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"Thanks for Helping Us Change" - Four Success Stories from the Front Lines

Why do we change? To achieve better outcomes. But if you’ve ever tried to get your team to alter long-standing habits, you know just how tough change can be. Even small tweaks take intention, focus, effort, and consistent attention. 

Change is hard.  Organizations (like people) need a reason to change. In our experience, strategy building done well clarifies the reasons for change and unifies your team around doing what it will take to achieve the better future they want.     


Here are four stories from clients who used strategy building to accelerate structural changes in their business. They’re all different, yet each one exemplifies how embracing the right shifts can level up your business. They climbed on board and during our strategy work together transformed their thinking, their organizations, and their growth trajectories.  


A Stable Manufacturer Goes from No Growth to Double Growth 


This industrial equipment company hadn’t experienced meaningful growth for many years. And they were OK with this. They prioritized stability. So, it felt like a big risk when their parent company pressured them to start growing. Leadership liked the idea of growth in principle, but weren’t sure they could shift to achieve growth in reality. 


As we worked with leadership to ​develop​​​ a detailed 5-year growth strategy, they learned more about their potential and began to feel that perhaps they could indeed accelerate growth. As we moved through each step of the strategic planning process, they became cautiously more excited. And by the time they approved the final growth strategy, they were “all in.” Their mindset about growth had shifted. 


This shift then empowered their success.  Five years later, they achieved their goal to double revenues, despite multiple surprises and unexpected deviations from the original strategy. What mattered ​was​​​ how their strategic planning and decision-making altered their mindset about growth. Today? They’re well on their way to doubling revenues again. 


Thanks for helping us change our mindset. Embracing a growth mindset and spirit pays dividends, especially when the details don’t pan out as we expect. 


A Successful Family Business Hits a Wall—and Busts Through  


This successful, multi-generation service company hit a wall—growth had stalled. To restart growth, they knew they needed to prioritize their growth opportunities and detail their go-to-market strategies. We discovered, however, that market prioritization and better go-to-market strategies by themselves weren’t going to be sufficient. It wasn’t markets that held them back. 


You see, the wall they hit was internal, not external. To achieve the growth they wanted, they needed to make significant changes on the inside, especially around how the company was organized, managed and led.  Such changes would fundamentally alter how this family had done things very successfully for generations.  They wanted the changes, and resisted them at the same time.  Their family-business traditions had served them well, but they weren’t going to help the business grow in ways the family now wanted.  


Changing market growth strategies is often straight-forward. Changing organization is often very hard, easy to put off, and necessary. Fortunately, effective strategy building helps teams recognize, acknowledge, and prioritize the harder internal changes needed to achieve the external outcomes they want. 


Thanks for helping us change how we lead. As we focus on improving external results, we need to tackle the harder internal issues that hold us back. And often the internal changes needed to achieve next-level growth are the ones we’ve been resisting the most.  


A Complex Company with Many “Great Ideas” Prioritizes the “Best Ideas” 


This complex company had numerous service offerings, several manufacturing operations, serving ​multiple​​​ markets. On the plus side, the firm’s complexity spawned many “great” growth ideas. When a great idea emerged, they added it to their already long “to-grow” list, where it competed with all the other ideas for the team’s limited time and resources. All these great ideas were confounding leadership’s clarity and fostering strategic confusion and paralysis. In this case of great ideas, more was not turning into better.    


As we helped them focus, they moved from a long list of great ideas to a much shorter list of “best ideas.” Our process had objectivity, rigor, and active facilitation. The team prioritized and then sequenced their best ideas into a single path forward, and they took the rest off the table.  Once leadership centered their attention, thinking, and resources on executing a single path forward, growth accelerated and the firm more than doubled in size over the next three years. 


Thanks for helping us change how we choose. What we focus on gets our attention, and what gets our attention moves forward. Having a lot of growth ideas is great.  And the best way forward is to prioritize, sequence, and then focus.  Zeroing in on less makes it more likely we’ll achieve more. 


A Customer-Focused Firm with a Blind Spot Enhances Its View 


Our fourth firm—a B2B high-touch service company—felt strongly that they were very much in tune with their customers. They already knew what their customers valued. And they, like most companies, had a blind spot. 


In our strategy work, we conduct Voice of Customer research to hear from customers directly. In this case, we learned key information that our client was not tracking.  This included key insights about forces shaping their customers’ futures that our client was not seeing and not prioritizing.   


Armed with new ​data​​​ and insights directly from their customers, our client recalibrated their perspectives. They recognized their “we-already-know” blind spot and adjusted their approach. Today when they talk to customers, they uncover both where their customers are today and where their customers are going (and why). When our client thinks about their ecosystem, they include the present and future needs of their customers. What a strategic advantage! 


Thanks for helping us change what we pay attention to. Uncovering blind spots enhances our ability to serve.  For instance, we may focus just on our customers’ present – what’s true today, and we fail to look at our customers’ futures —as they see it. Fortunately, as we more strive to see our customers’ tomorrow needs through their eyes, we learn to truly serve them better today. 


Embrace Transformative Change in 2025? 


Each of these companies courageously chose to become fundamentally better through engaging in intentional strategic work with the help of Shepherd Advisors.  Effective strategy building does this—it transforms companies on the outside and the inside, ultimately delivering better outcomes for shareholders, employees, and customers. 


​​​​​Do you want to make deeper choices to realize the growth you want?  Shepherd Advisors can help. Learn more about us or reach out to discover how we help companies improve outcomes as they make better and often transformational strategic changes. 



 

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