Justifying a Strategy Office (2 of 3)

Part 2 of 3 in a Series: Justifying a Strategy Office

In Part 1 of this series about starting up a strategy office, ?I mentioned the formation of a strategy team at our company based on valuable experience and interactions I had with these sorts of teams at ADP and Indeed.com. In this, Part 2, I’ll talk about how I got this off the ground.

How I set up a Strategy Office

my past, I had seen how these teams contributed to long-term planning cycles. I also knew that our company was at a pivotal stage given market conditions and that a strategy team could not only help the company set the right foundation for growth but also navigate our future success by “looking around the corner” at macro trends and positioning us to be in the right business and have the right resources in place to take advantage of future opportunities.

I started by ensuring I had buy-in from our management team. I presented the concept and collected feedback to refine the plan before finalizing the goals and objectives for the team. Short-term goals included helping us review our ideal customer profile as part of our go-to-market strategy and longer-term goals included evaluating our industry, our business model and whether it would make sense to build, buy, or partner on future capabilities.

Location for the Strategy Office

Since this team was going to be starting from zero, I wanted to bring in a senior resource and team that could hit the ground running. This requirement made the process a little longer initially as we wanted to really vet the team lead.

As you can imagine, analysts and in particular, strategy roles are not common and thus a scarce resource. We turned to our operations in Pakistan to bring on our team given that our finance leads are also based there. Pakistan offers a number of leading universities in Lahore, where our office is located, and the population has a large number of post-graduates.

Time and Effort

Overall, the process to announce the intention to management, set up the charter and bring on the first strategy lead took about 90 days. The initial recruiting process included identifying candidates, conducting interviews with a 5-person panel, negotiating offers and to allowing candidates time to give notice. As we added to the team, we reduced the time to hire down to 45-60 days which is mainly internal interview panels and notice periods.

Within a few weeks of having the team in place, I could already see the value. I intentionally chose industry outsiders so they could challenge the status quo and ask lots of questions. The team was full of energy and excitement as they interviewed internal and external stakeholders and ramped up on the business. This energy spread across the organization and we started to identify a few projects immediately that would help us work toward our vision.

In the next article, I’ll cover our initial projects that not only helped the company, but also helped me in my role as CEO.