SixH Consulting

What Keeps Business Leaders Up At Night? (and other problems worth solving)

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In more than four decades combined experience building and strengthening successful companies, we’ve helped solve some tough problems:

• Maintain performance in down markets (building products)
• Compete effectively against larger, richer, more established competitors (packaged goods)
• Turn promising ideas into successful new products (investment services)
• Expand into new categories (software)
• Insulate themselves from commodity pressures (technology hardware)
• Align disparate parts of their organizations behind a single, clear strategy (information services)

In each case, executives we’ve worked with found that critical talent they needed to tackle these problems came from outside their company. As one Marketing SVP told us, “We were a $5 billion company with below-average marketing and a brand that just wasn’t cutting it. Looking back, we were too close to the situation - everyone had a strong opinion, but none of us could see the answer. You gave us the objective perspective and the true picture we needed to solve our problem.”

Here are the kinds of things executives tell us most often about why they’re looking outside their companies for solutions they can’t find within – the kinds of problems that benefit most from external expertise:

1. “I don’t know what my problem actually is.” This can be tough for executives to admit: You know something’s not working, but can’t figure out exactly what or why. The longer it goes on, the more disruptive it gets. One client described this situation as his “ice cream headache.” If you can’t name a problem, you can’t solve it. This is why leaders and their teams ask for help to get their arms around a complex problem, pull it apart and analyze it, as a first step in finding a solution.
2. “I don’t know what compelling ideas to say ‘NO’ to.” Every CEO should be able to answer this question: What two or three attractive directions should we not pursue? Effective strategy is about elimination, deciding what not to do, concentrating resources and building unity of purpose. It begins by selecting a core strategic objective. What’s yours? Growth…profit…share? If your answer is “All of the above” you’re kidding yourself. An outside source of light will help expose the implications of choosing one objective over another, and help leaders pare away the plausibles in order to focus on the potentially ideal.
3. “I don’t know how to get on top of market changes.” Stuff happens. Conditions change. Globalism, technology and category morphing redefine competition. (Clients frequently tell us the challengers they fear most are the ones outside their conventional category frameworks.) Successful companies adapt to sea changes in the market. Sometimes, they initiate them. Experts can help you define and defend your position from competitors, current and potential—then re-imagine and re-tool your own offering for profitable competition in new areas—and make change your ally instead of your enemy.
4. “I don’t know how to maximize top-line revenue.” Marketing is, essentially, the process of creating a preference customers will pay more for. Sometimes this is a function of marketing communications. Most often, it’s about marketing strategy. Good consultants help leaders build plans that orchestrate and optimize all the marketing levers, to create preference and command premiums, even in commodity-driven categories. (There are no commodity products. There are only commodity perceptions.)
5. “I don’t know how to get my organization all headed in the same direction.” A compelling vision and clear objectives don’t ensure that the parts of your company all line up. Misalignment happens – a lot – in businesses grown through acquisition, or in companies organized by business unit. Writing in HBR, David J. Collis compares misalignment to, “10,000 iron filings, each one representing an employee….Drop them onto a piece of paper, they’ll be pointing in every direction — a big mess…But pass a magnet over those filings, what happens? They line up. Similarly, a well-understood strategy aligns behavior within the business.” Outside experts can combine an objective perspective with a broad range of applicable analogies. Their analyses and recommendations aren’t tainted by turf battles or organizational politics.
6. “I don’t know how to turn my strategy into action.” Plans are important, but it’s what a company does that defines its chances for success. We help leaders work through the implications of their strategy and agree on a framework for setting tactical priorities, eliminating activities that aren’t on strategy and establishing an effective way to measure progress.

 

These six problems reflect the frank and open-ended conversations we have with business leaders who want to move their company closer to success. These executives understand how external perspective and outside expertise can be the catalysts that lead to breakthrough ideas.

Bringing the answers to action is what we do, every day. Give us a call and let’s start the conversation.

• How can I...
• align my entire organization around the right strategy
• command a premium in a commodity-driven market
• deliver a marketing strategy that drives business
• expand into new markets and customer sets
• gain sustainable competitive advantage
• increase profitability with existing assets
• leverage corporate brand assets for maximum impact
• reinvigorate my corporate reputation
• All case studies

You could walk into the local Best Buy and look at the hodgepodge of our products and it was a real mess. We had lost the plot of what we trying to do. And 6h Consulting came along and said, ‘Here’s the diagnosis, and here’s a way to fix it.’