Giving Consultants a Way to Scale Their Processes

 

Challenge:

In the consulting industry, there is a lot of time spent in Excel with highly subjective data that takes months to uncover. 

An Advisory Firm came to us in a time when consulting and strategic software was an entirely new category to create their first strategic management platform. Their biggest need was to productize their processes in order to increase evaluation efficiencies and demonstrate impact for investors.

This particular advisory firm provides access to executive-level services with a bench of over 100 specialized executives in a wide variety of industries and experience types, which told us they would need a solution to monitor multiple implemented strategies at a time across the firm.

The firm came to us looking to increase efficiency and scalability in their processes:

  • Diagnosing a business’ need

  • Mapping the need to the appropriate advisor

  • Ensuring the same standard of high-quality care for all advisor relationships

  • Monitoring the advisor’s impact over the life of the contract

  • Demonstrating firm-wide impact for all advisors and clients at any given time

EVALUATION

While the relational aspect is key, especially in developing mutual trust between the two parties, the firm’s ability to understand the inner workings of a prospect was too dependent on insights gained from limited access to leadership. 

Identifying the cultural and relational state of the prospect was difficult and took months of regular interaction to uncover, making it difficult to decipher which advisors would be the best fit for the business.

STRATEGIC INTEGRITY

Similarly to assessing the current state, the ability to integrate each of these factors into a successful strategic plan is a difficult skill to scale.

This part of the strategic process is also particularly susceptible to bias, which introduces an opportunity for the business to lose trust in the advisor’s ability to objectively deliver a strategic plan that meets its needs. The risk of subjectivity and the experience needed to strategic plan with excellence make this phase of this client's model one of the most delicate and difficult to scale.

The quality of the strategic plan is something that can also vary from advisor to advisor, once again influenced by the individuals experience, skills, and perspective. All advisory firms need to be able to ensure a high standard of quality for all engagements.

PROVING & DEMONSTRATING IMPACT

Once a strategic plan has been created, each advisor has his or her own approach to assigning accountability and tracking both implementation and success over time. This made it difficult to track and measure the total impact of each advisor, as well as the firm’s impact as a whole. 

Monitoring long-term strategic impact proves difficult with only historical output metrics, such as KPIs or financial growth data. These metrics can be impacted by a number of different internal and external variables, making it a challenge to track and demonstrate impact to correlated implementations.

Solution:

A strategic plan is only as good as: (1) the data it is built from; (2) its ability to be implemented.

Customizing a strategic plan is a delicate balance of present and future. A business may have goals that are not supported by its current state, by other stakeholders, or have not been credibly proven to be advantageous.

Advisory firms walk a fine line between what a business may believe it wants or is capable of, and what the business actually needs or can sustain. 


THE JOURNEY PLATFORM ENABLED THEM TO:

  • Create clear and detailed plans for implementing strategy

  • Prove their value using more than historical KPI’s

  • Watch and track the impact of implemented strategy across their businesses

  • Rely on clear accountability structures

  • Automatically generate necessary reports


Results:

By focusing first on providing a scalable way to gather the data which is toughest to get — we were able to cut processes that usually take weeks down to a matter of hours. Their platform allows clients to complete assessments and update progress at any time, from anywhere, creating visibility for each advisor within the firm and demonstration to those who need it.

The Journey Strategic Platform gives our consulting clients the flexibility, demonstration, and scalability they need to amplify methodologies they have spent years refining.

 
New Orchard