Services
Most business problems are not solved by outsiders providing something that is missing. They're solved by changing how what is already there is coordinated. We bring the right suite of services to an engagement to solve the problem you're having while strengthening the capacity of your team for future challenges.
Organizational Benchmarking
Your company has a playbook. You may not call it that, but it exists. You have values but they might not be written down. You have a system for prioritizing projects, or it might just be putting out whatever fire is in front of you on any given day.
In short, your company is getting by but you have a sense that things could be just a little, or a lot, more efficient. That’s where our CultureOps assessment comes in.
Typically the first steps in a long-term engagement or a stand-alone service, we’ll conduct surveys and interviews with your CEO and executive team members. If you’re open to it, we’ll also conduct a broader cultural survey with the entire organization.
From there, we’ll synthesize our results and draft an Organizational Blueprint — your North Star on what’s working well and where there is room for improvement.
Outsourced COO
You already know what you’d like to improve, you just need help implementing a specific plan.
Once we’ve created an Organizational Blueprint, we’ll meet regularly with the executive team or functional managers to drive initiatives forward and instill continuous improvement in your operations.
Here we’ll establish protocols as well as individual or team coaching. Additionally, we’ll collaborate with your CEO to set agendas and help move key initiatives forward. For organizations without a COO, we provide the tools, methods, and good old fashion elbow grease to get you the results you’re looking for.
Executive & Executive Team Coaching
We’ve been the beneficiaries of great coaching. Coaching’s fails when disconnected from the company’s broader playbook and objectives. Great coaching can be the catalyst for your team adding up to a lot more than the sum of its parts.
We break our Executive Coaching into three tiers:
Tier 1 - Individual Executive Coaching
Traditional 1:1 executive coaching. This is about personal development and changing your relationship with your problems. Perfect for those always on the lookout for improvement.
Tier 2 - Executive Team Coaching
This focuses on the dynamics throughout the executive team. Through a series of workshops and observing team meetings, we’ll help identify hurdles and create frameworks to ensure your team is reaching their full potential.
Tier 3 - Coaching as a Skill for Managers
Learning how to skillfully navigate between giving direction, listening to employees vent, and empowering them is paramount to being a capable modern manager.
Most of what we do will demonstrate this nuanced approach but we also help embed this skillset into your organization’s playbook.
Learning & Development
To keep up in the modern world of business, your team has to continue learning and developing at all times.
At Persistently, learning is the core of our organization. We work in multiple ways to fit with the participants, timeline and cadence that you have in mind. Our core offering is a monthly executive and manager session that ensures your leaders evolve and amplify your organization’s potential. We supplement this with informal sessions with shorter topics. In all of our learning and development offerings we do the hard work that so many others don’t to build the learning into the rhythms and systems of your organizations. The result? The “ah ha” moments stick and new members of the team benefit from what’s been learned in the past.
Strategic Planning - Annual/Quarterly Facilitation
A financially-driven annual planning process is common in most organizations. In our experience having a budget is hugely important. But how do you effectively set a budget unless your team is aligned on where the company can go? By facilitating a quarterly and annual strategic planning process, we drive clarity in the organization’s long-term goals and support your team in identifying annual and quarterly objectives to help achieve those goals.
We anchor this strategic planning to the continual review of organizational capabilities, and ensure the objectives are not just one-off initiatives, but building future capacity to execute within your company. This means tying feedback from customers and employees as well as communication plans into the planning process, ensuring that your strategy doesn’t get eaten for breakfast.
Functional Playbook Development
Whether from growth or attrition, you’re hiring. New employees are joining throughout the company. HR and your functional leaders are doing their best, but something is missing. Employees just aren’t getting up to speed fast enough. They’re not making the impact you need. There are lots of causes, but at its core is the basic blocking-and-tackling of how work gets done, what is expected, and how to make decisions that’s necessary to your employees success.
Your functions need a playbook. And it needs to be written down. But your managers are busy. And they may never have done this before. That’s where Persistently comes in. We help your team build clearly defined and readily available functional playbooks. The result? New employees get up to speed, teams work better together, and the organization moves forward, aligned internally and towards the company’s strategic goals.
Exit Preparation
Exiting your business can be overwhelming. Navigating investment banker selection, cleaning up financial reporting, and communicating expectations with key team members are just the tip of the iceberg. All while continuing to run your business.
Exiting is a process – not an event. We can help you better prepare for that process. If your time horizon is short, we can help you and your investment banker determine critical items to take care of within your timeframe. Furthermore, we’ll help organize due diligence materials, prep communications for employees, and generally help you feel more confident through the whole process.
Company Playbook Deployment
Successful CEOs have a playbook. Often it lives in their head. They set the tone for the culture – how energy moves around the organization. They set strategic objectives, and they design the organization to make it all happen. The playbook can either be clear, explicit and documented, or it can be ambiguous and elusive, transmitted largely by tribal knowledge.
We help to make clear how your company works, reducing time to value and increasing employee satisfaction. Done well, your playbook empowers your employees to embody and execute on the vision, and to more quickly course correct when things get off track. This is about operations…but it’s about more. Getting the flow of information and work product right (operations). Energizing teams around a clear vision and explicit expectations for how to work together (culture). And leveraging all of that to gain insights on where to go next (strategy). We bring it all together to build your playbook.
