Growth Strategy

VISION & EVIDENCE

For more than two decades, Stout has been advising Fortune 500 corporates and private equity portfolio companies in the development and execution of winning strategies. We support a broad spectrum of strategy development from blue sky strategies to detailed validations of existing growth plans.

Our methodology combines strategic research and strategy consulting disciplines. Our approach is grounded in our deep sector expertise, primary insights, and advanced analytical techniques. Together with client leadership, we articulate a winning vision for future, diagnose the present, identify risks, and map the steps that achieve your full ambition, building consensus at every stage. AI-powered tools expand what we see, what we test, and what we deliver. The result: our clients move faster and advance with conviction.

Value Creation

Maximizing your organization’s value is a daunting task. But value creation strategy begins with one key question: How do you win in your field of play?

The answer requires a deep understanding of your market, its customers, your competitors, and your organization, including your vision, values, and capabilities. Understanding the players on the board helps to clarify where your “edge” is and how you can deploy that to win.

Objectivity is key in this process. Cognitive biases, groupthink, and dated market truisms can lead to misperceptions around positioning and can derail the value creation process. Seeking external validation of your intended direction can provide you the ability to move forward with conviction.

How Stout Can Help

Your goals, capabilities, and market position are unique and require originality to create optimal value. We deploy our expertise and creativity alongside analytical frameworks and best practice processes to power the value creation effort that is just right for you.

• We validate a working definition of “core” market, including segmentation and growth forecasts
• We clarify current market position relative to competitors
• We identify the subsegments within your market that offer the greatest potential value
• We size the prize for each identified subsegment to clarify priorities
• We determine the success factors within each priority segment
• We evaluate your capabilities relative to competitors across each success factor
• We develop initial roadmaps on how best to capture the identified value
• We leverage AI-enabled tools to enhance the field of vision and move at pace from data to value

Opportunity Prioritization

The age-old adage “too much of a good thing” is especially true when it comes to growth opportunities.

Current market conditions offer an abundance of potential, but knowing which opportunities to pursue and which to surrender can be intimidatingly complex. Half pursuing a dozen opportunities can easily result in the same outcome as pursuing none. But how do you break free from analysis paralysis and confidently pursue your list of opportunities?

Opportunity prioritization begins and ends with framing. Defining what makes an opportunity attractive is an imperative first step. Attractive opportunities are ones that both offer high probabilities of success and empower your organization’s longer-term vision and objectives. Once these criteria are defined, applying the subsequent framework can quickly prioritize those opportunities that warrant your investment.

How Stout Can Help

Over the last two decades, we have observed that successful opportunity prioritization efforts start with thoughtful frameworks that provide context for an organization’s short- and long-term objectives. We work with you to clarify business priorities and then apply those same dimensions to identified opportunities. The result is a shortlist of growth vectors that will supercharge your short- and long-term strategies.

• We validate reasonableness (and market potential) of identified opportunities
• We identify additional opportunities for growth
• We define the dimensions of what make opportunities attractive (in the context of overall business objectives)
• We define the dimensions that make an opportunity feasible (based upon the distance of an opportunity from your “core” business)
• We develop a framework to evaluate the attractiveness and feasibility of each discreet opportunity
• For prioritized plays, we develop an initial business case for pursuit of opportunity

Go-to-Market Strategy

Go-to-Market (G2M) is a universal challenge. Companies frequently underperform because they take a suboptimal route to their customers.

The underlying reason for these observable inefficiencies can differ by industry and company. In some instances, an entire industry may lack certain channel infrastructure. In other situations, a distribution dynamic may be changing due to consolidation or disintermediation. Companies may simply fail to diversify their commercial model, such as transitioning towards e-commerce, to better align with shifting consumer preferences. But, regardless of the challenge, there is a common symptom: insufficient data.

But even perfect data on the externalities is not a guarantee of success. Consequently, it is imperative to marry the external analysis with an unapologetically objective evaluation of your own capabilities. This combination identifies the exploitable market gaps and the path to realizing the associated value.

Whether you are a longstanding market leader or a recent entrant, the right G2M strategy can be clarified by a deeper understanding of the market landscape, including customer preferences, channel partner constraints, and competitor positioning. Unfortunately, insights across these dimensions are not always readily available. The datasets required to optimize G2M strategy must be created. That is where Stout can help.

How Stout Can Help

We can work with you to develop a G2M thesis and use this process to identify the data required to test the thesis. The result is an evidence-based roadmap on the optimal G2M strategy supported by thoughtful frameworks and advanced analytics.

• We evaluate your capabilities
• We assess the target market, including mapping the routes to market
• We determine customer segments, purchasing criteria, and buying processes
• We evaluate the competitive landscape and key competitors’ capabilities
• We identify market gaps that align with our core capabilities
• We develop a roadmap for the optimal G2M strategy (including execution risks)
• We perform an economic analysis on the expected investments required to execute relative to the “size of the prize”