Creating a Strategy Office

Part 1 of 3: Creating a Strategy Office, 2023 Planning

While large businesses are accustomed to research departments, strategy departments, this has historically been considered a luxury for small or midsize firms. As I recount the development of a strategy office through this series of articles, I’d like to share my enthusiasm and support for having a team like this to help the C-Suite. It wasn’t that difficult to set up and the investment has been extremely worthwhile.

The notion of a strategy office wasn’t something I had a lot of exposure to before I worked at ADP and Indeed. However, after working from the ADP headquarters in Roseland, New Jersey and engaging directly with these teams in planning, I realized the tremendous value of having a team focused on strategy. Without divulging details, there were multiple types of strategy teams at ADP covering corporate strategy, growth and sales strategy. At Indeed, I saw strategy and insights teams leveraged for growth, innovation, and M&A activity as well.

So how does this help your business and do you really need a strategy team?

While having near-term and long-term lenses on your business, the industry and having a watch guard to protect against disruptions can add tremendous value to your business, you might have more urgent needs.

As CEO or President, you may already have ideas and a vision for the business but lack an execution arm to bring these ideas to life. In that case, you can focus the strategy office on research and development so that they can vet ideas and even get them ready to hand-off to your operational team.

In either case, this function helps the C-Suite explore, validate and execute fast since they are dedicated to supporting the CEO’s vision. When I joined my company, I started to build out a strategy office. The team reports directly into me as CEO and provides me and the management team with a sounding board as well as a sharp eye on guiding the business in an economic environment that has been more complex than ever.

I’ll share my experience of building this team out, leveraging my interactions with the uber brilliant folks at ADP and Indeed.com.

Interviewing for Strategy Analysts

When I set out to bring in a strategy analyst, I wasn’t sure where to begin. In fact, I wasn’t sure what interview questions to ask a strategy analyst since it wasn’t a role I had hired for in the past. While google provided some help, I turned to existing job descriptions to see what most companies required as qualifications for a similar role.

One important factor was keeping an open mind on the background of the candidates, to ensure we had diversity in the candidate pool and shortlisted group. More on this later. As I began, I wasn’t sure how to compare and benchmark candidates except that I knew I wanted smart people on the team. So anytime we got into a topic that started to go over my head, I’d give the candidate extra points. I’ll touch on the time it took to set up the team in my next article.

Our recruiting team did a great job in finding people and I was very impressed with the talent pool we came across in the Philippines and particularly in Pakistan (two locations where we run our operations from). While we had identified certain types of companies as likely sources of candidates, such as consulting firms, most of our applicants were in non-strategy roles helping with operational aspects but required strategic application for execution of their CEO’s vision.

It Takes Two to Tango

I reflected on the charter of the strategy office and at a high-level, knew they could be useful in shorter-term decisions and go-to-market enablement while also looking out 3 to 5 years to help us intentionally evolve our business whether that meant organically or through M&A (mergers and acquisitions) or partnerships.

Knowing I probably couldn’t keep up with a brilliant strategist, I opened two requisitions so that the strategy team was truly a team that could bounce ideas off one another. This proved to be extremely beneficial as time progressed because it also helped us find candidates that were very strong in certain areas and could be complemented by their teammate in areas they weren’t as strong. For example, one analyst may be more tuned into customer insights, qualitative data gathering and the other could be an excel-ninja that thrives on statistical slicing and dicing of numbers.

The other benefit of having two people in our inaugural department was to get diversity. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to ensure we had diversity in the background of the candidate whether it was their industry, their viewpoints or other characteristics. This would help us uncover unconscious bias and evaluate all opportunities for growth.

The premise I started the strategy office was on having a long-term growth plan. Having the team in place has in fact helped our company and me personally set a clear vision for our organization. I’m a strong advocate for the concept of maintaining a strategy office so this series of articles is my way to share and be of help to others.

In Part 2, I cover how I determined the location for this team and how long it took to get up and running.