Strategic Planning Consulting
A strategy your leaders agree on, and a plan your organization can run.
Most strategic plans stall in the gap between the leadership offsite and the operating calendar. Excelerate's strategic planning consulting closes that gap. A Transformation Architect™ runs a high-involvement process with your leadership team, narrows a long list of possible initiatives to the few worth funding, and turns them into a financial model, a roadmap, and a governance structure the organization can execute. Excelerate prices strategic planning on a fixed fee tied to a defined scope and outcome, so the plan has a finish line.
What Our Strategic Planning Consulting Includes
Where we start depends on where your strategy is stuck.
Market and competitive analysis. Macro trends, market analysis, and competitive positioning, including perceptual maps, to ground the plan in where your market is going.
Strategic pillars and a strategy on a page. A small set of pillars, each with owners and performance measures, on a single page everyone can repeat.
Opportunity identification and prioritization. Impact and effort drivers applied across the full list of initiatives, so leadership picks the few that carry the most enterprise value and names what to stop.
Financial modeling. Cost/benefit analysis across initiatives and a summary model that shows leadership what each choice is worth over the life of the plan.
Facilitated leadership alignment. Workshops and working sessions that get senior leaders to decisions they will stand behind.
Roadmaps and governance. Implementation roadmaps, decision rights, and accountability mechanisms that carry the plan into execution.
Strategic Planning Consulting in Practice
Plans that got approved, funded, and beaten.
An orthopedic products manufacturer. A high-involvement engagement on an eight-week timeline produced a strategy on a page, four strategic pillars, and a prioritized list of ten growth opportunities spanning employer branding, master data management, digital transformation, and commercial optimization. The client improved EBITDA by 55% year over year within twelve months of the work.
A global recreational brand. Excelerate facilitated the next five-year strategy across more than 50 stakeholders, ran a cost/benefit analysis across more than 50 initiatives, and delivered the plan and financial model for board and private-equity approval. The client has exceeded the plan every year since.
A global consumer packaged goods brand. After a department consolidation, we built a standardized intake and prioritization process that produced a prioritized roadmap for a portfolio of projects representing $16M in incremental revenue.
"We engaged Excelerate to help us develop a multi-year strategic plan that envisioned a significant transformation of our company. They provided thought leadership, tools, and effective facilitation to help us move through our own inertia. The outcome was a plan that aligned our executive leadership, was easy to communicate, and led to greater accountability across the organization. As we begin our third year of execution, we are well on our way to achieving our audacious goal, and I attribute a great deal of our success to the value the Excelerate team brought."
—Kurt Gering, Chief Human Resources Officer, FairSquare
“You are strategic thought partners that remove barriers and obstacles to accelerate execution. In our first year working with you, you helped me build the strategy and then in the second year you taught my team the skills needed to implement that strategy.”
—Jennifer Schulz, Former Senior Vice President and Director of Commercial Client Experience & Strategic Performance, Umpqua Bank
The Transformation Architect's Difference
Turning a strategy into a plan that gets funded and run.
Writing a strategy document is the easy part. The test is whether it changes what the organization funds, stops, and does next quarter.
High-involvement by design. Senior leaders build the plan with us, so it is theirs before it is ever presented.
Prioritized for enterprise value. We weigh impact against effort and look for what to stop, not only what to start.
Built to execute. Every plan leaves with a roadmap, a financial model, and governance, and we can stay on to implement it.
Senior practitioners. Excelerate consultants average more than 16 years of professional experience, and most ran the work inside companies before they advised on it.
With Excelerate, a strategic plan is the start of the work, not the end of the engagement.
What does a strategic planning consultant do?
A strategic planning consultant helps a leadership team decide where to compete and what to fund, then turns those choices into a plan. At Excelerate that means market and competitive analysis, strategic pillars, opportunity prioritization, financial modeling, facilitated alignment sessions, and an implementation roadmap with governance.
How much does a strategic planning consultant cost?
It depends on scope. Excelerate quotes a fixed fee for a defined scope and outcome before work begins, so you know the total cost at the outset, and Excelerate carries the risk if the work takes longer than estimated.
How long does strategic planning take?
It depends on the scope and the size of the leadership group. One recent engagement for an orthopedic products manufacturer ran on an eight-week timeline.
What is the difference between strategic planning consulting and strategic planning facilitation?
Facilitation runs the sessions that get a group to a decision. Strategic planning consulting also owns the analysis, the prioritization, the financial model, and the roadmap. Excelerate does both, and you can engage either.