The Minnesota Business Valuation Group provides a range of strategic planning services that help business firms be deliberate, astute and adaptive about maximizing business value over time.
Business strategy is about having a rationale for business decisions that links those decisions first to key value drivers and then, ultimately, to business value.
A firm's strategic effectiveness depends both on the degree to which managers can formulate a cogent rationale for their actions and decisions - a rationale that specifies how actions and decisions are intended to affect key value drivers and business value - and on the degree to which managers are able to test, learn, and improve their decisions over time.
A Unique Approach
At MBVG, we take a unique approach to strategic planning. It is based on the notion that at the heart of a firm's business strategy is a "strategic bet." In other words, the rationale for business decisions ultimately rests on a "bet" that the firm is making about the future. Regardless of how lengthy or involved a firm's strategic plan may be, there is always a strategic bet that underlies the plan. If you think of a firm's strategic plan as a novel, then its strategic bet is the plot of that novel.
An effective strategy depends on doing things differently or doing different things, not on simply doing the same things as competitors, only better. Thus, no two firms will ever have the same strategic bet. On the other hand, there is a structure to a strategic bet; it must answer certain key questions about how the firm proposes to maximize business value.
We can help you clarify your strategic bet. We can help you ensure that your strategic bet is not only complete, specific and unique, but that it is also a "good bet" - that it has a high probability of success and a compelling profit-making logic.
We can also help you to translate your strategic bet into a cogent business model that "operationalizes" your bet in terms of the eco-system through which you work with suppliers, partners and customers, the internal value creation chain by which you deploy your firm's unique know-how and know-what to create value for customers, and the organizational support structure by which you provide support to value creation and develop your firm's intellectual capital and unique capabilities.
We have extensive Human Resources and Operations Development experience, we can help you align your people, processes, systems and structure to your strategy. Alignment allows you to maximize business value. We can help you build consensus, create shared understanding and establish a common language about strategy. We can help you ensure that the way people are managed, evaluated and rewarded is consistent with business value creation.
We can help you install leading performance indicators that provide you with an early-warning system about the road ahead as well as feedback that allows you to test whether your bet is the right one and how well you are executing this bet. With leading indicators, strategy making becomes an adaptive and dynamic process rather than a blind "roll of the dice."
Tailored and Flexible Service Offerings
Our strategic planning practice is based on supporting and enhancing your deliberate, astute, and adaptive decision-making. Thus, four themes run through our service offerings. First, our offerings are designed to help you be clear and explicit about the assumptions underlying your decisions. Second, our offerings help you make risk-adjusted projections about the expected consequences of your decisions. Third, our offerings help ensure that you have the tools and information you need to make the best decisions possible. Fourth, our offerings help you get the feedback you need to test your assumptions and improve your projections.
Facilitated Working Sessions – A working session for the senior leaders of the firm or business unit in which they systematically examine their assumptions about strategy and arrive at an agreement about its core propositions and the underlying “bet” of the strategy. This workshop helps identify and resolve disagreements, clarify misunderstandings, and build a common language and agreement in the senior management team about the firm’s direction. This is essential to consistent operational decisions and a common message being conveyed throughout the organization.
Focused Training Seminars – We offer short (3 to 6 hour) seminars on strategy for a variety of audiences including managers, professionals, and opinion leaders within your firm. These seminars present an elegant and proven conceptual framework that transforms strategy from a complicated abstraction to a practical tool. This tool allows participants to more effectively support the organization’s strategy, align their own contribution with the firm’s strategy, and make decisions that are consistent with this strategy.
Planning and Decision-Making Tools - We offer a variety of management tools in the form of decision-making frameworks, analytic processes and conceptual models that allow strategic planners to construct and evaluate scenarios, conduct sensitivity analyses, map assumptions, and so on.
Assessment and Tracking Tools – We can help you build leading indicators to track the effectiveness of your strategy, both in terms of its quality and in terms of its execution. This information allows you to act preemptively and proactively to avoid being blind-sided. Depending on your needs, we offer a range of other tools, from diagnostic audits, to performance feedback systems, and other self-assessment tools.
Consulting Projects – We offer consulting services around strategic planning, execution and measurement. This includes large-scale organizational change efforts, organizational structure redesign, and process reengineering to align critical business processes with strategy. These projects are bid on an individual basis.
All of our offerings can be tailored to meet your specific needs and budget. In addition, some of the seminars, management tools and audits can be used with or without the involvement of MBVG consultants. This allows you the option to move slowly into strategic planning so that you can test the MBVG approach at very modest cost. As an example of the offerings that allow you to try us out at a very low investment of your time and finances, we suggest you consider the “Audit of Value Management Practices.”
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