Thanks for Showing What Strategy Well Executed Really Means

Growth success starts with developing the right strategy but hinges on what comes next: execution. This step can be challenging and is often where things start to unravel. In fact, growth strategy success is much more likely to falter from execution breakdown than from poor strategic thinking. There’s a real hazard in not quite making the leap from strategic planning to practice. 

The safeguard is intentional integration of strategy planning and execution. 

When you intentionally integrate strategy and execution, something powerful happens. Strategy improves as it is tested, refined, and strengthened by real-world implementation. Execution improves because the team is aligned—owning their roles, knowing what matters, and feeling excited to make it happen. 

With that backdrop, we’re introducing a new series of posts on STRATEGYMatters! to highlight—and celebrate—mid-market companies that are accelerating growth as they improve strategy through execution (and vice versa). First up, we’re excited to highlight Boll Filter Corporation’s journey navigating a particularly thorny CEO challenge. 

The CEO Challenge: Integrating Strategy and Execution

The number one reason for strategy failure is poor execution.¹ When execution isn’t guided by strategy, it’s too reactive; and when strategy lives apart from execution, it’s too abstract. The challenge—and opportunity—for leadership is integrating the two, so that: 

• strategy informs daily decisions,  

• execution sharpens strategic thinking, and 

• each makes the other stronger. 

  
  

This integration requires willingness to learn, strong discipline, and relentless focus on getting better and better at both building and executing strategy. 

This is precisely where Boll Filter Corporation stands out. 

Boll Filter Corporation: Turning Strategy Into a Growth Multiplier 

Boll Filter Corporation (BFC) sells German-made filtration systems across maritime, industrial, water treatment, energy, and defense markets. Boll & Kirch Filterbau GmbH established BFC four decades ago to open the US market. After a period of steady growth, sales growth flattened during most of the 2010s. Leadership knew it needed a different approach. That’s when BFC was introduced to Shepherd Advisors. 

In our early strategy work together, we translated customer insights and market research into a focused growth strategy targeting specific market opportunities and defining clear action plans. BFC learned to prioritize opportunities, reallocate resources, and steadily build growth mindset (and muscle) across their entire organization. 

The Learning Loop: Shifting From Reactive to Proactive 

Engaging markets less reactively and opportunistically helped BFC undergo a profound shift. With a more proactive and intentional mindset, sales doubled in 5 years—according to plan despite struggling with the complexities of a global pandemic. Michele LaTorre, president of BFC at the time, shared: 

With a clear growth picture, visualizing our goals for everybody to see

on a daily basis and having open-minded discussions—the team

responded very positively. We became focused, made needed changes, and elevated our performance to another level. 

After their initial success, BFC returned to Shepherd to help build its next growth strategy. The goal? Achieve sales of $50+ million in 2028. BFC leadership had learned that strategy can't be treated as a one-off event. Continuity and momentum matter. That's why they’ve committed to ongoing strategy execution support with Shepherd. 

Today, BFC continues to steadily build on what they’ve learned by integrating their growth strategy into everyday work. Tradeoffs have become clearer. Decisions are made faster. As a result, execution becomes ever more rigorous and confident. BFC is mastering the simple but powerful learning loop:

As execution generates insights, and insights refine strategy, BFC is building a virtuous cycle to accelerate their success. 

Boll Filter’s Three Pivotal Focus Points 

At the heart of BFC’s current growth strategy is steady improvement in three critical areas: segments for new growth, marketing, and team engagement. 

Focus on specific market segments for growth. Challenged to accelerate top-line growth by tens of millions, leadership and sales took a disciplined approach. They identified and prioritized a handful of high-potential segments, then defined clear pathways to win and organized their teams to execute.  

As the team’s focus on strategy execution got sharper, more structured, and more demanding, performance accelerated in the targeted markets and across the board. 2025 closed as a near-record year, an especially strong outcome given significant tariff headwinds and unexpected sluggishness in several key sectors. 

Focus on marketing to augment sales success. The team prioritized marketing as a critical capability gap, so leadership invested in building the function, allocating internal resources and adding fractional CMO-level support from Shepherd. BFC improved its marketing strategy and decision-making as well as its core marketing capacity, especially digital marketing.  

Today, marketing outreach is highly targeted. Messaging is sharp and consistent. Lead generation is accelerating and, most importantly, marketing is aligned with BFC’s growth strategy and integrated with its sales priorities.

Focus on increasing and improving team engagement. Historically, BFC’s sales culture skewed reactive, which spurred both morale and turnover challenges. When leadership made high team engagement a strategic priority, they set ambitious engagement goals backed by confidential surveys, candid team discussions, and visible collaborative responsiveness.  

Results are positive and very encouraging. BFC’s employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), measuring how likely employees are to recommend their company as a place to work to their peers, has swung dramatically positive by 46 points in 18 months. Engagement and culture conversations have shifted from “This is hard to do” to “Let’s get better!” 

Through this strategic growth work, a whole new mindset has taken hold. By integrating their growth strategy with everyday execution, BFC is enjoying the results of stronger performance, sharper execution, and higher retention. 

Strategy Execution Creating New Possibilities 

Boll Filter’s integrated strategy-and-execution approach is positioning them to surface and pursue new opportunities that weren’t even on their original strategic roadmap. Some of these could potentially propel BFC well beyond its $50 million goal. 

This is an underappreciated truth about strategy. Execution done well doesn’t just deliver strategy but actually expands it. When teams execute well, new pathways and possibilities emerge. Strategy becomes both proactive and adaptive. 

BFC now evaluates these opportunities rigorously and integrates the right ones into its evolving growth plan. Their commitment to integrating strategy and execution has positioned them to leverage a powerful combination: stronger market prioritization and sales focus, more targeted marketing, and significantly higher team engagement. 

Boll Filter is seeing the value of strategy and execution operating as one.

We are experiencing firsthand that disciplined execution is critical to delivering results and expanding our expectations on what is possible. By staying focused, evaluating new opportunities with rigor, and aligning our team around clear priorities, we are realizing pathways that will take us to our $50M+ goal.

This is the power of integrating vision with action.

– Mike Mews, President of Boll Filter Corporation 

Today, growth is not an “if” for Boll Filter but “when—and how much.” 

The Takeaway for CEOs 

Right strategy—executed well—makes all the difference. It accelerates growth. It sharpens decision-making. It energizes teams. 

The real magic happens when strategy and execution continuously reinforce one another. When thinking improves execution, and execution improves thinking, that’s when strategy becomes a true competitive advantage. And growth becomes a lot more fun. 

To Boll Filter Corporation: 

Thank you for showing how focused strategy, executed well, becomes a powerful growth multiplier. And congratulations on the results you’re achieving. 

To explore more about integrating strategy and execution, let’s connect.

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1. Smith, Brian. (n.d.). Strategic growth failures: Why most plans fall short 2025. Strategy Ladders. https://www.strategyladders.com/strategic-growth-failures/