Growth Strategy Consulting

Growth strategy consulting is the work of establishing where a company’s next growth will actually come from, sizing each option against the evidence that demand for it is real, and putting those options in an order so the first one gets funded properly instead of all of them getting funded partially. It is a sequencing and capital allocation decision before it is a creative one. The hard part is rarely finding growth options. It is deciding which ones to decline, in writing, this year.

This page covers that decision on its own. If what you need is the wider practice that joins the growth decision to the innovation capability which has to deliver it, start with our growth and innovation consulting practice instead.

• Since 1999growth and strategy work for global companies
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

Growth strategy is usually bought by a CEO, a chief strategy officer or a divisional president who already has more growth ideas than money. The trigger is almost never a blank page. It is a list that nobody can rank.

• The core has stopped carrying the plan. The base business still grows, slowly, and the gap between that number and the number the board has been given now has to be closed by something that does not exist yet.
• Three credible options and one budget. A new segment, a new geography and a new adjacency all look defensible, each has an internal sponsor, and there is no shared basis on which to choose between them.
• Last year’s plan quietly did not happen. The initiatives were approved, the money was spread across all of them, and none reached the scale at which it would have proved anything.
• A new owner or a new mandate. Private equity, a new CEO or a merged business needs a growth thesis that can be defended line by line rather than a set of aspirations.
• The forecast and the strategy disagree. Finance is modeling growth the strategy does not explain, which usually means one of the two is wrong and nobody has been asked to say which.

Why a growth plan that lists every option funds none of them

Most corporate growth plans are inclusive by design. Every business unit contributes an initiative, every initiative is described as a priority, and the result is a document with twelve bets and no sequence. That document is politically stable and strategically useless, because the budget that follows it divides the available money by twelve.

The failure is not that the options were bad. It is that none of them received enough capital, attention or time to reach the point where its result would have told you anything. A growth option tested at a tenth of the required investment does not produce a small version of the answer. It produces no answer, and then it produces a cancellation.

The second failure is in how the list gets ranked when someone finally tries. Growth options are almost always sorted by confidence, which is a measure of how much evidence already exists, not of how much the option is worth. Confidence is highest for the extensions of what the company already does, so the money goes there, and the plan ends up funding the safest, smallest, most provable things on the list. They work. They also do not close the gap, which is the one thing they were approved to do.

The job of a growth strategy is therefore narrower and harder than producing a list. It is to size each option honestly, to be explicit about what evidence would settle the ones that are large and unproven, and to name the small number that get real money first. That means writing down what the company is choosing not to do this year, and accepting that a growth plan without exclusions is a budget request with a cover page.

What our growth strategy consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements use three of them, and which three depends on whether the constraint is knowing the options, sizing them, or getting the organization to act on the order they are put in.

1. The growth option inventory

A single list of every route to growth the company could credibly take, written in comparable terms so that a pricing move and a new market entry can sit on the same page without one of them being flattered by how it was described.

• Growth from the existing base: penetration, pricing, mix, retention and share within the current field of play
• Growth from adjacencies: new segments, new geographies, new channels and new uses of what already exists
• Growth that needs something new to exist, kept on the list but clearly marked as requiring a different clock and a different kind of funding
• The options already running that nobody has formally reviewed, which on most lists is where a surprising share of the money already sits

2. Sizing, and the evidence test behind each number

Every option gets a size and, next to it, the strength of the evidence that size rests on. The two are reported separately on purpose, because a large number built on an assumption and a large number built on observed behavior should not travel through a steering committee looking alike.

• A value at stake for each option, with the three assumptions it is most sensitive to named explicitly
• A classification of the evidence behind each: observed, tested, inferred or asserted
• For the large and unproven options, the specific question that would settle it and what it would cost to answer
• Where the option depends on finding and sizing a demand space that has not been mapped, that work is demand landscape mapping and we scope it separately

3. The sequence and the funding decision

The output that matters. Not a ranked list, which invites the reader to fund the top five, but a sequence with a stated level of funding per position and a written set of exclusions.

• What gets funded to full scale now, and what full scale actually means in money and in months
• What gets funded only to the point of answering its open question, with the decision date set in advance
• What is deliberately not funded this year, with the reason recorded so it does not return as a surprise in the next planning cycle
• The dependencies between positions, because some options are only affordable after an earlier one has paid for them

4. The growth case finance will accept

A growth sequence that cannot be reconciled with the financial plan is an opinion. We build the case in the form the CFO already uses, so the argument happens over the assumptions rather than over the format.

• The bridge from today’s revenue to the plan number, with each growth position carrying a named share of the gap
• The investment profile by position and year, including the cost of the evidence work on the unproven options
• What has to be true for each position to deliver, stated as a condition that can later be checked
• The downside case, which is the version the board will ask for and the one most growth plans do not have

5. Governance that keeps the sequence intact

Most growth sequences survive until the first quarterly review, at which point the organization reverts to funding everything a little. The governance work exists to stop that.

• A small number of decision gates tied to the questions each position was funded to answer, not to the calendar
• The rule for stopping, agreed before anything starts, because the hardest growth decision is ending a position that is merely disappointing rather than clearly failing
• The reporting line between the growth sequence and the annual budget, which is where most of these plans are actually lost
• A review cadence for the inventory itself, so new options enter the sequence rather than bypassing it

How a growth strategy engagement works

1. Inventory. Leadership and business unit interviews, a review of the current plan and its funding, and customer and market work where the picture is thin. The output is one comparable list of every growth option on the table, including the ones already quietly running.
2. Size and test. A value at stake for each option and an honest classification of the evidence under it. For the large and unproven positions we define the question that would settle them and what answering it costs. The output is a sized inventory, not a recommendation yet.
3. Sequence. Options are put in order with funding levels attached and exclusions written down, then stress-tested with finance until the sequence and the financial plan describe the same company. The output is a decision, with what was declined recorded next to what was chosen.
4. Govern. Decision gates, stopping rules, reporting into the budget cycle and a cadence for reviewing the inventory, so the sequence still governs spending two budget rounds after we leave.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for growth strategy

We have been doing strategy work for global companies since 1999, from ten offices on four continents, and the growth problems we are brought into are usually not problems of ambition. They are problems of allocation inside companies that already have good people and too many plausible options.

Three things tend to be the reason the call comes to us rather than to a larger firm. The first is that we work from customer demand rather than from internal capability, so the sizing is anchored in what people are trying to do rather than in what the company happens to be good at. The second is that we are small enough that the partners who size the options are the ones in the room when the sequence is argued, which matters because the argument is where the value is. The third is that we will write the exclusions. A growth plan that declines nothing has not been finished, and saying so is a less comfortable conversation than most firms are structured to have.

How to evaluate a growth strategy consultant

Five questions worth asking before you sign anything. They separate firms that produce a sequence from firms that produce a longer list.

• Will the deliverable name what we are not doing? If exclusions are not an output, you are buying a list, and you already have one.
• How is each option sized, and is the evidence reported separately from the number? A single score that blends attractiveness and confidence hides the exact trade-off you are paying to see.
• Who stress-tests the growth case with our CFO, and when? If finance meets the plan at the end, the plan will be re-cut after you have paid for it.
• What happens to the large options we cannot yet prove? The honest answer is a funded question with a decision date, not a slide that says to monitor it.
• What governs this after the engagement ends? Without gates, stopping rules and a line into the budget, the sequence lasts one quarter.

Growth strategy consultancy, corporate strategy firm or growth marketing agency?

Related work

Growth strategy sets the order. These are the services that answer the questions inside each position, and the ones that sit either side of the decision.

• Growth and innovation consulting is the parent practice, and the right place to start if you need the growth decision and the capability to deliver it treated as one engagement.
• Demand landscape mapping finds and sizes the demand spaces themselves, which is the input a growth option needs before it can be sized honestly.
• Competitive strategy decides where to compete, which constrains the inventory before the sequencing starts.
• Business model innovation takes over when the answer is that the way the company makes money has to change, not just where it sells.
• Innovation strategy owns the innovation portfolio and its governance once a funded position requires something new to exist.
• Product and service innovation decides which products and services to actually create inside that portfolio.
• Open innovation covers growing with outside parties where a position is faster bought or partnered than built.
• Innovation playbook makes the method repeatable once the company runs this more than once.
• Go-to-market strategy takes a funded position and works out how the offer actually reaches its market.

Growth strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

We work with leadership teams from ten offices on four continents, and most growth engagements are run across more than one of them, because the options being sized rarely sit in a single market. That matters more than it sounds. An adjacency that is obvious in the US may have no evidence behind it in Germany, and a sequence built on a single market’s read will be defended in the one region where it was researched and ignored everywhere else.

In practice it means the sizing work is done where the demand is, with local customer evidence rather than a global average, and the sequence records which positions are genuinely global and which are one market’s opportunity being described as a strategy. That distinction tends to change the order.