Leveraging “9-Box Insights” to Find Hidden EBITDA: A Three Part Series

Strategic Decision Making in the Era of Abundant Data

In this month’s Hidden Value blog series we will dive deep on how proactive CEOs and their Private Equity sponsors are effectively using data to identify opportunities for growth and drive operational improvements. We will start by exploring the challenge of strategic decision making in the era of abundant data.

Scottish Wisdom

Leave it to an old time Scotsman to lay down some business wisdom over a century ago that still rings loudly today:

“[He] uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than for illumination.”
– Andrew Lang, Scottish poet and novelist, 1910

Unfortunately, many modern business executives do just that, using data to support recommended actions rather than identifying insightful actions from the data.

The Dashboard Trap

Businesses are awash in more data than ever before. Today’s modern software tools provide a wide variety of ways to gather, aggregate and present data. Dashboards track every KPI imaginable, highlighting trends and variances for executive leaders to review and digest. With a few clicks, executives and managers can dive deep on what is happening in the company and where problems may exist.

Dashboards and visualization tools are great. They are enormously powerful, allowing “real-time” access to metrics that just 10 years ago would have required dozens of Excel spreadsheets and taken a team of people days, or even weeks to gather. This near-instantaneous access to data makes managers more effective at finding and fixing problems before they become major issues.

But dashboards typically only “look in the rearview mirror,” allowing you to REACT to the latest operational results and course correct as needed. While dashboards help you manage today’s business, they rarely help you INDENTIFY NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROWTH or to STRATEGICALLY TRANSFORM THE BUSINESS.

Strategic Decision Making in the Era of Abundant Data

Another unlikely source of business wisdom comes from classical guitarist and native Scotsman, David Russell, who noted:

“The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn”

Echoing that sentiment is famed management consultant and educator Peter Drucker (not a Scotsman), who commented that:

“Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.”

No truer leadership challenge faces today’s mid-market CEOs and their PE sponsors. With no shortage of strategic initiatives to invest in, how do you make sure you are “crossing the right bridges” and “doing the right things”?

If you’re like many CEOs, strategic planning consists of a series of brainstorming sessions held in Q4 with the executive team to review past performance and establish new performance targets for the coming year (e.g. grow revenue by xx%, reduce costs by yy%, increase production by zz%, etc.) All options to achieve these new targets are discussed and hashed out, then detailed plans are developed. Empowered with reams of historical KPI data, managers come to the table with specific change initiatives supported by objective historical data, cost analyses, and budget projections. Balancing competing interests and funds to invest, the CEO and team select a series of change initiatives and set the action plan in motion.

This top-down strategic planning methodology is flawed because it generally assumes the company is already “doing the right things” and fails to ask the right questions in advance of the planning effort.

Examples of questions that are rarely addressed in strategic planning sessions include:

  • How can we best increase enterprise value?
  • Should we expand / exit this line of business?
  • Who are our best customers and why?
  • How do we get more customers like our best ones?
  • Should we fire some of our customers?
  • Why are our customers buying our products vs. competitors?
  • Do our sales and marketing messages align with our customers needs?

Be Smart

Leading CEOs and their PE sponsors don’t set company goals in a top down fashion. Instead, they avoid the dashboard / KPI trap and adopt the following framework to drive their decision making:

DATA ➔ INSIGHT ➔ ACTION ➔ RESULTS

In Part 2 of “Leveraging ‘9-Box Insights’ to Find Hidden EBITDA’” we will explore the 9-Box Framework in detail and offer suggestions to successfully implement this approach in your company.

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