Strategy
Helping you choose where you’ll play and how you’ll win

Our strategy practice works with businesses to help them develop their strategy, agree the choices they need to make to achieve it and then share it throughout the organisation so that everyone knows what they need to deliver and why.

Why does your organisation exist and what are the critical outcomes it will deliver, whether for customers, employees or shareholders? To achieve this mission, where will you choose to play – which sectors, segments or geographies? And how will you win in these particular arenas? As importantly, what does your organisation need to be able to do, measure and reward to get this done? These are the essential questions of strategy to which any high performing business needs to know the answers.

Whether you need a brand new strategy, or you have an existing strategy that needs clarifying or refining, we help you make clear choices that position you to win in your chosen markets. Once you’re clear about what you will do, we then advise on the structural, capability or cultural gaps that might put this strategy at risk. Assuming there’s a plan to close those gaps, we then help you share the strategy - internally and externally - to ensure understanding and commitment from the people who will help deliver it.

We use various strategy frameworks to help achieve clarity, including our own proprietary ‘Step Up, Step Back’ model. Often informed by insights from customers or prospects, the result is a “Clarity Statement” about why the business exists (its purpose), what it will deliver (its key outcomes) and how it will behave, both with customers and employees.

Examples of our clients

Deutsche Bank is a global, universal bank with operations in 58 countries, reporting EUR25 billion in revenue in 2018. Its largest investment banking operations are based in the City of London and it employs over 8,000 people in its UK business. We worked with some of their senior leaders to help them articulate and implement a new growth and cost-cutting strategy in the UK.

Elsbeth’s work significantly contributed to the clarification both of the strategic direction for my function at DB and the culture we needed to create in order to deliver it. The frameworks drove us to clearly articulate our commercial objectives and the necessary decisions we had to make to achieve them. As I have progressed into more senior roles, the proven efficacy of these frameworks and ideas has led me to use them time and time again.

Alex Wilson
Global Head of Liquidity Management, Investment Bank Treasurer and Treasurer for UK & Ireland at Deutsche Bank

Oxford Instruments provides high technology products, systems and tools to the world’s leading industrial companies and scientific research communities. We worked with them to agree their strategy for the next stage of growth; and to clarify the capabilities this meant they needed to develop within the business.

Advisers need to be credible in order to advise. I remember wondering whether people with little background in our sector could become strategic advisers to us. Elsbeth and her team devoted real time to understanding our business and how it made money, and gradually developed a point of view about how we could be even more successful. Perhaps because of her past experience as an equity analyst, Elsbeth in particular has an uncanny knack of knowing what to ask, when to listen, when to push and where the holes are. That’s a powerful combination that challenges and supports you in equal measure. The decisions we made as a result of this strategy process laid the foundations for Oxford’s next stage of growth.

Jonathan Flint
then CEO of Oxford Instruments

InCrowd develops health-care software to help drug developers gain fast insights from physicians, nurses and patients about their products. We worked with them to make clear decisions about which strategic areas to prioritise as they considered how best to fund their next stage of growth.