What We Do
We help our clients, through a structured and disciplined approach, focus on what is really important in the marketplace and convert that understanding into actions that result in growth and profits. Our role is to be the catalyst for developing winning ideas and converting them into action. We help you leverage your scarcest and most important asset - your people - by bringing them the ability to creatively understand their customers' businesses, the competitive environment and their own strengths so they can leverage their instincts, knowledge and capabilities to obtain a winning position in their markets.
Although the strategic issues facing a business are often clear to the leadership of that business, pressures for short-term profit gains and visible organization "wins" often, and appropriately, take priority over the important but difficult and time consuming process of rethinking the strategy and value proposition and implementing the necessary organization and value delivery system changes. As a result, MFL often starts working with our clients on the short-term opportunity to more fully capture the value from the existing product/service offerings through better pricing. The return from identifying and plugging price leaks and then developing creative and proactive pricing strategies and tactics is usually over 2 points of margin captured with only a few months of effort.
We apply a disciplined market-in - or Market-Focused - approach to identifying and capturing pricing opportunities, as well as other short-term profit opportunities rising from improved sales force productivity or distribution channel management. When the timing is right, this same approach provides the insight and creative perspective necessary to quickly and profitably develop the new strategies and value propositions necessitated by shifting or consolidating customer environments, changing distribution channel structures, technology changes, or new competitive initiatives.
The most important value we deliver is not "the answer," it is instead the improved capability of the entire management team to develop, modify, and successfully implement profit improvement programs and winning strategies for their business from a Market-Focused perspective. Their productivity and impact is increased through a common mindset and language across the entire organization. They are more empowered and equipped to identify and evaluate new entrepreneurial opportunities, choose and prioritize customer segments to serve and not serve, develop highly actionable and measurable business plans, and permit the organization to work as a single integrated unit focused on profitably delivering and capturing value and creating new value delivery opportunities. Although these concepts are often not intuitively obvious or easy to apply, especially when a management team is facing the challenge of multiple priorities or major shifts or distractions in their core business, we provide the practical guidance, structure, and motivation needed to understand and use the concepts in a timely and profitable manner.
