Business Growth Strategies
Accelerated Sustainable Growth
Strategic Growth Partner to Established Business Owners
Build a stronger, more profitable, more valuable business.
Established businesses can be successful, profitable and growing — and still contain substantial unrealised value.
It can sit in pricing, customer economics, working capital, capacity, management depth, owner dependency, underused capability, strategic relationships, acquisitions or the business model itself.
My role is to look across the whole business, understand where value is being created, where it is being suppressed or left unrealised, and identify the relatively small number of things that could materially change what the business becomes worth.
Profit. Cash. Business Value.
Three connected views of the economics, strength and future value of the same business.
Much of the opportunity may already be inside the business.
Over time, established businesses accumulate far more than revenue, equipment and customers.
They accumulate:
customer trust;
technical capability;
market knowledge;
pricing power;
supplier relationships;
distribution;
reputation;
management capability;
intellectual property;
operating know-how;
strategic relationships;
and an understanding of their market that may have taken decades to build.
Some of those advantages become almost invisible because they are familiar.
At the same time, value can be quietly suppressed by things that have also become normal:
margin leakage;
cash tied up unnecessarily;
poor-quality revenue;
customer or supplier concentration;
owner dependency;
unrecognised complexity;
underused capacity;
weak management depth;
or growth that makes the business larger without making it materially stronger.
The question is not simply:
What is wrong with the business?
It is:
Where is value being created?
Where is it being lost?
What is being left unrealised?
And what could materially change what this business ultimately becomes worth?
Three connected views of the same business.
Profit
Where is the business genuinely creating economic return?
Which customers, products, services, channels or activities have stronger economics than the average suggests?
Where is margin being created, lost or left unrealised?
And where could relatively small commercial changes produce disproportionate improvement?
Cash
What does the business have to own, hold, do, fund and wait for in order to earn its revenue?
Where is cash being absorbed unnecessarily in inventory, WIP, terms, capacity, complexity or the structure of the transaction itself?
Could the same profit be produced with materially less cash committed?
Business Value
What is all of this doing to the quality and ultimate worth of the business?
How transferable are the earnings?
How dependent is the company on the owner or other key people?
How predictable and resilient are the economics?
How strong is management?
Where does concentration or dependency reduce value?
What capability, relationships, knowledge, market position or intellectual property have enduring value?
And what could make this a substantially better business for somebody to own?
Profit, Cash and Business Value are not three separate services.
They are three ways of understanding what the business is becoming.
Valuable opportunities rarely sit neatly inside one function.
Sales sees customers and revenue.
Finance sees the numbers.
Operations sees delivery.
Managers see their areas.
Accountants, lawyers and other specialists bring expertise from their disciplines.
Those perspectives matter.
But some of the most commercially important things happen between them.
A major customer can increase revenue while weakening margin, absorbing cash and creating concentration.
Purchasing can improve unit cost while increasing inventory and working-capital requirements.
Growth can create capability and strategic strength — or simply add people, complexity and dependency.
An acquisition can add customers, capability and recurring earnings — or destroy value.
An underused asset, customer relationship or technical capability can sit inside the business for years without anybody joining the pieces together.
That is the territory I work in.
I look across customers, pricing, margins, cash, capacity, people, management, operations, assets, capability, risk, business model and strategic options to understand how the pieces are affecting each other.
The objective is not to produce more analysis.
It is to make the commercially important picture visible.
Most established businesses do not suffer from a shortage of possible improvements.
There are usually dozens.
The harder task is distinguishing what is merely interesting from what could materially improve the economics, strength and value of the business.
We look for things such as:
hidden profit within existing customers, products or services;
pricing power that is not being used;
cash unnecessarily absorbed by the operating model;
customers or work whose true economics differ substantially from the revenue they generate;
valuable capability that has become invisible because it is familiar;
underused assets, relationships, distribution or intellectual property;
owner or key-person dependency suppressing transferability;
management capability that needs to exist for the next stage;
better uses of existing capacity;
recurring or more predictable earnings;
strategic relationships;
acquisition opportunities;
business-model opportunities;
and sources of complexity or risk that are quietly destroying value.
The purpose is not to create a longer list.
It is to understand the scale and interaction of the opportunities and determine what genuinely deserves concentrated attention.
A half-day working session that puts the whole business on the table.
The Profit, Cash & Business Value Consult is a focused working session of up to four hours with the owner.
The purpose of the Consult is to uncover where the greatest unrealised value may be sitting across the business, understand the economics and consequences of the most important opportunities, and determine where concentrated attention could make the greatest difference to Profit, Cash and Business Value.
We look across the business rather than beginning with a predetermined problem or solution.
Together we examine where value is being created, suppressed or left unrealised across Profit, Cash and Business Value.
Where the available information supports it, we put indicative economics around the most material opportunities.
By the end of the Consult, you will have:
a Strategic Opportunity Map showing the meaningful opportunity landscape across the business;
indicative economics around the opportunities where sensible estimates can be made;
two or three commercially material opportunities or issues that deserve serious consideration;
one highest-value priority deserving concentrated attention first;
and a practical 90-Day Priority Plan completed during the session.
The discipline is simple:
Diagnose broadly.
Prioritise narrowly.
Your business owns the outputs and decides what happens next.
For many owners, a sale will eventually become part of the journey.
That may be five years away.
Ten years away.
Or not something you are thinking about at all today.
You do not need to be preparing to sell.
But there is a fundamental difference between owning a business that happens to have a value and deliberately building a business that becomes more valuable, more transferable and more attractive to own.
The eventual value of a business is shaped long before a transaction.
It is shaped by:
earnings quality;
cash generation;
management depth;
owner independence;
customer concentration;
recurring and predictable revenue;
strategic position;
capability;
risk;
growth economics;
and the strength of the business model itself.
Building those things creates options.
Whether you eventually sell, retain ownership, bring in management, acquire other businesses or simply want a stronger company, those options are worth creating while there is still time to influence them.
Best suited to established, owner-led businesses
This work is best suited to owners of fundamentally sound, privately owned businesses with enough economic substance and complexity for meaningful value to be created.
Typically, the business has been established for years.
It has customers, people, capability, history and something genuinely worthwhile already built.
The owner may be thinking about:
making an already good business substantially more profitable;
releasing cash unnecessarily tied up inside the business;
improving the quality and economics of growth;
making better use of existing customers, assets or capability;
reducing owner dependency;
strengthening management;
creating more predictable or transferable earnings;
using acquisitions selectively to create value;
building greater resilience;
or materially increasing what the business could ultimately be worth.
Nearly five decades across the business of business.
I have spent nearly five decades in business, working across strategy, pricing, sales, marketing, commercial finance, operations, people, business models, acquisitions, growth and Business Value.
That breadth matters.
The most commercially important opportunities rarely remain inside a single discipline.
A pricing issue can really be a customer-selection issue.
A cash issue can be embedded in the commercial model.
A capacity problem can expose a business-model decision.
A growth opportunity can materially change risk, management requirements and Business Value.
A valuable capability may be sitting in one part of the business while the demand for it is visible somewhere else.
My role is to see those connections.
The owner and management team should know their industry and technical field better than I do.
I bring something different:
a whole-business commercial perspective developed over 47 years of seeing how businesses make money, consume cash, grow, become constrained, create advantage and build — or destroy — value.
I do not replace your accountant, CFO, lawyer, managers or specialist advisers.
Where specialist capability is required, the right specialist should be involved.
My job is to understand the whole commercial picture and keep the creation of Profit, Cash and Business Value in view.
There may be considerably more in the business you have already built.
Some of it may be visible.
Some may be hiding inside things that have become completely normal.
And some may only become apparent when customers, economics, cash, capability, management, risk and Business Value are looked at together.
The starting question is simple:
What could this business become worth if we deliberately built more value into it while there is still time to do so?