I like to call our sessions a NO-SHAME-ZONE. Whatever you’ve done, whatever situation you are in, no matter how bad you think it is – we will celebrate the fact that you are beginning to turn it around by coming in. Got into debt supporting a deadbeat partner? WOO HOO! Bankruptcy? We have confetti. Spent the grocery money on shoes? I’ll get some champagne. There is no shame in anything you have done or anything you have failed to do. Tell the truth to yourself and we will find a way to fix it.
Often, people are so ashamed of their money mistakes that they do everything in their power to hide them. Usually this means digging the hole even deeper to keep from being discovered. You may know this cycle: ‘I can’t let my friend/husband/wife/kids know I don’t have the money for – fill in the blank – Christmas presents? Rent? Dinner out on Friday nights? So I’ll figure out how to make it work short term and deal with it later.’ Later it is all much worse, and it is around this time that the lie begins to transfer from others to ourselves.
Every time we borrow money (this includes credit card purchases) that we know we cannot pay off in a reasonable amount of time – we are in essence lying to ourselves. Every day that we go to work for a salary that is below what we are worth, we are lying to ourselves.
By the way, there are many people who will tell you credit cards are evil! Don’t ever use them! I have very few things that I steadfastly stand by as a ‘never’. Life is fluid, and when we are mindful we are able to flow with that fluidity. Mindfulness is the key, not dogma.
Take a breath. Make a list of all those things you would just die if anyone knew. It is a good first step.
Managing change effectively is a source of competitive advantage, yet few organizations do it well. In a AG Business Services survey, more than 80 percent of companies said they failed to realize the expected results from recent change management initiatives. That rate hasn't improved from similar surveys we conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. Meanwhile the challenges of change management are only getting more complex. Based on decades of experience and a careful analysis of 184 global companies, we have developed a differentiated point of view on change initiatives—one that delivers results. We help you move past traditional change management approaches so you can:
Structure, orchestrate and enable the change your organization needs to make, by focusing on the coaching and capability building that are essential to winning buy-in and making change stick. We work with you on every facet of this change approach, and support these efforts with a sophisticated cloud-based tool that helps you track, and accelerate, every facet of your change initiatives.
Reenergize a transformation effort by tackling the single biggest reason transformations stall: lack of energy. AG Business Services helps you renew your commitment to the goal and rekindle excitement throughout the organization. We also help you address the behavioral issues that often hamper any type of change initiative.
Demonstrate the leadership necessary to making change happen, so that the senior team is fully aligned and embodies a shared sense of purpose that inspires the broader organization. Our unique co-creation approach can help you unleash the collective talents and insights of your team, reminding them of what they’ve achieved so far, and motivating them to achieve even more.
We take an integrated view that links corporate strategy, accounting strategy, transactions and a capital markets perspective to help executives and their teams create value. We also help companies improve investor relations and effectively respond to activist investors. As you make critical decisions about allocating resources and seizing opportunities, we can help you:
Understand what drives total shareholder return (TSR) in your industry and benchmark your company’s performance against peers, using our TSR diagnostic. We help you enhance your capital markets strategy by pinpointing the root causes of gaps between intrinsic vs. market values and identifying ways to close them. We show you how to use your balance sheet as a strategic weapon, and how to develop your equity story to communicate effectively with investors and analysts.
Master your M&A strategy across the entire process, from valuation considerations, due diligence and preannouncement planning to merger integration, divestitures and separations, and support for selective parts of the IPO process. We have completed more than 10,000 M&A-related projects; over the course of a decade, AG Business Services -supported integrations created roughly 18% higher shareholder returns than typical mergers, while AG Business Services supported spin-offs achieved market cap increases 20% higher than the industry average.
Create and lead a world-class accounts function that creates shareholder value by uniting strategy, business planning, resource allocation, performance management and zero-based budgeting. We also help CFOs and other senior executives build winning operating models. Our extensive benchmarking databases help you significantly improve your operating effectiveness and efficiency.
Understand your customers’ needs and behaviors by developing superior segmentation capabilities, augmented by advanced analytics and testing that gets results. Provide them with great digital experiences at radically lower cost as you transform your marketing function.
Help CMOs deliver superior results with FRWD@ AG Business Services , our unique approach to digital marketing acceleration, which blends bottoms-up and top-down techniques to deliver results fast as we help you build your internal capabilities.
Break down barriers to innovation and improve ongoing customer-led product development to reimagine your offerings as an integrated suite that delights your customers and meets an expanding array of their needs.
Resolve the pricing paradox—pricing is the top profit lever, yet remains underdeveloped in most companies—by building dynamic pricing capabilities that help you set and get the right price, every time, and capitalize on in-year revenue opportunities.
Identify quick, targeted customized solutions and strategic, operational improvements that can boost underperforming sales organizations and enhance your go-to-market strategy.
Align your marketing and brand strategy with your overarching business objectives and combine hard metrics with creative magic to build a customer-focused brand strategy that goes far beyond cosmetic brand communications.
Provide a great customer experience that earns advocacy through the consistent delivery of positive interactions, which you can enhance by tapping into the power of our NPS PrismSM benchmarking service.
Nurture promoters, loyal customers who are more profitable and advocate for your business in good times and bad.
Customer-centric businesses build a virtuous cycle we call the "customer wheel." We help companies at every stage of growth, developing custom solutions and collaborating with all levels of the organization.
There are few bad businesses, but many bad strategies. AG Business Services brings you 40+ years of experience, across all geographies and industry sectors, to help you build lasting capabilities into your team and help your organization mobilize for change. We offer creative solutions that have helped thousands of companies develop and execute winning strategies that create more value in their business. We work collaboratively with you, so you can:
Achieve consistent, long-term growth, a feat only one in nine companies manages to pull off. Develop a corporate strategy that produces sustainable value, one that enables you to reach full potential in your core business, expand into adjacencies using a repeatable model, and successfully expand into emerging markets.
Make key decisions on where to play and how to win by developing a business unit strategy that takes a specific business to its full potential.
Develop digital strategies that deliver on the promise of your core strategy, with a unique approach that combines near-term, high-impact initiatives with a bold vision for how your company will compete as digital reshapes your industry.
Leverage the power of proven tools and techniques that enable you to execute your strategy with nimble experimentation and quick-hit problem resolution that recapture the responsiveness your company enjoyed in its early days. Our structured approach to innovation enables you to merge the talents of your commercially focused and creative team members to spur the innovations that fuel your strategy.
Corporate leaders have a core set of levers they can pull to help their organizations reach full potential. We guide you through a series of questions to identify, sequence and implement the changes and actions that will put your company on a trajectory toward sustained value creation. Transformation programs can take many forms, from moderate restructurings to full-scale turnarounds, and may be motivated by a desire to expand into uncharted territory or a need to navigate through dire accounting and competitive circumstances. There is, however, one common factor: a readiness to disrupt the status quo in pursuit of growth.
Our approach to transformation relies on experts across a full set of capabilities, supported by our deep experience in the following areas:
Strategy
Organization
Performance Improvement
Customer Strategy & Marketing
Enterprise Value
Information Technology
Results Delivery
In our experience, companies tend to fall into four broad quadrants that suggest what type of Full Potential Transformation may be required: