Expert Guidance

Setting a Strategic Direction

Becoming Strategically Smart

Navigating market forces while providing a product or service that generates profit is primary.

It's not unusual for a few senior leaders to spend a few weeks behind closed doors drafting the annual strategic plan. When it is unveiled to the organization, the senior leaders hope that others are excited by it and want to implement it. Often this is a hit-and-miss approach.

What makes Focus™ more successful than other strategic planning consulting processes is the incredibly important step of gaining feedback and input from key stakeholders including staff, customers, Board Members and industry experts. This crowdsourcing approach allows the Strategic Planning task force to build a plan that is smartly informed by the knowledge gained by those closest to the business areas. Leaders are coached to adopt the vital few initiatives that hold the most leverage for the organization. It's common for essential processes to improve.

To ensure success, we incorporate routine check-ins to measure and monitor the success of the plan. We love strategic planning so much we wrote a book about it. Click HERE to secure a copy for yourself.

Culture & People

Culture Defined. Buy-In Built.

Have you heard the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast? If this is true, how much are you paying attention to your company's culture? Do you know what it is currently? Is it what you want it to be? If not, how do you change it?

Helping companies foster great cultures is our sweet spot. We have lots of experience helping organizations envision, define and articulate world-class, service-oriented cultures through our culture consulting work. We also have lots of experience helping organizations embrace the newly defined culture. Our secret sauce is gaining huge levels of buy-in at the beginning because we understand that people are more inclined to support what they help to create. Along with defining that culture, we help build the training programs, the collateral materials and the internal processes to keep 'it" alive and thriving for years to come.

Fractional HR Leadership Services

Strategic HR Support, When and How You Need It

Is your HR function keeping up with where your organization is headed? Are you building the kind of team -- and the kind of culture -- that attracts and keeps great people? If you're not sure, you're not alone.

That's where we come in. We plug in as your fractional HR leader, bringing senior-level expertise to the things that matter most -- staffing talent, getting compensation and rewards right, making sense of your HR technology, and staying ahead of compliance instead of scrambling to catch up. We've done this work at both the strategic and tactical levels, and we can help you get there too.

Our approach comes down to three things: People, Policy, and Process. We help you build strong, high-performing teams. We help you create policies that actually reflect who you are as an organization. And we help you streamline the everyday workflows so your HR function runs smoothly instead of feeling like a constant scramble.

Fractional Ops Strategy Services

Optimize Processes and Scale with Confidence

Growing pains are real. What worked when you were smaller starts to crack under the weight of more people, more complexity, and more moving parts. Sound familiar? You're not alone -- and you don't need to solve it by hiring a full-time COO before you're ready.

We step in as your fractional operations leader, helping you build the infrastructure that lets you scale without the chaos. That means sharpening your strategic execution, re-engineering the processes that are slowing you down, reducing operational risk, and putting the right technology and metrics in place so you can make faster, smarter decisions.

Just like our HR work, this comes down to People, Policy, and Process. We help your cross-functional teams work better together. We build the governance that keeps things consistent and lowers risk. And we streamline the workflows -- with the right automation -- so your operations can grow right alongside your ambitions.

Custom-Built Courses

Done for You Fast!

We rarely advertise this offering, so we chuckle when we find ourselves building another custom-built course for one of our clients.

Typically, we are asked to create a course that teaches a new concept or skill that needs to be widely understood and practiced. Our custom-built courses are well received as they are a blend of teaching, interactivity and application. The course design incorporates varied approaches that appeal to many different learning styles.

If you don't have the resources to build such a class yourself, and you are stressing for how to get this done well, give us a call as part of our consulting services. We can help.

What do all of these award-winning companies have in common?
They are all our clients!!

Service - An Oxymoron in Self-Storage

Cubesmart's stock price was hovering around $12 per share when we were hired to work with them in 2011. Formerly known as U-Store It, Cubesmart was looking to distinguish themself from the crowded marketplace of self-storage. But how? Renting space to put your stuff, wouldn't everyone be looking for the lowest price?

Over a period of four years, we helped Cubesmart rebrand themselves and stand out from a service perspective through our culture consulting work, celebrating their values and instituting simple behaviors that yielded great payoffs. What is CubeSmart's stock price today - $48 per share! (Too bad we weren't smart enough to invest in their stock when we started working with them back in 2011! LOL.)