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Practice Area
Strategic Advisory Services
 
How do we grow faster?
From stalled to renewed

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Igniting Growth

Of the diverse challenges facing company leadership today – technology, workforce, competition, and more – few have a more positive impact than sustained, value-creating growth.

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Sage is your growth partner. Having served in operating roles in and as trusted advisors to a broad variety of company sizes and industries, we know how to roll up our sleeves (not a metaphor, but actually doing the work) to work alongside management and with Boards to build sustainable value-creating growth.

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Because Growth Matters

Companies with a near-fanatical focus on growth outperform all others - not marginally, but spectacularly. They achieve success by any measure. For Shareholders, high-growth companies generate five to ten times the returns of slow-growth companies. For Customers, high-growth companies churn out new products and services at nearly twice the "normal" rate. For Employees, high-growth companies are the most satisfying places to work, and incredibly, job satisfaction soars despite enormous pressure to keep pace.1 

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The Growth Acceleration Process

Our process typically starts with a diagnostic – a complementary meeting to review challenges and opportunities. We’ll provide actionable insights and advice. From there, we have helped companies in a variety of situations:

 

  • Executing a pivot to address new challenges

  • Developing a growth strategy for a stalled division or product line

  • Market entry strategy for international expansion

  • Divestiture of division – or helping to find a strategic buyer for the enterprise

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Focus Areas and Examples

These are our four focus areas and links to representative examples of our engagements:

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We Are

Sage Partners is a firm of senior-level professionals focused on helping you address your most important strategic issues.

  • Highly experienced, successful strategy consulting leaders and technology-centric industry executives: no junior staff

  • Savvy, trusted advisors who have “been there and done that”

  • Helping you address your “big issues” to create enterprise value:

  • Growth-Focused Strategy Development and Facilitation

  • Strategic Transactions (acquisition, sale, divestiture, alliances, and JVs)

  • Capability Building and Strategy Enablement – developing appropriate operating model, organization, strategic marketing, and financial roadmaps that catalyze successful implementation 

  • Board and C-Suite Governance 

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Principles

Our client work is driven by a set of time-tested guiding principles.

  • Growth is the best value-creating strategy

  • We have no set agenda beyond helping our clients be successful

  • Our clients benefit from a “peer-to-peer” working partnership 

  • Our role is to help clients gain the insights, conviction, and commitment to take meaningful, impactful, value-creating actions

  • We don’t merely make recommendations;  we focus on and help drive results

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Common Challenges | Focused Solutions

We leverage our experience in working with you to create solutions that work for you.

  • Help you identify essential strategic issues, challenges, and opportunities (the “big things you face”)

  • Team with you, working shoulder-to-shoulder as trusted advisors

  • Bring broad and deep executive perspectives from decades of successful business experience

  • Focus on fact-based, insightful recommendations that drive results

  • Develop and enable solutions that work given your specific organizational and marketplace context

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We Win Together

In all cases, our compensation is aligned with your success. Because at Sage Partners, we don’t have junior staff to feed billable hours. We are a team of accomplished senior executives. We take on projects where we feel we can add tangible value and work alongside management to get the job done. When you win – we win.

 

Here are a few case studies that help illustrate what we can do. If you are interested in learning more, please contact us.

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Strategy: The Roadmap to Growth Acceleration

 

Value-Creating Growth

Growth creates value. It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? However, not all growth creates the desired value that leadership is seeking. Successful growth strategies create value in all areas that matter – – for customers, for employees, for the economy at large since growth creates jobs, and for investors by generating shareholder value. Of course, winning the growth battle is tough. It requires creativity, focus, and deep organizational alignment to increase the odds of success.

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Identifying The Big Things

Noise from tactical issues often crowds out discussions about the critical and strategic issues facing the company. To crystallize the search for answers, we help our clients identify and deal with the Big Things they face. If it’s big, it matters. If it matters, we help leadership focus on the process of defining the desired outcome and the steps necessary to ensure success.

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Reading the Tea Leaves

To paraphrase President Eisenhower, “If the President could operate with 20/20 hindsight a teenager could do the job.” Simply put it means the future is always uncertain and even the present can be murky. It is our role to bring an informed, but above-the-fray perspective into the decision-making process. As trusted advisers, our job is to dig into the facts and let the facts drive the issues. Often the real issues are buried in questions not asked or those that go unanswered. Our role is to read the “tea leaves” to gather information, identify the real issues, and help our clients deal with them.

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CEO's Get Leverage from your Board

During an invitation-only event for 300 sitting board members on “Engaging the Board in the Strategic Dialogue”, a senior officer of a leading Executive Search firm offered the opinion that “The Board has no role in strategy. They don’t know enough to contribute”. That opinion is both disappointing and wrong from our perspective. To take on major strategic initiatives, the Board must be knowledgeable about the issues and supportive of management. Our role is to help our clients to engage their Boards in the most effective way possible to shape strategic initiatives for maximum business impact.

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1 Doorley, Thomas L., and John Donovan. Value-Creating Growth: How to Lift Your Company to the next Level of Performance. Jossey-Bass, 1999.

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