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Strategic Agility for Startups

Strategic Agility for Startups

Service type:

Continuous Strategy, Leadership & Team Coaching

Format:

Advisory assistance and synchronised cadence of execution AND strategy

Costs: 

Audience(s):

Startups

Details of the service:

The Challenge:


Calibrating agility is critical in Startup environments.


In the early days, you have to expect that the initial ideas will have to evolve to find market (and sometimes investors') traction. This is requisite agility, and you should purposefully organise for it. Unfortunately, too often, Founders are keen to hold the integrity of their initial ideas (which is an important needed quality nonetheless), and the team is organised to deliver, generally rigidly, to the initial idea. Learning to flex and adjust is about setting the balance between being opinionated, an important instinct in entrepreneurship, and inviting teams and early customers to influence the direction to gain market momentum.


The second stumbling block comes when market traction starts to build and the Startup grows into a Scale-up. No longer can everybody be connected with everything. This is the time when you have to be very intentional about the roles, organisation, and how to maintain continued coherence across the organisation. Sheer grunts from the Founder and the executive team will not cut it anymore. You must establish and evolve an operating model that can scale and support scaling.


"Growth Hacking" has emerged as a term for Startup agility. Unfortunately, this is too close to "normalised hustling", and it does not capture the structure needed from the early days of Startups. The critical part is to connect strategy closely with execution and bring everybody with it.


As much as Startups can benefit from an external challenger intervention that will help them reflect on what may be entrenched perspectives and bring structure to their operating model, there is often little available cash to spend on external support. Issues are often found the hard way: when it is too late, cash is running out, and clients have not built up sufficiently.


Henko can help you with those challenges.


Our Differentiated Approach:


  • At the heart of our approach is to bring challenge, intentionality and connect closely the strategy and its execution,

  • Our offerings are commensurate to your needs and look to minimise your cash expenditure while building the inhouse skills so you are mostly self-sufficient:

    • Our packages can start with a simple challenger intervention where we regularly come in to challenge your thinking and work with your leadership team. Those interventions can cover many factors, such as your strategy, your execution ability, your leadership or your organisation’s operating model. Discussing this regularly is your way to be intentional in creating attention and evolving your organisation for success,

    • We can expand into more support around the strategy support using the support of Wardley Maps or connecting the strategy and execution using strategy development tools like xMatrix,

    • We also see the value in investing early on in developing leadership through systemic interventions (Leadership team coaching) or coaching key individuals to develop healthy leadership for themselves and the organisation.

  • Our stance is for you to be in charge at all times. This places the right responsibility in the hands of your leadership, and it enables solutions to be implemented much quicker when the leadership is in charge. This also enables a more optimal engagement of our time, making our costs only marginal and preserving your resources,

  • Our engagements are typically fractal on a cadence; they allow intentionality without overburdening. we calibrate cadences with you in six-month cycles and adjust every six months as your needs evolve. This is our agile way of ensuring that you continually get the best value.


Expected Outcomes: 


  • Better adaptability to evolve the produce and find traction in the market,

  • Better strategic clarity and agility,

  • Continuous balancing of the workload for optimum leverage of available bandwidth,

  • Leadership development through the stage growth of the organisation allows a harmonious team spirit, constant alignment and full engagement of the brains of the organisation,

  • Intentionality of healthy working relationships consolidating on the main stable base of the Startup: its people,

  • Easing the teething issues of growth by evolving the operating model and associated leadership intentionally and continually,

  • Leadership and team health through creating clarity of the evolving landscape and organising making decisions about it,

  • Better Flow of strategy to execution and feedback to strategy, allowing rapid adaptation and success.


Please explore Henko Services that support those outcomes, or get in touch to discuss »

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