Capabilities
When running a business, it is often easier to identify opportunities and solutions for others than it is to pinpoint your own challenges. Fairbanks Consulting can help with this. Dick works one-on-one with principals and presidents to understand a business’s financials, daily operations, and strategy. By employing a top-to-bottom approach, Dick guides companies to find meaningful answers to the following questions:
- What do people pay us for?
- Are we sufficiently recognized for the value we bring?
- What are our unique capabilities?
- Where do we go from here?
Organizational Transition
There comes a time when next steps move beyond daily operations. Your current growth rate and governance may be expanding. However, internal and external forces or influences that have reshaped your company will redefine how you and the company need to progress.
Dick has worked with large and small organizations that were undergoing a fundamental change in senior leadership, structure, and market direction, often simultaneously. In every instance, success depended upon a clear understanding of the goals, the organization's capabilities, and the assets at hand. If you are already consumed with daily operations, the temptation is to shortcut the change process, to your detriment.
It makes sense to seek counsel from an experienced outsider to strengthen your approach and assist in creating a new and enduring success.
Organizational Transition Services Include:
- Planning for acquisition
- Preparing for the eventual sale of the business
- Thinking of next leadership and changes to the traditional, long-term CEO position
Strategy & Culture
There is a temptation to think of strategy as a high-level blueprint and to think of culture as a “nice to have” bolt-on. Neither could be further from the truth.
Every successful organization has an understood set of goals and values. Broad, strategic goals should be universally understood, shared, and embraced. Having a goal “together” is the first step in creating a cohesive group.
Your organization’s values inform every decision made by every player in the business. More than perhaps any other feature of your business, values start at the top.
I’ve experienced the energy and satisfaction that comes from these things done well. I have felt the fatigue and underperformance that exists when they are done poorly. I am committed to seeing them done well.
Strategy & Culture Services Include:
- Developing a company-wide understanding of “the business we’re in”
- Creating buy-in through communication, goal setting and leadership
- Identifying culture as a competitive weapon
Growth
Businesses that fail to grow face ever-increasing difficulty in maintaining excellent people, acquiring necessary assets and maintaining acceptable profitability. Whatever industry you’re in, you must have a commitment to real growth. Growth attracts personnel. Growth attracts key vendors. Growth opens opportunities for improved financing. Growth helps create an enterprise-wide sense of worth and excitement.
The avenues to sustainable and efficient growth are not always obvious. It is too easy to copy what others do, to get lost in chasing low-yield opportunities, and to underestimate the skills and assets necessary. Successful growth comes from understanding your strengths as they relate to the opportunities at hand. An experienced “growth agent” can be invaluable in helping to determine what’s next.
Growth is “playing to win,” and everyone likes winning.
Growth Services Include:
- The recognition that growth is imperative to organizational health
- Creating an internal expectation of growth
- Determining sound growth opportunities and the assets necessary to assure a successful effort