CASE STUDY: Getting your growth engine going again

Imagine the context. You join a business with a brief to focus on building a strong brand footprint, serious scaling ambition and a mandate to create an exciting vision for the future. An exciting brief about growth (tick) future focussed (tick) and ambitious (tick).

What you find on your first day is a business that’s losing customers faster than gaining them.

What do you do?

That was the context of my story; quickly it became apparent that whilst trying to build the future was exciting and important, my most immediate concern was months of consecutive customer losses that needed addressing, fast.

Having never worked in energy before, I had no appreciation for the complexities within retail supply so my learning curve was fast. To my benefit, I had worked in a number of different industries, and this wasn’t the first time I needed to get into the roots of a business quickly. Loving the challenge of learning…. It was time to ask questions.

Talk to me like a three year old: Sometimes when talking about really complex subjects it can be easy to get caught up in the detail or be afraid to admit you don’t fully understand what’s being discussed. Repeatedly, I asked what Barack Obama would call the ‘dumb questions’ so I could get up to speed quickly. Without fear, I asked my colleagues to talk to me as if I were a three year old when they explained contango vs normal backwardation. My immersion in all things energy retail was swift, whilst not exhaustive, but it gave me enough base line understanding to move onto the next stage of enquiry.

Get data don’t guess: I needed to understand what was going on in the engine room, but the data just wasn’t available. It’s a common problem in smaller businesses where sophisticated reporting isn’t on tap, and often data points conflict. The sales team told me they were hitting their targets every week, but where had the targets come from? Why was the focus only on acquisition when retention was clearly an issue? The data only looked backwards, so I couldn’t get a handle on the monster coming over the hill. To quote the former US President again, Obama on occasion apparently made decisions when he had only 51% confidence in the outcome based on the information available to him – this was so that he could fail fast and move on to the next decision with learnings under his belt. Accepting that I was working blind, I needed to get to 51% confidence so I could at least make some decisions from a point of authority to get things moving. Starting with small steps – nicely linked to my post from earlier this week. 

Surround yourself with smart people: As well as not having deep energy experience and patchy data, I also found myself with some capability gaps in the team which meant I wasn’t being effectively challenged. The wise say surround yourself with smart people, others say surround yourself with critics. I’d say do both; it’s good to have people who disagree with you and force you to think differently and debate the issue. Setting egos aside, the challenge was becoming clearer.

I believe that as a leader there’s no room for big egos and blame, but sadly the experience of this team hadn’t always been aligned to my belief and they felt burnt. Culturally I had to create a safe environment where it was ok to share ideas, thoughts and feelings. It can take time to embed this new type of leadership style, but I didn’t have the gift of time when action to deliver immediate results was necessary. I needed to be visible and drive the conversation, role modelling the behaviours that I wanted to see.

With these things in place, I’d started to build a picture of what was happening and it was easier to adopt my usual purpose led leadership style to the challenge. 

Building a compelling narrative

The story I told the team:

“We have a leaky bucket. There are holes everywhere and our customers are seeping out of them. We are topping up the bucket with new customers but not as quickly as our existing customers are falling out. Our busy hands are trying to cover those holes with lots of make shift solutions, which is not efficient and makes us stressed. We are not happy, and neither are our customers. Over the next few months the pressure on those holes is going to increase, and the holes could get bigger. Our job is to properly fix the biggest holes first, and stop the leaks. It won’t be easy, but we will work openly and together, and you have our support.”

My simple narrative was easily understood across all levels of the business. The job that needed to be done was clear. Colleagues were able to decide whether they wanted to be part of the journey or not. For some, they were just too tired at the prospect of months of fixing the broken, but for others there was a huge sigh of relief that they were being heard and the support was being offered to address the challenges.

The narrative into the executive and wider leadership team was an evolution of this same story.

“We have a leaky bucket. Critical journeys are broken that are causing customers to seep out of them, for example in Moving Home (only xx% choosing to retain us when they move because we make it really difficult for them to stay). Customers are dissatisfied with our service evidenced by our Trustpilot ratings and CAB score. We are acquiring new customers but not at a rate that counters the losses and we don’t have a deep enough understanding of our acquisition journey impacting margin and LTV. Our people are working with inefficient and concerning processes that are cumbersome and need improvement. Better visibility of some data points shows that we are expecting a significant renewal peak which is going to cause us pain for a number of reasons (details shared with data to support). The impact on our people and customer base could be significant if we don’t take immediate steps. There may be capability gaps we need to fill and it’ll take some tough decision making when it comes to prioritisation. We need to create a solid 90 day action plan to address the biggest areas of concern to stop the leaks.”

We co-created a 90 day plan that followed a simple model: OGSP – objectives, goals, strategies and plans. A highly effective model that, supported with a 15 minute daily stand up, allowed steps to be small enough to make significant progress swiftly and barriers to be quickly identified and unblocked. Ownership was strong, silos were broken down and teams were given clear actions with stops as well as starts and continues.

You may have read last week’s case study about driving change through Trustpilot which was one facet of the plan which supported the rapid turnaround to return to growth.

Mid term we developed a new commercial strategy that included more sophisticated retention, renewal and acquisition strategies alongside developed pricing policies and a comprehensive whole of market segmentation study. But addressing the immediate performance concern gave us permission to dedicated time to this optimised thinking.

There were seven consecutive months of losses in total (some of these falling before I arrived) until the customer based returned to positive growth. I won’t chart every action that happened to impact this change but suffice to say, it was an incredible journey requiring joined up thinking and focus that ultimately resulted in the business achieving its goal and driving cultural transition alongside the accomplishment.

My top 5 learnings

1.    Leaders don’t always have all the answers, and it’s ok. Surrounding yourself with smart people and critics is a good thing to challenge your thinking.

2.    There’s no room for big egos, and role modelling the behaviours you want to see more of is the quickest way to build an inclusive, open environment where it’s safe to share.

3.    It doesn’t have to be perfect. Too often we’re presented with images of perfection in social media and business text books, but in the moment you don’t always have access to all the information to make the perfect decision – 51% is ok for some decisions so you can get going, build momentum, and take the learnings.

4.    Fail fast. Give something a go and see what happens. If it doesn’t work you can always try something else. Don’t fall for the ‘we’ve done it before’ trap either.

5.    Don’t assume that you’re working with a strong foundation. Whether it’s compliance, governance or processes, assume nothing.

And one for luck……… of course think about your people – engaging with them, the narrative you share with them to help frame the context, and appreciate how they feel. Burn out is a very real thing and when you’re a leader newly entering a business with high energy and ready to tackle Goliath, you may find your team not exactly match-fit when you look into their weary eyes after months of firefighting.