Driving Strategic Change: Evaluating and Optimising the Business Model for Sustainable Growth
Problem
Company Overview: An Australian building solutions supplier faced critical challenges impacting its growth and operational efficiency. The company experienced periods of growth followed by significant retraction, with significant issues including:
1. Stagnant Growth:Despite being part of a major company, the roofing solutions provider had not achieved substantial growth and remained a minor contributor to the overall strategy.
2. Operational Inefficiencies: The business operated independently without full adherence to professional leadership, systems, and processes, leading to suboptimal performance.
3. Organisational Misalignment: The organisational structure evolved around existing employee preferences rather than being strategically designed, resulted in inefficiencies and a lack of clear strategic direction.
Solutions
Comprehensive Business Model Review: Stoke Consulting was engaged to conduct a thorough business model review and provide strategic recommendations to align the roofing solutions provider’s operations with the broader objectives of the parent company. The review included the following key actions:
1. Collaborative Engagement:
- Conducted one-on-one interviews with key managers to gather insights and foster a consultative engagement style.
- Visited each office to understand the operational environment and challenges first-hand.
2. Detailed Review and Analysis:
- Analysed existing company plans, functional information, and business performance.
- Assessed the value propositions, organisational structure, and leadership competencies.
- Compared practices with external industry standards to identify gaps and opportunities.
3. Strategic Alignment:
- Worked with senior leaders to clarify and align the high-level vision and strategic direction.
- Brought external perspectives to define what ‘good’ looks like and provided high-level recommendations for changes to the business model.
Outcomes
Implementation and Recommendations: Stoke Consulting delivered a comprehensive set of recommendations and a staged approach for execution, focusing on the following outcomes:
1. Enhanced Organisational Structure:
- Proposed an optimised organisational structure aligned with the business strategy, emphasising operational excellence, customer service, and sales growth.
- Recommended and designed a specialist resource to calculate where additional specialists can be justified, facilitating business growth and efficiency.
2. Improved Leadership and Management Practices:
- Identified significant leadership gaps and recommended practices to improve management effectiveness, communication, and strategic planning.
- Suggested the recruitment of a new General Manager with strong leadership and strategic execution skills.
3. Operational Efficiency and Standardisation:
- Recommended standardising and documenting scheduling, estimating, and customer service processes across the business.
- Suggested implementing a centralised scheduling system and standardisation of some of the common roles and leverage sub-contractor relationships.
4. Strategic Market Growth:
- Proposed strategies to expand into new market segments and geographical areas, particularly focusing on operational excellence and customer experience.
- Highlighted the importance of professional marketing processes to drive business growth and better segment the customer base.
Conclusion:
A few common themes added real value to this business including:
- Good leadership makes great companies. “It all starts at the top”
- Successful businesses have well planned strategies to grow their market and move into new or aligned market segments
- Organisational roles and responsibilities need to be clear and well defined
This case study highlights Stoke Consulting’s role in providing a strategic business model review for the building solutions provider. Through comprehensive evaluation and detailed recommendations, Stoke Consulting enabled the company to align its operations with the broader strategy of the parent company, driving sustainable growth and operational efficiency. The successful implementation of these recommendations has started to transform the company within 6 months into a more competitive and well-structured organisation within the construction materials industry.
Is your business underperforming but you are not sure how to turn it around? Stoke Consulting can help. Contact us today and we can discuss a business audit with you.
Stoke Consulting
Chris Read
Leveraging his extensive leadership and entrepreneurial background, Chris consistently leads high-performing teams of leaders to outstanding business achievements. He excels in unravelling the intricacies of challenging business scenarios, crafting strategic plans and business cases while fostering deep trust including during executive coaching. This comprehensive and high integrity approach significantly elevates business performance for his clients, helping them to exceed expectations. Chris’ experience includes successfully leading multiple $1B+pa businesses with full P&L responsibility across nine countries and 800 reports to starting, building and selling his own e-commerce business, all the while building high performing teams of leaders.
