Phase 1 · Strategy and repositioning
Most owners can answer that question. Very few can back the answer up. That gap is where we work with managing directors and shareholders. Not with a slide deck, but with a repositioning that has been costed before anyone signs it off.
Where you have landed. Work with 3connected starts with the position assessment: evidence-based findings on where your company really stands. This page describes one of the three phases that can follow from it.
It is deliberately detailed. If you have read this far, you want to know how the work is done, not whether it is worth reading on.
Who does the work. I lead every engagement myself. Where extra capacity or specialist knowledge is needed, I bring in experienced colleagues, and you will know beforehand who they are and why. When this page says “we”, that is what it means.
In more than half of the engagements that have followed this path, the end point was a sale of the company. That is not a sequence you can book. It is simply what my own engagement history shows.
If you have ever said one of them, you already know what this page is about.
As long as it lives in the owner’s head, nobody can test it and nobody can take it over. And it is only as reliable as everyone’s memory of the last time it was discussed.
Growth is very good at hiding margin problems, right up until it stops. The awkward sums come later, and by then they cost more.
What is usually missing is not an argument but the figure that could settle the debate. Without it, a strategic question turns into a matter of taste, and taste is won by whoever holds out longest.
That is the moment for a repositioning. Not for reinventing the company: far fewer businesses need that than believe they do.
Until an option has been worked through in numbers, the leadership team is pitting one person’s experience against another’s. You cannot decide that kind of argument, only sit it out. Once the same option is on the table with revenue, costs, capital tied up and a timeline, much of it resolves itself. Often not in the way everyone expected.
Most of the repositionings I have worked on did not produce a new company. They came down to three or four shifts: a different customer segment at the centre, a service turned into a product instead of delivered case by case, a new pricing model, one line of business dropped. Go for the grand overhaul straight away and you lose two years and your people.
The interesting business model patterns hardly ever come from your own market. That is exactly why someone sits at the table who has not known the industry for thirty years. It is not a weakness. It is the point.
We do not start with an analysis project. We start with a working session. After the first stage you will know whether it is worth going further, and so will we.
A pragmatic look at the situation rather than a full survey: business model, market position, competition, profit structure by segment, plus conversations with the leadership team and, where it makes sense, with customers. We use proven analytical frameworks, but we do not tick them off box by box. We look for the two or three places where things are genuinely stuck.
We develop possible repositionings and test each of them twice. Externally, with experienced people from our network who know the question from their own practice. Internally, against the hard numbers: resources, investment needed, an outline costing, timeline. Every option is worked through in a planning model built on your own figures, including what happens if things go worse than planned.
The chosen strategy is written up so that it can be measured: targets with figures and dates, clear responsibilities, and a business plan you can rerun when assumptions change. If you wish, we turn this into lean management reporting that works as an early warning system.
Two engagements from this field, anonymised but concrete. More case studies are under References.
Starting point: An international software company needs a new direction. Its growth story no longer holds up.
Approach: Orchestrated the redefinition of the strategy, with full business planning and support for the international rollouts.
Starting point: Financial difficulty, strained relations with creditors, no clear outlook.
Approach: Orchestrated the turnaround: strategy, planning, putting the finances in order and active communication with creditors.
Then the strategy work is done and the question sits one phase further on. A strategy process that justifies a decision after it has been taken costs time and achieves nothing.
Without a profit and loss account broken down by segment, no option can be costed. In that case the first step is to sort out the accounts, not the strategy.
Diverging goals among the owners are not a strategy question. They are a question of agreeing the goals, and that needs settling first. Otherwise even the best option gets blocked from a side where it was never discussed.
A direction only pays off once sales puts it into practice: the right customers, the right offer, a deal with a closing date in the diary. If that is where your question lies, the Sales page picks it up.
One conversation to find out whether the question really belongs here, or one step earlier.
Book an initial call Back to the position assessment
Prefer to write? info@3connected.de · +49 177 44 99 66 8
