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Why do so many ambitious, experienced executive hires fail to take?
New funding often means new senior hires. When this rush to uplevel the organization with experienced leadership encounters entrenched dynamics, it often results in (expensive) failed executive hires. The missing ingredient is usually willingness to listen deeply to understand the current situation. This is the foundation these hires need to succeed.
The biggest functional fitness brand in the world was experiencing a massive transition. We started work with a new management team after the founder/CEO sold the business following a scandal. Meanwhile, Covid had shuttered many of the 14,000 affiliates worldwide. After twenty years of organic growth, the brand and product needed work. New investors and management came in hot, hiring executives from their network of former colleagues at a furious pace. The organization needed a fresh approach, but despite their strong track records the new leaders found themselves pulling in different directions. Affiliates, already on edge from the scandal and covid closures, started cutting ties. They didn’t want new initiatives; they wanted continuity and trust. Within a year, all of the new executives were gone.
We spent time listening to understand the capabilities of and lessons learned by the legacy staff; we identified serious financial and operational holes that were missed during the acquisition due diligence and laid out a process to address these risks; and we listened for what affiliates needed to get back on board.
Our value to the client:
We learned what leadership qualities and approach would work to rebuild trust with affiliates whose loyalty was the key to the business going forward. It took time, but this foundation is paying off as the business rolls out new initiatives.
After a long day of meetings, you (and everyone you met with) still has to do the resulting work. Tomorrow, more of the same. Why does it feel like you’re standing still?
Welcome to the 90/10 rule: ninety percent of building a successful company is execution. Ten percent is picking a direction. But the ninety percent is blocked by the ten. Most meetings are about trying to determine what should be prioritized–and which details could make or break execution of the project.
Playbooks put decisions on rails to unlock everyone’s initiative by clarifying the ends and means to enable execution. They supercharge every decision you spend time to hash out in meetings, guiding and informing subsequent similar decisions. Endless meetings to get feedback and buy-in become impactful meetings when they build “plays” that everyone knows how to run.
We worked with a postnatal fitness company that was ready to scale. After building a fiercely loyal offline following, they wanted to take their one-of-a-kind program for moms online. They created lots of video content and offered a subscription. After an initial burst of interest, growth stalled. The powerful experience that moms reported offline didn’t yet translate to the online product.
A hundred small factors might hold the key to the online product. Instead of debating each of them, we built a playbook to 1) identify what offline customers loved, and 2) structure experiments to bring these things online.
Our value to the client:
The playbook we built unleashed years of pent-up creative ideas in a structured format. Our client is now working through these ideas in a systematic way to determine which make a difference for online customers.
What makes launches scary?
A lot of people need to execute steps, in tandem, that they’ve never done before. Launches are in the details, and details fall into place with test runs.
We worked with a B2B SaaS company whose operation was rapidly expanding to new cities and countries. Cross-departmental teams were formed to plan and execute the launches, but they repeatedly missed their own timelines and ran into hiccups after launches.
We rebuilt the program management function that was in charge of overall project orchestration. Representatives were nominated for each department to create clear accountability for deliverables. We equipped the team with modern project management software; created meticulous playbook templates that could be reused for each consecutive launch; and we started tracking all tasks based on their owner, priority, dependencies and critical path impact for the project. We also introduced the concept of a soft launch to give the team on the ground a few days of dry runs with dummy data (and tech support standing by) before starting commercial operations with the full launch.
Our value to the client:
New locations launched with good commercial results 4-6 weeks faster than they could achieve before our project.