We provide a personal touch in a digital world.
Customer and Market
The post Brexit environment forces businesses to rethink their customer engagement strategies. Do your strategies still drive profitable sales growth?
Businesses have had to deal with significant issues impacting how their products and services are built, as well as how their potential customers are engaged with a relevant and personalised value proposition. Knowing what to sell and how best to engage customers with the right strategy and product offering will be essential to continued success.
+ Our Approach
At Bridge Advisory Partners we take the time to understand your “product to market” capability. We work back into your business to determine how best those customer needs are being served. Digital business is the new norm and yet few businesses have adjusted their marketing strategies around their customer engagement process. Identifying the key customer touchpoints, and aligning your resources to serve the customers is key to increasing your relevance, win rate, adoption, loyalty, and wallet share.
Understanding your customers and markets means you target your scarce resources to improve your business efficiency, whilst increasing retention and loyalty. Marketing is the art of knowing why your customers chose to do business with you. Our mission is to make sure that you win every time!
Sales and Channel
With the changes to remote and flexible working, how can you ensure you are deploying the right sales channels to drive new business in a consistent & predictable manner whilst maintaining strong relationship with your existing customers?
All businesses have had to change and adapt how their products & services are sold to their customers. This is especially true in the B2B environment where direct sales play a key role. Which sales channel to use and when, will be key to driving profitable sales whilst meeting the needs of your customers. Securing this balance will be crucial to your success in an environment that has adapted to an on-line engagement model.
+ Our Approach
At Bridge Advisory Partners we believe that understanding your customer needs is essential in this new business environment to ensure relevance & success. Digital business is the new norm and yet few businesses have adjusted their customer engagement process. We will review your entire go to market resources as well as understanding all the key customer touchpoints, from pre-sale to post sales, with the aim of ensuring you serve your markets & customers, whilst increasing your relevance, channel productivity and win rate.
Our approach will ensure you have a comprehensive understanding of your customers as well as how to successfully win new business. By leveraging the most effective sales channel we will increase your sales growth and productivity as well as improving your customer loyalty and life time value in that relationship.
People Development
So much top-line success is delivered through your leadership team, but is your bench as talented?
Critical to long term success is the selection and development of future leadership and talent, particularly when 72% of companies predict an increase in leadership vacancies and 76% are ‘less than confident’ in their ability to find suitable replacements. Business survival is predicated on finding and developing the next generation of leaders. Success comes to those that create an effective succession management process that anticipates and fill gaps quickly, identifies high potential employees and aligns their people and business strategies.
+ Our Approach
At Bridge Advisory Partners we believe that a succession process will only be successful if it is part of your company culture. It’s not a stand-alone exercise but something that happens continuously. We can help you implement succession management by making sure your business understands and nurtures talent through individual planning, development, coaching and mentoring activities. Then by introducing succession analysis we can identity candidates and guide your people to make correct development choices so that individual and business requirements are achieved and key talent is retained.
With a winning succession management process in place you won’t be leaving key staff replacement to chance and although it still won’t be completely seamless the transition impact will be positive rather than a potential catastrophe, helping your business to thrive and not just survive.
Organisation Development
Could your business benefit from an increase in efficiency and productivity without the need for capital investment? Obviously, the answer is yes, but how?
Most organisations have developed and mutated over time, adapting themselves to suit specific operational circumstances or tactical needs. These organic changes, although a good idea at the time, may now not be optimum or worse not aligned to your overall goals and be holding your business back, ultimately impacting your bottom line.
+ Our Approach
Through a formal Organisational Development (OD) process, Bridge Advisory Partners will examine you current organisation, its structure, its alignment to your overall business goals, strategy and objectives, its supporting processes and the attitudes and effectiveness of the people within it. We will identify how the parts of the organisation interrelate and create an environment for improvement by developing new understandings, new behaviours and new ways of working.
By implementing a program of systemic change in the motivation, attitudes and values of your employees we will enable your organisation to better respond and adapt to market and technological advances. It will ensure your organisation is fit for purpose and fit for the future.
Technology Exploitation
Today everyone is talking about Digital, AI, Automation, Blockchain or even the 4th Industrial Revolution, but what does it all mean for you?
With 79% of business leaders expecting a century’s worth of technological advancements in the next 5 years, but 3 in 4 of these same leaders saying that current technology is not able to support the coming increases in Customer and data requirements, you can expect to be inundated with new technology ‘must have’ ideas. As a result, many companies’ waste time, money and resource implementing solutions they don’t really understand or need.
+ Our Approach
Technology should be viewed as tool to fix problems not something looking for a problem to solve. Bridge Advisory Partners will cut through the jargon and hype, helping you understand what could really be of value. By analysing your business and how it works we can define a roadmap, creating an individually tailored technology strategy specifically for you, with clearly quantified deliverables and tangible benefits. We can also help turn that strategy into realty by providing and implementing those solutions.
Technology shouldn’t be seen as a mysterious black hole to throw money down but a tool for good. With an understanding of what’s available and what would benefit you, a clearly articulated strategy will help you resist the hype and ensure your technology investments provide an effective return.
Security and Controls
Exploiting digital and cloud technologies isn’t a matter of choice, it’s a matter of survival; but how can you ensure the inherent risks are understood and managed?
Today there is a malicious cyberattack every 39 seconds with damages estimated at $6 trillion globally in 2021. The UK was the 7th hardest hit country by cyberattacks in 2019 with an estimated 80% of businesses impacted. Ransomware is the most common threat to SMB’s, increasing 8% year-on-year with 2 out of every 5 SMB’s being effected with the average ransom payment of $250k.
+ Our Approach
Using the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, Bridge Advisory Partners will help you Identify threats, put in place Protect regimes to safeguard your assets, implement Detect activities to identify the occurrence of a cybersecurity event, create mitigation plans to Respond if you are impacted and finally put in place processes and procedures to help you Recover if the worst happens.
Using this framework and implementing these controls is a cost-effective way for you to approach cybersecurity and create an enterprise wide conversation around cyber risk and compliance. It takes your organisation out of the ‘one-off’ audit compliance mind-set into a more continuous, adaptive and responsive posture.
Data Governance
Your people are your greatest asset but how well do you protect them in a digital world?
Are your employees your weakest link? In a recent survey of business leaders 43% said employees were a company’s greatest asset but 21% identified them as the biggest challenge to data security. As you continue to digitise your business how can you prevent your employees from making mistakes with your data or worse still going rogue and intentionally causing damage. Either way the result is the same, impacting reputation, sales and even regulatory fines.
+ Our Approach
Bridge Advisory Partners can help you minimise this risk. By embedding security within your company culture we will assist you to implement a blend of policy, process and technology that will protect your valuable data. We will help you create a data policy that will define who can access what and instigate data controls. Then to prevent deliberate action, implement Data Loss Prevention to stop confidential or sensitive data being sent outside your organisation. Alongside this we will engage with your employees and provide comprehensive communication and training to help them spot security threats and risks.
With these measures in place you can empower your employees, increasing their productivity through digitisation but avoiding data accidents.
Operating Model
Is your way of doing business optimised for today’s environment. How can a Transformation program help?
The way you operate should sustain the performance of the core business today, whilst innovating and diversifying for the future. This creates long term value and ensures you can continue to invest for growth, and deliver the future business strategy. The operating model must enable realisation of your strategy and embrace the customer. Transformation must unlock value, simplify the business, create a more flexible and agile organisation, and build capability to rapidly adapt to market changes.
+ Our Approach
Bridge Advisory Partners will explore the purpose and ambition of your business. We will help you develop a strategy that enables it, ensuring challenge and clarity to the market, customer, partner and commercial propositions, and then chart what needs to be put in place to deliver the strategy and accelerate it.
The work will identify the cost, margin and revenue actions plans, and design the agile operating business model to accelerate and sustain value.
Restructuring and Integration
The transaction to restructure the business was the easy bit. How do you now ensure the new business in integrated and delivers the plan?
The decision to restructure a business is not taken lightly. The reasons to do it may be compelling at face value - to fuel growth, reduce costs, secure talent, merge or consolidate to gain a market edge, or financially restructure for a future transaction. But in all cases, it creates operational disruption, takes focus away from the core business, impacts customers and suppliers and costs money. Businesses invest considerable time and energy getting the strategy and the transaction done, but invariably the implementation of the new entity is sub optimised. The result is often a significant delay in the realisation of growth and synergies and a compromised outcome that is not well received by stakeholders.
+ Our Approach
Bridge Advisory Partners will step you through the integration and ensure minimal disruption to your business. The end-to-end business will be integrated with processes and systems streamlined and optimised. Critically, the people in the business will be trained and supported through a progressive change management process that pays real attention to culture and communication.
With a timely and well managed implementation, you quickly move into and accelerate realisation of the benefits and opportunities that the business plan demanded.
Business Governance
Your business is going great, sales are up, profits are up and Customers are singing your praises; so why are you still worrying?
All businesses need good business governance to ensure decisions are made using a robust decision making process. In large corporations there will be teams to safeguard proper principles are adhered too, small or medium size businesses must also ensure they have good governance in place but the structure maybe far more simple. As you focus on growing your operation, building relationships and generating new business one area of governance that often gets put on the ‘too hard’ pile is managing business risk.
+ Our Approach
We take an extremely simple and pragmatic view of Business Risk Management (BRM) with our 4x4 approach. Firstly, we will help you Identify risks and categorise them into 4 easy to understand groups: Hazards, Financial, Operational and Strategic. We then Assess each risk to determine what might happen and the harm it may cause and then to each one assign a Control action. The final step is to establish a Review process to periodically re-look at the risks and the controls to make sure they are still valid.
You can never eliminate business risk, it’s the nature of the current environment. But a robust BRM process can help. It will save you time and money protecting your business, its reputation and the Customer base you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
Turnaround
Your business is failing. A Turnaround is critical to survival but we don’t have much time and where do we start?
All businesses at some point hit a point where survival of the core businesses is at risk. Competition has hit sales and margins; costs have been allowed to grow or outpace sales; wider market conditions have hit business confidence and spending, or the whole essence of the business and how it operates is stressed. It’s always an uncertain time and often a frightening one for management, staff and key stakeholders. The business conditions that create the crisis usually build up over years, but they can also hit strong businesses very quickly. And whilst the problem may be understood, the process to address and resolve it is complex and a significant management challenge.
+ Our Approach
Bridge Advisory Partners has the experience to identify the Turnaround strategy and develop a plan with you that will deliver it. We sit beside you through the process, and guide you through the often-painful decisions that need to be taken to stabilise the business and return is to health and growth
As a result, your business will survive. It will be a stronger with a lean, agile and competitive operating model that ensures the core business returns to profitability and stays there.
Process Simplification
COVID has forced businesses & employees to work differently; this new way of working has been embraced positively, but is it sustainable?
Many businesses have slowly adapted their use of application tools, with some even migrating to the cloud. Much of this adoption has been done without conducting a thorough review of their business processes many of which are likely outdated. Technology has been deployed to replace paper-based systems, not addressing the real need for process simplification and automation. Little time has been invested to understand the real impact to their people, suppliers, and most importantly their customers.
+ Our Approach
At Bridge Advisory Partners we believe in a simple but extremely effective three step process that looks at business processes, the people that it impacts and whether it adds value or cost to a business. Once we have simplified processes, we apply relevant technologies that help automate and stream line the way things are done.
The business benefits go far beyond reducing cost. The changes create a much more agile, and responsive business which is centred around serving the customer in the most cost effective and responsive way. Also, employees experience the benefit of a new mobile way of working, that empowers them to do what is right for the business and the customer each and every time.
Business Services
Your business is growing but are your back-office business services ready to support?
All companies rely on their back-office functions and increasingly those functions are becoming core to the commercial and operational fulfilment of business. Supply Chain & Procurement has changed significantly and must now excel in a very different digital world whilst Finance, Commercial, IT, HR, Facilities and Legal must become key business partners in addition to the traditional functional responsibilities that always prevail. These business services must now operate in an end-to-end integrated way. They need to be agile, entrepreneurial and strive to be best in class. Above all they must be a trusted partner to the business and a guardian of the key high value business and operations activities.
+ Our Approach
Business Services must become a centre of excellence with a talented team embracing a new culture that relentlessly exploits technology, data, innovation and digital capabilities. That team will work remotely as well as in the office, and as a shared or decentralise service. Bridge Advisory Partners has the experience to understand, design and stand up the most efficient functional and wider business model.
With this in place, your business will have a stable, resilient and high performing back office that is functionally best in class and operates as a true business partner.
Data Analytics
Data is the new Gold! But how do you best use it and protect it?
Data is everywhere in your business. It provides key insights to grow customers and revenue, reduce costs, improve working capital and manage risk. Transformation or change that is data led provides the evidence for a clear and credible business case and enables the inspection that is needed for good governance and control. Across the key functional areas of Finance, Supply Chain, IT, Procurement and HR Operations, data analytics will clearly evidence the current spend and efficiency, and provide clarity on how to optimise these services. From a Market perspective, Customer analytics will provide insight on pricing, margin, product, sales and marketing performance, ensuring market and customer intelligence to automate and digitise the customer journey.
+ Our Approach
Bridge Advisory Partners will identify what tasks need to be simplified and automated; what business processes need to be standardised and optimized; what commercial decisions need to be challenged and how to develop your people to think and work in a Digital world.
You will understand and trust your data and it will lead you to make quicker and smarter business decisions.