flow/debt pay down. But in our experience they must also include roadmaps for the major functions (like IT and HR) to be able to support the value creation plan.
These plans go under different names including Blue Prints, Shared Vision Plans, Value Creation Plans and Commitment Plans. We are experts in all facets of value creation planning.
Commitment planning
We developed a widely used methodology for delivering what private equity calls a value creation plan but what we often call a “commitment plan.”
For most businesses, planning is divided into a strategic plan and a one year annual budget. These two plans are loosely linked but when day to day business ups and downs begin budgets dominate and strategy often gets put off. A company will still go through the strategic planning process which usually results in mission, vision, values and some kind of five year plan. These plans are important and often inspiring but typically they are “aspirational”. It is very hard to plan out five years with a level of conviction.
By contrast, annual budgets are more about execution. They are true “commitments.” But annual budgets don’t allow a company to make long term investments. No investment pays off in a single budget year.
Something is missing. Practical strategy has developed a methodology that bridges the strategic plan and the annual budget. We call this a Two Year Commitment Plan.
Private Equity Operating Group Advisory
We will provide advice and a go forward roadmap to scale and maximize value from private equity operating groups.
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