Each year Strategy International is approached by clients to 'do strategy'. Each client brings their own unique perspectives and issues and the strategy process reveals the root issues they need to deal with to increase their profits and success.

We call our projects assignments and we have given a few codified examples to give you an idea of the range of work we have done.

A legal firm approached us to 'do strategy'. It soon became evident that in fact they were anxious to improve their productivity. They wanted to grow the business but it appeared that there was difficulty managing the volume of business and the staff turnover of assistants was growing at an alarming rate.

No matter how much a law firm paid its assistants and clerks in order to get clever people to fix their problems, the paperwork continued to be a paper tiger that threatened to kill the business. Lawyers were unable to find law cases, typists were frustrated at not knowing how to codify documentation and then deal with irate staff. The corporate culture was slowly being poisoned.

Our consultants exposed the problem of the inefficient system with its bottlenecks and old-fashioned methods during a strategy workshop. We helped the law firm put together a productivity team, bring in an ISO 9000 expert and get their processes updated.

The law firm was then ready to achieve its main objective to go international and make 60% of its revenue from outside of the country.

A Food & Hospitality conglomerate wanted to 'do strategy'. The investment analysts on the stock market had been downgrading their stock and the Chairman of the Board wanted something done.

A new competitor had entered the market and the founder of the fast food chain refused to believe it could beat his business and it became clear that this was the investment analysts' hot button. Doing client analysis with the team, including the founder, was a powerful method to begin to change perceptions. The team came to the conclusion that their fast food would not be the primary choice for the consumer but would be a strong brand if located in a convenient spot such as when refuelling the car. The Fast Food business established a strong alliance with a petroleum company and set up business in the gas stations. The brand was secured and market share preserved.

Our team worked with the management group to develop a corporate venture capital group to fully exploit the great concepts that the engineers were developing. Once ideas were assessed for risk and financial returns, they were then assigned an 'intrepreneurial' leader to manage the idea and push it through to the marketing team, a newly formed core or engineers who were already in touch with global markets and knew where to sell products.

A chemical company wanted to 'do strategy' and, during the pre-workshop discussions, it soon became clear that their prime issue was how to take all the ideas and inventions coming out of the laboratories and make them profitable.

The head of a property firm was aware of the serious rift growing in his senior management team due to the conflicting views of the strategic direction of the firm. Strategy International was asked to 'do strategy' and our consultants recognized the abundance of brainpower in the group and the strength of the ideas to grow new core businesses. With the usual scarcity of resources, only one of these could be feasible in the long term.

Strategy International was able to design a workshop to get the group to process the main ideas. They were able to come to a shared conclusion on the main objectives and core business focus for the next five years. Our consultants helped put together a strategy team to make sure the vision was executed and to keep the project on track against its targets as well as communicate with the necessary stakeholders to keep the peace.

A major bank was suffering ongoing losses despite its large number of new clients and its visibility in the market place.

Our consultants worked with the middle management layer of the different divisions and the strategy process quickly revealed that a complicated organization structure with rigid reporting rules focusing attention on the inward organization was to blame. Not only was the customer not the focus, the company politics were sour and staff turnover was rising. It was also discovered that new clients were soon leaving once their service levels were not met.

Strategy International was able to put together a team from each of the divisions to reorganise into client-focussed business units to serve the segments specific needs. A performance system to track the efficiency of processing client requests was established to improve efficiency further. In addition, multi-functional teams were able to report back to their own discipline and help out at bottlenecks. There was clarification of management responsibilities and reporting needs and a redesign of the processing. The cost savings were drastic but the clients stopped being 'turnstile customers' and employees were significantly happier.

Strategy International was asked to assist The Garrison Creek Project to gain understanding of what their strategy should be. The documentation is public domain and is available.
Read the document (PDF)

A variety of neighbourhood associations wanted to gain control over the future direction of its area and give The City of Toronto an insight into the residents and business owners needs.

Once the groups met to 'do strategy' it became clear that the stakeholders were more than home owners and that there was a broad range of opinions for the future development of this part of the city.

A series of workshops funnelled the variety of opinions to a shared three-year, five-year and ten-year vision which was then presented to The City of Toronto.