Brief MFL Background
Elliot Ross and Dave Nuechterlein started MFL in 1999 with the objective of helping successful businesses build on their strengths to grow their top and bottom lines. Our assistance is centered on strengthening our clients’ capabilities in pricing, segmentation, organization, process,and overall strategy – what we call Commercial Excellence. In addition to this core focus, we have also assisted a number of clients in developing and implementing strategies for new businesses and startups, refined organizational approaches.
Our specialty, however, is working with our clients to develop and nurture a market-in, value-focused mindset throughout their entire operation. This change, across all functions of the organization, allows businesses to significantly improve their ability to find and win the sweet spots in their markets by understanding, delivering, and getting paid their fair share of real value delivered to their customers.
The two of us, plus our assistant, constitute our entire firm. This is a conscious choice designed to enable us to work directly with our clients, not delegate the work to a group of young consultants. The combination of our marketing and strategy development capabilities, enhanced during our combined 21 years with McKinsey & Co., with our extensive and pragmatic general management experience leading public and private global companies (including tier 1 auto suppliers) forms the foundation of our customized approach with each client.
Our value-added springs from helping our clients “discover the answer” themselves, not by simply giving them a report. This approach has enabled our clients to successfully design and implement changes that improved their growth and profits in both the short- and long-term. Nearly all of our clients have been able to gain market share while achieving at least a 2-point improvement in margins, even in difficult markets. A number of our clients have successfully captured and sustained as much as 10 points of margin as a result of changing mindsets, focusing on sweet spots, improving pricing capabilities, and implementing appropriate tactics – i.e., moving up the path toward Commercial Excellence.
We have served public companies with global businesses, large and small privately held businesses, portfolio companies of private equity firms, and a number of pure startups in a wide variety of industries.We generally work with a small internal client team of high-potential individuals with whom we jointly develop “the answer” and who become the key change agents to achieve successful implementation of new mindsets, capabilities, systems, and controls. Interestingly, most of our clients rarely use traditional consultants. Our unique approach of working shoulder to shoulder with our teams and senior management has been the key to helping our clients successfully build on their strengths to grow their businesses.
