STRATEGY
STRATEGY CONSULTANCY SERVICES
The strategy consultancy services provided by Souter Point fall into two categories.
Firstly, we understand that often the best ideas for strategic growth come from within an organisation. But what many businesses seek assistance with is structuring those ideas into an actionable strategy. Souter Point can therefore take the ideas your people have already identified and validate them through research, providing you with an action plan for moving forward.
But sometimes the way forward is not so clear, which is especially true in turbulent industries and environments. The second category of strategy services we provide focuses on taking your ambitions - such as a growth target or business model diversification - and analysing how you can best achieve that goal given the resources, capabilities, time and funding available to you.
The output of our strategy service is an action plan that details what your organisation needs to do to achieve its strategic objectives, giving you a clear path forward.
RESEARCH SERVICES
Research forms a large part of what we do at Souter Point, from conducting research to support a strategic growth programme to developing winning bid strategies and validating product needs.
We also conduct bespoke research projects, both commissioned on behalf of our clients and created in response to where we see a market need.
Our clients can draw on Souter Point research services as part of a larger strategic engagement or use us to conduct a study to underpin a major business decision.
STRATEGY CASE STUDIES
THE BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP: BUSINESS MODEL DIVERSIFICATION
Following a successful advisory session through an expert network group, a project team at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) contacted Souter Point again to assist with a pitch they were developing for a business model diversification study.
A multi-billion pound company in the visa application outsourcing industry was looking to minimise the future risk to its business from downturns in global travel and wanted to understand how it could leverage the resources and capabilities it had to diversify its business model.
The BCG team has already drawn up a range of options, which Souter Point added to with three additional ideas for how the client could leverage its existing resources and capabilities. Souter Point provided critical evaluation of each idea and helped the BCG project team rank the proposals in order of impact and deliverability.
When it came time to pitch the proposal to the client, Souter Point participated in the call to the client's executive management team and advocated on behalf of the proposed options.
CAPITA: EQUITY AND GROWTH STORY CREATION
When the Specialist Services division of FTSE 250 corporation Capita was looking to divest a dozen disparate businesses, the executive team needed to make sure each business was as attractive as possible to potential investors. With no real strategic link between the businesses - which ranged from a digital rail ticketing platform to a facilities management company to an insurance business - each business had to demonstrate its own merits through a strong equity and growth story.
And this is where Souter Point came in.
Working with the management team of each business, Souter Point performed a strategic review of each organisation and the markets in which it operated. Through a combination of extensive research and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, Souter Point developed compelling equity stories for each business and plotted a growth trajectory over the subsequent five years that could be achieved with the right investment.
The equity and growth stories were incorporated into the investment cases and due diligence packs prepared for investors by Citigroup and used to market the 12 business being offered for sale.
UK VISAS AND IMMIGRATION: ASSESSING INNOVATION OPTIONS
When UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) sought to introduce greater innovation into the procurement process for a £120m visa application outsourcing project, they ran into a challenge. By not wanting to be overly prescriptive in their requirements - rather, focusing on intended outcomes - they needed a way of analysing how those outcomes could be achieved through potentially very different operating models.
When Souter Point approach UKVI with an offer of assistance, we were commissioned to model 'what good looks like' for a range of operating model scenarios. This modelling would in turn allow UKVI decision-makers to evaluate the quality of each proposal received and compare it to the models to determine how robust the offer was.
For Souter Point, the project involved using demographic and historical visa application data to identify the most appropriate locations for visa application centres, their dimensions, staffing requirements and daily throughputs (including making provision for seasonal peaks in service demand) to create a workflow model that could be interrogated. The cost of the service was then calculated to create a baseline upon which further analysis could be performed.
The workflow model was run for each location and the operating process changed to incorporate greater degrees of digitisation and service variability. The impact on visa centre resource requirements was analysed and the resulting cost savings calculated.
At the end of the project, Souter Point was able to demonstrate to UKVI how many visa centre locations of which dimensions were needed to run the outsourcing project. We were also able to show that under the highest level of digitisation, an 18% cost reduction in total project cost was possible through lower real estate and human capital requirements.