What We Solve For
No matter what hurdles your business is facing — poor performance, disconnected teams, or time management and beyond — we’ll help you overcome them with simple solutions.
Erratic Performance
As organizations scale, they get more structured. This is helpful. But it also erodes the flexibility and responsiveness that made them successful in the first place. Response times increase. Gaps appear between what you offer and what the market needs. Or a mismatch emerges between how you work and the skills or abilities of your team. These mismatches can hit business performance. Sometimes it’s a flattening of revenue or profit. Other times it makes predicting performance feel impossible.
“Hire the right people” is a tempting solution. And it can work. But performance isn’t just about hiring the right people, it’s about equipping your people with the skills and support systems to rise to whatever challenge comes their way.
We don’t simply aim to solve the immediate challenge in front of you. We work to build the capacity within your team to recognize problems earlier and take action. That includes putting the right operational steps in place, and developing your team’s ability to use data to their advantage in the decision-making process.
Growing Pains
Plenty of companies have scaled and maintained amazing cultures at the same time. Clarifying your vision and values is a good start. But skillful culture-building and maintenance is about knowing how far to go in providing clear expectations and boundaries, while giving people the autonomy to take an active role in improving the organization.
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It’s not enough to hope that your current employees can pass along the culture through osmosis. At one level, that approach unfortunately doesn’t scale quickly. More deeply, we find that employees that love the firm they work for often can’t even name the reason. “It just feels right” or “I just like the people.” To truly scale your organization with culture as the backbone, it pays to dig deeper and understand the real why.
Our work demystifies culture, finding and naming the specific components that make your organization unique and your employees happy. We then weave those elements throughout the organization, making sure they are not only reinforced but also named and described, making it easier to recruit and hire based on the elements that’s made your company successful so far.
Disconnected Teams
Unclear responsibilities. Prickly personalities. Challenges with your goal or initiative-setting processes. Delays in understanding changing industry dynamics. These are just a few of the many things that can hinder team performance. Rarely is any one thing causing the lack of cohesion, but rather a series of misunderstandings and misperceptions.
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There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to changing these dynamics. But there are effective ways to diagnose the root cause and develop a combination of strategies to yield the best results. As a general rule, if you can identify them, you can improve them.
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We actively build feedback loops from customers and employees that ensures your offering matters to customers and has buy-in from employees. Customers provide the feedback that drives the strategy. A repeatable process for translating strategy into objectives provides clarity for execution. And employee engagement in the feedback and objective setting processes creates a sense of purpose that enables the execution to succeed.
Never Enough Time
Building a systematized, sustainable business that gives owners and executives the opportunity to focus forward, build future success, and scale a business that’s built to last. That’s your goal. The challenges for many are: what exactly should I be doing to work on my business? And when the hell am I going to find time for that?
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You’ve tried the quick fixes. If they worked, let us know about them (we love to learn). In our experience the most valuable achievements come with hard work, an openness to learning, and a truckload of persistence.
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That’s where we come in. We help you determine what’s holding you back, and offer a range of hands-on assistance to fill the gaps. By clarifying functional responsibilities, developing and documenting functional playbooks, and establishing shared norms and expectations, we make sure your business has what it needs to run properly – so you and your executives can focus on what’s ahead rather than getting stuck in today’s mud.
Organizational Confusion
Every department is focused on its own operations. Every employee is focused on their own goals. And that can work – if those operations and goals are aligned to your larger vision for the business.
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Too often businesses lack the touch points necessary to connect the high-level goals and strategies to every employee’s day-to-day. We see a lot of time spent on budgets and financial goals. These are important and necessary. But without further context, these goals can feel abstract and fail to drive enthusiasm in the organization. It’s the tangible achievements that are needed to support those goals that help energize the team.
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We work with you to clarify the “why” and “what” driving your business forward, get buy-in from the rest of your organization, and develop the high-level processes to make it happen. We help employees move from intellectual understanding of your strategy (i.e. “I know what that means”) to actionable intelligence (i.e. “I know what to do about it”). Because at the end of the day, there is no way to move forward when everyone is looking in different directions.
