Change is accelerating.
As business and technology leaders, we've been addressing business change for years. But what we're seeing now is an acceleration — driven by the pandemic — causing businesses to revisit and polish their visions, upgrade operations, and change their customer and employee experiences.
Telemedicine is a good example: the number of physicians reporting telehealth as a skill rose 38% from 2019 to 2020, and the number of Americans in at least one telemedicine visit increased 57% over the same period. Closer to home, when the State Fair of Texas couldn't run the traditional experience, it offered a drive-thru for 23,000 vehicles — Fletcher's Corny Dogs included.
Resources Are Limited
While businesses change to meet new customer needs, additional or external funds are limited in many industries. Leadership is looking to sustain the business and extend the financial runway to seize future opportunities — often under financing constraints that require hitting certain profitability targets.
But as direction shifts, there are stranded costs and assets — focused on the previous strategy — that can be captured and redeployed. There are new and existing products that can be sold into existing accounts. In other words, there are opportunities to find investment dollars within the current financials.
The Fund the Future™ Approach
Our approach to unlock those funds and focus investment on the future direction is Fund the Future. We collaborate with client leadership teams throughout, balancing speed, cost, and value capture:
- Identify & Prioritize — identify, evaluate, and prioritize opportunities through interviews, analysis, and workshops: new cross-sell into existing clients, reducing overtime and contractors, retiring software applications, improving billing and collections. With one client, we completed this stage in two weeks and outlined opportunities that exceeded next year's forecast EBITDA.
- Execute & Capture — drive those benefits through a regular program and accountability process. With another client, this meant changing the organization and operating model to consolidate operations, set the right incentives for team leaders, and unlock opportunities to scale.
- Redeploy & Invest — use the funds generated to invest in the future vision: new leadership positions and skills, technology platforms, or product capabilities to address market shifts.
In our experience, two elements significantly help achieve success. The first is a clear future vision — it enables faster, cleaner prioritization and gives the organization something positive to rally around. Often the team has known of the opportunities for a while and just needed the catalyst. The second is regular check-ins that foster accountability and momentum.
We've seen clients find the opportunities to fund their future vision and increase bottom-line profitability — in some cases over 40% within the first year of execution.
