creating a united vision and implementing practical steps to increase retail sales and preserve vital store presence
the challenge
The CEO had asked us to help them improve their retail franchise business. Revenue was falling and they had identified franchisees closing their branches as one of the major causes. There were multiple initiatives underway that were not connected to a strategic plan nor network performance. We needed to create focus and align people and projects alike in one strategic plan, with the right performance metrics to ensure the business could work on the right thing at the right time.
the results
This project was part of a wider transformation programme which delivered a 5% uplift in revenue. 87% of the franchisees said that they would recommend the approach to others.
This work ensured all parts of ‘the system’ were designed, developed and set up for the leadership team to drive their strategy forward, with clear ownership of the objectives and targets cascaded down through the organisation via a scorecard at every level. This allowed accountability to flow from the leadership to the frontline, setting vital groundwork for practical continuous improvements in staff and customer engagement and sales
how we got there
We created a Strategy Map, Balanced Scorecard & Portfolio Plan for the leadership team that showed the links between performance KPIs and change project benefits. This enabled the creation of a change portfolio that sequenced initiatives, as well as creating clear ownership, benefits cases and alignment across the leadership team. This was supported by a new project governance and reporting system.
We started by creating a picture of the current state of the organisation. We reviewed the current vision and goals, growth metrics and targets and recent customer insight work to identify clear desired outcomes. Alongside this, we gathered anecdotal and numerical evidence of the success and failures of previous change programmes to identify how we could best enable change in the organisation. Added to this was an overview of what initiatives were currently in flight or ready to launch.
Next, we worked with our client to design their desired future state. Through a series of workshops and focus interviews with the leadership team, we designed and refined the strategic objectives, metrics, targets and priority initiatives into one aligned strategy map, scorecard and portfolio plan.
To bring it to life throughout the organisation and ensure clear governance and tracking, we designed a cascade of scorecards with aligned metrics so that there was visibility of performance in line with the plan at every level of the business. Metrics were reviewed in a monthly review cycle focused around “Plan-Do-Review” – simply put, leaders asked themselves what did we do, did it work, so what do we do next? The leadership team could then effectively keep track of performance against targets and pivot where necessary.
