You’re working with your clients, and you know how important it is to get into a rhythm. Does this sound like you? Strategic priorities are set, the senior team has their marching orders, and you have monthly meetings to check progress...

Here's what goes into the typical monthly meeting agenda: “Where did we say we’d be, where are we, and where are we going?”

There’s a Growth Drive Action Cycle you can use to manage these engagements. The Growth Cycle has three elements - wash, rinse, repeat. The Cycle sets the rhythm for engagements, helps achieve the right objectives, and identifies new bottlenecks before they become real problems. Participants in the March 2021 Growth Consulting Summit will learn skills for using the Action Cycle in their engagements.

There are three cycle phases, which are repeated throughout an engagement - and hopefully become management’s tempo for running the company into the future. Here’s a summary:

1. Analyze: by measuring business drivers, we understand where we are. CoreValue Software measures the totality of a client’s business using the 18 Operational Driver methodology - what we call Growth Drivers. By quantifying the strength and weakness of the entire business against these 18 Objectives, you are making the drivers actionable. The software then defines the Key Results needed for success.
2. Prioritize: Not all objectives are equal - they need to be prioritized based on the CEO client’s strategic goal. For example, if the goal is to sell the company, audited financials are a high priority. However is the goal is to grow profitable revenues, a formal audit isn’t a priority at all.
3. Execute: the consultant is the general contractor, like a Chief Accountability Officer helping the client’s team convert the Strategic Plan into reality. 

Have you read  Measure What Matters¹ by John Doerr? John is the man who brought OKRs - Objectives and Key Results - to a little company that became Google. OKR is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Borrowing from Mr. Doerr and the tech industry, savvy consultants are using Agile project management to keep consulting project teams focused on reaching Objectives and Key Results.

• “Objective”“ is what is to be achieved
• “Key Results” benchmark and monitor HOW to get to the objective²

In the CoreValue system, Objectives are the best practices defined by the 18 Operational Drivers, for example:

Objective: Recurring Revenue. The company will generate 75% of future revenue from contractually committed customers.

Key Results:

1. 1. Contracts: we will have customer contracts or assurances of future revenue that represents most (over 75%) of our annual revenue

   2. Customer Mix: our customer base will be a mix of new, developing, and long term customers

   3. Customer Retention: we will articulate why customers will continue to purchase from our company

Here’s the guidance on these OKRs from the CoreValue Advisor Software:

You can instantly see that two of the Key Results need work to reach the minimum acceptable score of >7. And of course you will use the CoreValue Executable Growth Plan to guide you reaching the Objective by increasing the Key Result scores.

The Action Cycle is so powerful in significant part because it demands analysis after each Agile Sprint, ensuring that success in one area, like scaling sales thereby generating unprecedented orders, doesn't cause a crash in another. What could go wrong? Operations needs to be analyzed to make sure new sales can be delivered, and cash flow needs to be watched like a hawk so it doesn’t become trapped in the balance sheet. 

You’ll hear more about the Growth Consulting Summit in following articles; here’s your link if you’d like to register and get the early bird discount. The price goes up shortly.

Next time, we’ll talk about using the Growth Drive Action Cycle to break through client walls… so stay tuned.  

We’d love to know what you think, please comment here or email blog@corevaluefordvisors.com.