The first thing to differentiate here is the difference between a Business Strategy and a Corporate Strategy. Business Strategies generally are aligned with strategic decisions concerning the choice of product, competitive advantage, customer satisfaction and more, and are designed by the business managers to improve the overall performance of the organization. Corporate Strategies are generally aligned with the overall objectives and scope of business to fulfill stakeholder’s expectations and are typically developed and led by top level managers, C-Suite and often influenced by the Board of Directors.
Strategies, whether a Business Strategy or a Corporate Strategy, are key to determining how and when to optimize valuable resources, setting the overall tone and forward-thinking goals for the organization, and are of course, critically important to investors when they are evaluating whether to put additional funds into a company and/or product, or not. Strategies need timelines that are relevant to the stage of growth of your company, they should incorporate plans to pivot and manage the risk/reward of doing so, as well as understanding the internal ability to implement. Strategies must also consider potential external factors which can affect the internal changes, such as changes in government regulations, understandings of FIFRA and TSCA applications, changing technologies, grower adoption of new technologies as it pertains to the geography and farm size, commodities pricing and futures consideration, and financial / investment environments.
The value of a strategy is directly related to organization’s ability, willingness, and commitment to implementation, whether that strategy is planning for the next one, three, and five years, an upcoming merger or acquisition, or guiding a startup through the critically important decisions of sales and marketing platforms, organizational values and culture, hiring, process definition, systems selections and implementations, customer acquisition cost and/or future debt funding, to name a few. Maybe your business needs to improve the performance of your existing portfolio, pinpoint areas for growth within new business lines, or identify areas where change or divestiture is needed. Cultivate can help. We create meaningful and actionable business and corporate strategies in alignment with your organizational leaders, to better prepare your company, products, and people for navigating the future of uncertainty. We will not only help create the strategy, but we will also stay with you on translating the “what” into “how”, and then facilitate the change with your people, processes, your customers, and systems as you effectively grow into the future organization.
When working with your business managers to establish a Business Strategy, we use a structured set of 16 initial questions, followed by a more in-depth analysis of your organization against market variables and competition, leading practices and other metrics which we have built over the years, which in turn produce a customized Business Strategy and Program Plan to begin setting the necessary pieces in motion for development and implementation. It includes among other considerations, the internal organization changes necessary for success, market differentiators, process and systems updates, financial outlook, and more.
When working with an organization’s leaders to create or update a Corporate Strategy, we use a structured methodology that we have built over the years with our large Fortune 100 corporate clients to initially identify areas of future growth and profitability, financial and process levers used to address various future stages or changes which could occur, a market analysis and competitive customer journey program to develop workflows, and much more. Our goal when working with organizations to create or update their Corporate Strategy is first and foremost to ensure that they have a realistic, but aggressive, goals which center around leading the organization into the future and ensuring the organization is well positioned to be a market leader in their respected vertical(s) within the agriculture industry as a whole.