Corporate training day · Strategy
The business the company thinks it has
Who it is for, what it promises, how it delivers and where it earns: four answers that have to hold each other up.
- Duration
- 7 hours
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 8 to 20 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
Ask several people in the same company what the business does and you get several different descriptions. This is not an internal communications problem. Nobody ever decided what the business is, so each area answered from where it stands.
A business model is not a document. It is the set of decisions already being taken. Who the company sells to is decided every time a client who does not fit gets accepted. What it promises is decided every time somebody improvises in a quote. How it delivers is decided every time an exception is made. Where it earns is decided every time a price is cut to close. Taken one at a time, every one of those decisions looks reasonable.
The result is a company serving segments with incompatible expectations, an operation stretched to cover all of them, and a profitability nobody can explain. The review of the value proposition usually arrives late, once people have been hired and equipment bought to support a business that was never chosen.
What it covers
It takes a full day because the work is not drafting a value proposition sentence. It is putting four answers against each other until they stop contradicting. The morning runs on evidence: actual billing gets reviewed by type of client and type of engagement, then compared against the description the company gives of itself. It is common to find the company lives off a segment it barely talks about, or carries a line that consumes management attention without contributing much.
The afternoon builds the model in its four pieces: the segment actually served, the promise made to it in terms the client can check, the way that promise is delivered with the resources that exist, and the mechanism by which the company earns. Each piece is tested against the others, because a promise the operation cannot carry is not a value proposition. It is a future complaint.
The day ends on what the model excludes. Which clients, which engagements and which lines fall outside it, and which pending decisions change once that is settled.
What participants learn
- Reconstruct the operating business model from billing rather than from the official description.
- Define the segment the company serves, and the one it stopped serving without deciding to.
- State the value promise in terms the client can verify.
- Test that the delivery method and the earning mechanism can carry that promise.
- Identify the lines and the clients the model leaves out.
Agenda
- The operating model against the declared one
- Reading billing by type of client and type of engagement
- The real segment and the one the company says it serves
- The promise: what the client can verify and what is only adjective
- Delivery: what the operation can carry with the resources it has
- The earning mechanism: where money comes in and where it stays
- Coherence between the four pieces, and what breaks when one does not fit
- What the model leaves out: clients, engagements and lines
What the organisation leaves with
- A description of the operating model reconstructed from billing.
- The model defined in its four pieces, written on a single page.
- A value promise stated in terms the client can verify.
- An exclusion list — clients, engagements and lines left out — with the reasoning behind it.
Programme details
- Format
- Corporate training day
- Also available as
- Intensive workshop · Executive programme
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Leadership teams about to review their offer or their segment.
- Owners of companies that grew by adding services without reviewing the whole.
- Family businesses carrying lines inherited from an earlier stage.
- Organisations preparing to enter a new market or launch a new line.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this a strategic planning session?
- No. Planning decides what the company will do next year; this defines what the company is. With the model unclear, the annual plan turns into a list of initiatives with no criterion for dropping any of them.
- Can we do it without opening up the company's numbers?
- You can, and it yields less. The morning lives on actual billing; without it the exercise rests on perceptions, and the perception of the model is precisely what the day is meant to test.
- What if the leadership team disagrees about the segment?
- That disagreement is the finding, not the obstacle. The day makes it explicit and carries it to a decision. What it cannot do is take that decision on leadership's behalf if leadership is not in the room.
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Working this inside the organisation
If this challenge will not be settled in one session, ALUD Consulting LLC works it as consulting: management consulting, human resources, strategy, organisational design, leadership development and business transformation.