Improving Operating Model and Organization Scalability

Client: A global financial technology company.

Services: Organization assessment, leadership assessment, executive coaching, team alignment.

The Challenge

A dynamic and visionary CEO had successfully grown his company predominantly through acquisitions in the highly fragmented fin-tech space. The accumulation of acquired companies, however, masked stalled and declining organic revenue growth amidst ongoing industry consolidation. The company’s rapid acquisition-fueled expansion had resulted in an unwieldy organization design and governance model, resulting in inefficient decision making, increased levels of frustration by customers, and weakened employee engagement. Exacerbating the challenge, long-tenured leaders whose scope of responsibilities had grown exponentially in a relatively short time struggled to scale their leadership capability to the new demands of the business. This was ultimately impacting the company’s valuation and increasing the risk of not achieving their investment returns on future acquisition targets.

Our Solution

• A holistic assessment of the business including capabilities of the CEO and senior leadership team, culture, organization design, operating model and decision-making processes.
• A redesign of the top-level leadership organization structure including integrating select leadership from acquisitions and formalizing management teams across the primary market segments they served.
• Alignment of teams around agreed upon 3-year performance objectives, key strategies, corporate key performance indicators (KPIs) and team member roles and responsibilities to execute effectively.
• Conducted targeted executive assessments of key players brought into the business through acquisition to inform go-forward leadership roles and responsibilities.
• Provided executive coaching to key leaders to scale their leadership impact amidst rapid growth through acquisition.

The Results

With new leadership teams in place with a clearly defined set of strategic priorities for the business, there is now greater focus, and speed in decision making and alignment around key priorities. Sales pipeline for organic growth has been improved by realigning existing team members to provide increased focus and leverage strengths, and the team has worked to codify their approach to acquisition integration to minimize the level of disruption associated with integration. Finally, a more regular cadence of leadership team meetings and processes for decision making have resulted in more precise tracking of performance against identified strategic priorities. The company continues to rapidly consolidate its market through acquisition and has significantly increased its enterprise valuation.