Manufacturing Company Uses 80/20 Rule to Increase Strategic Growth

CLIENT SUCCESS STORY

Customer Challenge

A $500 million privately held manufacturing company had set a goal for doubling in size to become one of the top four manufacturing companies in North America, but they were experiencing significant challenges in meeting their growth objectives.

Among their many challenges, they were primarily struggling with:

• A new management team, with each member having their own priorities
• A lack of strategy to accomplish the company’s lofty growth goals
• An unruly product offering
• New product development efforts that were uninfluenced by market intelligence

The organization knew they needed support and advice with strategy design and implementation and decided to engage BDO to help them evolve.
 

BDO Solution

The BDO team conducted a customer study to understand the company’s value proposition and reveal opportunities for improvement within their product line, brand recognition efforts, and quality assurance process. The company is located in the midwestern region of the United States, and the BDO team’s study showed that the company’s brand was unknown outside of the region.

The BDO team used market research and customer interviews to create a focused product improvement and expansion roadmap. 80/20 analysis was utilized to assess customer profitability and help the company understand where they needed to concentrate on driving further growth.

The BDO team also:

• Conducted key stakeholder and customer interviews to understand current initiatives and narrow priorities.
  • They found the company was weak in terms of engaging with large, corporate accounts with scale to drive significant profit.
• Led market research to understand competitive positioning and gaps in the market.
• Analyzed the current customer roster, understanding current profitability and untapped growth opportunities.

 

Results and Benefits

After BDO had completed their research, a two-day strategic planning off-site retreat was planned to help the company’s management team understand key take-aways, create a business case for strategic growth, and to increase alignment on the company’s five top priorities.

The company realized many benefits after implementing BDO’s recommendations, including:

• Cross-functional focus through identifying top five objectives, deferring on hundreds of other initiatives
• Creating a new division aimed at driving large, corporate accounts; the division won an initial deal with a national brand worth $25M+ within the first 6 months and leveraged go –to-market strategy with other large nationals
• Year 1 operating income 1% improvement based on actions taken with double-digit growth

 

Next Steps

Once the strategy was developed, the team looked to BDO to assist with strategy enablement, specifically in three areas:

• Creating a deployment rhythm
• Organizational redesign
• Embedding the principles of 80/20 as part of their culture