STRATEGIES
We can help you develop winning strategies to compete in the present and prepare you for the future to gain and sustain a competitive advantage.
All firms face a simple but difficult question: “How to make money?” The answer to th
is question is that first, a firm must have a strategy to become successful, and then it can make money. In this regard, the firm is left with two broad basic strategic choices linked to “where to compete” and “how to compete” to become successful. These two choices are called corporate strategy and business strategy, respectively. Large firms treat these two strategies separately, while small and mid-sized firms take an integrated approach to strategy. The purpose of both strategies is to achieve superior performance in the long-run. In financial terms, it means the firm must earn a rate of return that exceeds its cost of capital and the industry average return.
Corporate Strategy
Corporate strategy involves decisions relating to the choice of direction, industries, or markets in which to compete and coordinate activities and move resources among business units and product lines to achieve superior performance. It includes a definition of a firm’s scope and decisions about investments in profitable businesses.
We can assist you in identifying your corporate-wide strategic issues related to your firm’s scope, direction, portfolios, investment, and resource allocation, and help your firm maximize its total value creation.
Business Strategy
Making money is much easier if there is no competition. However, in practice, the “no competition” situation does not exist. Each firm operates in a highly competitive environment, and therefore, the competitive market forces act as a barrier to the firm’s growth and profitability. To overcome these limitations, therefore, each firm, large or small, must also have a business strategy (or business unit strategy), also known as a competitive strategy, to succeed. One dimension of business strategy is about competing in the present to create a valuable relative position with respect to competitors within the industry. The other dimension of business strategy is about “competing for the future,” which involves long-range planning to achieve successful future performance. Therefore, incorporating these two dimensions of business strategy will tell us how to compete successfully in the business arenas to snatch customers away from competitors in your firm’s favor, to gain and sustain competitive advantage over rivals, and earn superior profitability in the long-run.
We can assist you in performing a complete strategy analysis and developing innovative business strategies to compete in the present and prepare you for the future. A strategy analysis will help us identify your current situation and factors of current and future advantages. Finally, we will recommend a strategy (or strategies) with implementation guidelines to create and sustain a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Growth Strategy
The fundamental purpose of most organizations is to grow, and through it, the desire and need to create value, and for this reason, most firms pursue this strategy to grow. Growth is an important common denominator of all three strategies: corporate, business, and functional. Growth can be realized through many dimensions of strategy, including market position, sales growth, product lines, and innovation management. But any motive to achieve growth should result in generating adequate profits. Profitable growth will create shareholder value and maximize firm value.
We can help clients identify, define, and develop the right growth strategy to achieve breakthrough growth and profitability.