Client Scenario: A growing technology company had successfully launched and navigated two rounds of external funding and expansion to approximately 120 employees and $75 million in gross revenues. As their calendar year was drawing to a close, the executive leadership team realized that they were experiencing some challenges with managing the current company size and scale. At the same time, it became clear that their market opportunity could theoretically double the size of the company within approximately the following year if managed properly. Cradlerock was asked to help develop a broader strategy that could both support better organization wide processes and drive the potential revenue increase on an accelerated schedule.
Cradlerock Solution: We began with a series of rapid discovery sessions with members of the Executive Team to be sure the challenges and market were properly understood before beginning planning. From there, it became clear that there were overlapping opportunities to both reset a relatively short term strategy and re-align process and performance systems within the organization. Scaling the company strategy, work, and communications platforms was a key priority as well as ensuring that company talent could continue to grow and collaborate in an expanding, high performance environment.
One of our key principles is that strategic plans only become viable when anchored in a rigorous system of clearly visible metrics, consistent company wide communications, and an ongoing execution framework. That execution piece must include both straightforward accountability for results and systems that support team leaders in both tracking and managing work along the way. Finally, it’s critical that people leaders throughout the entire company have the skills and language to marry frontline performance management with real leadership skills to help ensure everyone is bringing aligned, best effort to task on a day to day basis.
Cradlerock launched a multi-stage design to move quickly through a robust series of strategy sessions to clarify both short and medium term targets aligned with a simple set of company principles that would guide how the work would proceed. From there, we established a series of strategic milestones that would both anchor the current organization and drive growth quickly in the marketplace. Priorities were aligned across teams and a new working rhythm linked ongoing project management with individual performance metrics.
As a result of the work, the organization grew even faster than forecast. Expansion into two new markets was uncovered as part of the strategy work and the company generated brand new momentum in each of these new opportunities. In addition, employee engagement and retention shot up as everyone aligned with both the long term and short term priorities driving success and new opportunities across the enterprise.
