“Culture eats Strategy for breakfast” – but you still have to execute a strategy.

Personally, I think we have a great culture at Flock Consulting. I’m proud to say it and believe it wholeheartedly. We have a great team that live our values and culture and protect them as their own. Each month we celebrate this with an award, The Kotahitanga Award, which celebrates an individual that has contributed in ways that reflect our values and culture. The award recipient each month then gives the award out the following month. I love hearing in our monthly catchup the reasons why they deserve the award and other team members account of appreciation in support of the award recipient.

It’s what makes Flock what it is. People want to come work with us, customers and partners also value our Values and Culture and often comment on how pleasant it is to work with a business with such strong Values and Culture.

And yet, to be a successful business, we must have a solid strategy and execute it successfully.

Recently my business partner, Spencer Ho, and I have been updating our strategy. During the process I dug out something I put together at the start of 2022 when I was renewing Flock’s approach.

The Flywheel.

I picked this up from reading Good to Great by Jim Collins. Not everyone agrees with Jim’s ideas, however I have found them to be helpful in developing Flock over the last few years.

Jim Collins' flywheel concept revolves around the idea that great companies achieve sustained success through a cumulative process, like a massive flywheel building momentum. This process involves consistent, well-executed actions that reinforce each other, creating a positive loop of growth. Initially, progress may seem slow, but over time, the accumulated efforts result in significant momentum and success for the organisation. The key is to identify and consistently reinforce the core activities that contribute to the company's success, allowing the flywheel to turn with increasing efficiency.

So, as we unpicked the key drivers of Flock, we built out the Flywheel you see in the image.

For us, it all starts with great people. I would not have that any other way. As discussed earlier, at Flock we are passionate about our Values and Culture; everyone in the team believes in them and acts them out daily. Everything we do is checked against our Values, and our Culture leads to a solid team of people that want to achieve great things. Building a high-quality team is central to Flock’s ability to deliver value to our customers, so building capability and giving opportunities to learn are fundamental to our success.

Second is Delivering great value. To be successful we must deliver value to our customers. One of our values “Pixel Perfect” demands that we always do our best work. To do this, we must be clear about what great looks like and be sure that everyone knows how to get there. We have spent a great deal of time building out a collection of systems and standards that define what great looks like for us. In my time in the Data and Analytics environment I have seen too many examples of other consulting companies selling below par services to businesses that do not know what good looks like. They end up spending a lot of money on poor outcomes, making our industry look sub-par. At Flock, the whole team buys into the idea of always looking to deliver great value.

Third is to Build long-term partnerships. It’s natural to believe that if we provide a good service and deliver great value then we will build long term partnerships. We have experienced this a lot and have been lucky enough to have many customers stay with us long-term, in some cases we have clients that have been with us right from the start, 5 years and counting. The reality though is we do lose some. For different reasons we have lost customers, usually it comes down to differing values between us and the customer which leads to a mismatch in the way we work together. We love working with businesses that also live by similar values to us, we find those organisations understand that working together as partners creates a better more mutual outcome that is a win-win for everyone.

Fourth is to leverage those partnerships to build our brand. Showcasing our successes via our website and social platforms is a fantastic way for us to present our capability to new customers. For a new customer to see what we have done, how it has affected the lives of our customers and helped them improve their business not only gives the ability to assess if we are able to deliver what they need, it also allows them to see what is possible with the use of data. Interestingly this is an area where we identified that we haven’t been executing. We’ve been quiet on social platforms; we haven’t been creating case studies and therefore haven’t been highlighting the successes we have been having. Reviewing our strategy in line with this flywheel gave us such a clear idea of where we need to improve to be able to make an impact on our success compared to where we are now.

Fifth is to grow our customer base. The desired effect of building our brand, showcasing our capability, along with word of mouth should lead to us bringing new customers onboard. We have learnt lessons over the last year in some of our early engagements, especially from some of the chances we have missed. We are always focused on learning from our mistakes, in fact that is something we do right across the business. Losing a sales opportunity is an interesting chance to reflect, learn and develop our systems and processes, our content and materials, and who our ideal customer is.

As we cycle right through the flywheel, because we have grown our customer base, we can hire and train more great people. And then the Flywheel moves through the cycle again, gaining momentum each time.