The company viewed itself as a service-providing professional practice organization. The organization members’ education, professional experience, and the company culture encouraged a limited, traditional industry perspective centered on the conventional professional service model.
The top leaders of an engineering firm that serviced communities, community developers, and private owners was frustrated by its limited growth. The CEO was interested in being more than a professional service firm. He envisioned a firm delivering professional services as its core business while encouraging its professionals to create even more value for its customers through non-traditional services
The company opened new, profitable business units. Enterprise appeal to employees and potential new hires increased (resulting in hiring high-performance contributors).
ScaleWerks started the engagement by meeting with key leaders in monthly forums where critical concepts and a new lexicon was introduced, discussed, and applied. Following those sessions, key leaders and ScaleWerks developed the SmartScale℠ plan.
That plan, presented on a Gantt chart that included revenue and expense targets, encouraged further business area experimentation, culture initiatives, process re-design, and new approaches to and tools for data management.
The company undertook data collection to define staff and customer perspectives. The process identified how certain company areas could be re-imagined to achieve category leadership.
ScaleWerks then worked with leadership to rework the strategic plan, change how data was collected and used within the firm, develop tactical operating programs, and participate shoulder-to-shoulder to execute the strategy-to-tactics agenda – including successfully conducting technology and organizational transformations.
The company opened new, profitable business units. Enterprise appeal to employees and potential new hires increased (resulting in high-performance hiring contributors).
Practice areas quickly exchanged low-value customers for high mutual-value relationships, and the firm began regularly exceeding aggressive growth (20% per year), profitability (21% NOI), and enterprise value targets (valuation multiple increased from 5.5 to 9 11 based on new business model).