Four engagements. Four contexts. One consistent finding: the constraint was the organization, not the strategy.
6% sales growth in each of the two fiscal years following the redesign — driven entirely by organizational change, not product change.
The North American sales organization of a leading science and biotechnology company serving farmers was losing ground. Products were best-in-class. The competition wasn't beating them on product — they were beating them on customer intimacy. Competitors had built deeper relationships with individual farmers, understood their specific needs, and were winning business as a result.
A new business unit leader arrived with a clear mandate: reverse the decline and grow market share through organic growth.
The sales organization was structured around three large regional zones across North America. For a business where climate and soil composition are the primary determinants of how farmers use products and services, that structure was too broad to support the customer-level knowledge the business needed to compete.
Talented people were working hard. But the operating model, organizational design, and processes weren't built to support the level of customer intimacy the strategy required. Structure was undermining effort.
The three large regional zones were reconfigured into smaller geographies defined by similar climate and soil conditions — bringing sales teams closer to the specific farming environments they served and enabling the depth of customer knowledge the strategy required.
The operating model shift rippled beyond the sales team. Customer service, supply chain, R&D, and marketing all required organizational redesign to align with and support the new, more decentralized structure.
Workflows were redesigned end-to-end across all five functions to enable speed and agility across the new smaller geographies — eliminating the handoff friction that had slowed response times under the prior model.
We identified the specific behaviors critical to customer intimacy, closing sales, and long-term account management — and built a behavioral assessment tool around them. Assessment scores combined with sales figures determined variable compensation. The same tool was used to evaluate candidates as the organization expanded its salesforce by 30%.
6% sales growth in year one. 6% again in year two. Driven not by a new product or a new market — but by an organization finally built to execute the strategy it had been handed.
$850M in revenue achieved within three years — exceeding Toyota's requirements. The company continued growing to $1.3B in the three years that followed. The CEO appointed during our engagement remains in the role today.
A Tier 1 automotive supplier received an ultimatum from Toyota: grow from $500M to nearly double that size globally within three years or lose preferred provider status.
The timing couldn't have been harder. The company had recently lost its beloved CEO to an accident. The founder and board chairman had returned as interim CEO while a successor was identified. The existing international footprint — plants in Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific — wasn't sufficient to satisfy Toyota's scale requirements.
The mandate was clear. The path was not.
The supplier had genuine strengths. A strong, employee-centered culture. Significant intellectual property and new product development capabilities that had won business not just with Toyota but Ford and Hyundai as well. A reputation for crafting differentiated solutions that competitors couldn't match.
But the organization wasn't built for the growth it had been asked to deliver.
The board, while composed of accomplished businesspeople, lacked direct experience scaling an organization to global revenues at this level. The operating model was highly centralized — a hub-and-spoke structure where headquarters governed and made all decisions of consequence. That model had already been frustrating growth objectives before the Toyota mandate arrived.
The structure, the governance, and the decision-making model were all optimized for where the company had been — not where it needed to go.
We restructured the board's mandate and composition. Drawing on our network, we brought in a former CEO with direct experience growing and successfully exiting a global organization, and more recent experience advising CEOs and boards. She sourced and added the remaining board members — bringing in leaders with direct experience scaling companies globally — with one exception: a board member with deep innovation expertise whom we sourced through prior work with 3M, directly aligned with the supplier's competitive advantage in IP and new product development.
The centralized hub-and-spoke model was redesigned to enable decision-making by plant leaders outside North America — a fundamental shift in how the organization governed itself. We supported the founder and leadership team in assessing and applying strategic partnering principles to a joint venture in Southeast Asia as the first major growth move. To navigate the complexity of international joint ventures, we brought in a world-renowned business school faculty member with specific research and consulting expertise in this area. Entirely new governance structures were built to support it.
We modeled what the organization needed to look like at $1B and designed a global structure to match it. From that end state, we developed a phased three-year roadmap to get there. The new design reflected the decentralized operating model, created space for leadership teams to operate with authority outside North America, and included process redesign to enable growth at each stage.
We worked with the founder and existing leadership team to define the specific leadership behaviors required to drive rapid global growth. The assessment process identified one leadership team member whose behaviors closely matched the growth profile — which gave the founder the confidence to appoint him CEO, a position he had already been targeted for. The same behavioral framework was used to assess leaders brought on to sustain the growth agenda going forward.
$850M in three years. $1.3B in six. Toyota satisfied. A new CEO installed and still leading the company today. The result was not driven by a new product or a new market. It was driven by rebuilding the organization — its board, its operating model, its structure, and its leadership — to match the scale of the ambition it had been handed.
8% reduction in unit labor costs. 12% reduction in employee attrition within three months. Job satisfaction scores shifted from dissatisfied to satisfied. The root cause of frontline turnover addressed directly through community partnerships.
A business unit was hemorrhaging frontline employees across its plants. Plant managers — a scarce and specialized resource — were working ten to thirteen hour days to keep production on track. Attrition was accelerating. The risk was existential: if plant managers burned out or departed, the plants' ability to meet customer demand would be in jeopardy.
Something had to change. The question was what.
The presenting problem was turnover. The actual problems were layered and interconnected — and would have been missed by any assessment that stopped at the surface.
Exit interviews with departing frontline workers revealed that the primary driver of attrition wasn't pay or working conditions — it was the inability to find affordable childcare near the plants.
Interviews with plant managers revealed that a significant portion of their extended hours was consumed by administrative and HR work that a shared HR function located a time zone away was structurally unable to absorb efficiently.
A process review uncovered widespread workarounds and waste stemming from workflows that had never been updated to reflect newer systems and plant requirements.
New HR roles were created and positioned within proximity of the plants they served. Administrative responsibilities were redistributed between plant managers and supervisors, reducing plant manager hours while giving supervisors meaningful development toward future plant manager roles.
Supervisors and plant managers received training on their redefined roles and on the principles of high-performing teams. Targeted coaching of intact teams embedded new behavioral expectations across the organization.
Frontline employees were assembled into workstreams and guided through structured process improvement to redesign the workflows affecting their plants. Data flows and software platforms were simplified and streamlined as part of the same effort.
The business unit offered incentives to communities surrounding the plants to open and sustain childcare facilities — addressing the root cause of attrition that no organizational redesign alone could fix.
Within six months of launch, enhanced efficiency reduced required headcount and delivered an 8% reduction in unit labor costs. Attrition slowed by 12% within the first three months. Job satisfaction scores moved from dissatisfied to satisfied. Exit interviews confirmed that lack of childcare was no longer the primary reason frontline employees were leaving.
Leadership team exceeded private equity firm expectations within 60 days. Employee sentiment scores rose 30% over 120 days post-close. The organization has consistently met or exceeded every KPI tied to its five-year exit strategy.
A private equity firm was taking a publicly traded company private. The thesis was clear: the business had the right market position but the wrong organization running it. Over the prior five years, stock value had dropped 75%. Market share was eroding. Competitors were moving faster. Customer satisfaction was lagging.
The firm assembled a new leadership team and tasked them with due diligence ahead of replacing the existing C-suite. The clock started before the deal closed.
The organization had a structural problem at every level. The leadership structure was bloated — far too many vice president and director level roles relative to the company's size, creating layers that slowed decisions and diffused accountability.
The combined marketing and sales function was underperforming competitors across every measurable dimension. Interviews with former employees and a review of Glassdoor and Indeed ratings painted a consistent picture: a siloed organization where finger-pointing was the norm and end-to-end accountability was rare.
The organization was reacting to the market rather than leading it.
The new leadership team's strategy and vision were used as inputs to define corporate values directly aligned with customer needs. In high-performing organizations, culture and customer experience are mutually reinforcing. The values were designed to make that alignment explicit and operational.
A behavioral assessment tool was built around the behaviors required to execute the five-year exit strategy. Less than a month after close, every leader from vice president through director level was assessed — giving the leadership team a rigorous, consistent basis for decisions that needed to be made quickly and gotten right.
Marketing and sales were separated into distinct functions with clear, independent accountability. The IT organization was restructured to reduce siloing and elevate specialization aligned with digital and e-commerce priorities. The post-assessment design provided a clear path into new roles for leaders who were staying.
New cross-functional processes were built to match the new structure. Decision rights were clarified. End-to-end accountability for outcomes was established. The finger-pointing that had characterized the prior organization was replaced with explicit ownership.
The leadership team delivered exceptional speed, rigor, and impact in the first 60 days — exceeding the private equity firm's expectations on every dimension. Employee sentiment scores rose 30% over the 120 days post-close. The business has met or exceeded every KPI in its five-year exit strategy since.
No pitch. No proposal before we've listened. Just a direct conversation about what's happening in your business and whether we're the right people to help.
Schedule a Conversation