June 2024 – Curzon Consulting

From Seven Silos to One Growth Vision: Uniting a Top Team Around a Route to £1 Billion

Outcomes

The engagement produced a clear, agreed plan to increase EBIT by a minimum of 2%, a new operating model aligned with the business’s growth ambitions, and new market sectors identified, agreed, and launched. The work was compelling enough to secure a second phase of engagement to drive through the business model changes identified during the first.

Our Client

A European technical services business with revenues of £420 million, operating across seven separate business lines and management teams with a bold ambition: to reach £1 billion in revenue within five years. Despite its scale and market position, the business lacked a coherent, prioritised growth strategy to connect its ambitions to a credible plan. With a fragmented operating structure and a business model that needed to evolve to support the next phase of growth, leadership recognised that reaching the £1 billion target would require more than organic momentum.

Background

Seven distinct business lines had developed with significant autonomy, creating a fragmented organisation that pulled in different directions rather than operating as a coherent whole. There was no unified growth strategy, no shared set of priorities, and no mechanism for identifying and developing the cross-business opportunities that a company of this scale and diversity was well placed to pursue.

The business model itself needed to change. Existing capabilities and market positions were not sufficient to close the gap between current revenues and the £1 billion target, and the organisation needed both a clear picture of where the growth would come from and the structural alignment to go after it together.

Curzon Approach

Curzon began with several weeks of research to build a grounded, evidence-based picture of the growth landscape before bringing the leadership community together to act on it. The centrepiece of the engagement was a two-day Venkat workshop involving approximately 50 Managing Directors and Finance Directors from across the business, designed to generate genuine alignment at the top of the organisation around a shared vision and a prioritised set of growth opportunities.

This was not a presentation exercise. The workshop was structured to surface real options, stress-test assumptions, and produce agreed decisions that the full leadership group owned and could act on. From it, a shortlist of growth opportunities was agreed, including a number with cross-business potential that no single business line could pursue independently.

Teams were tasked with developing plans for each opportunity, and a Business Model methodology was deployed to work through the structural and capability implications of the new markets being targeted. New markets were defined, selected, and readied for launch, and a redesigned organisation to support the new model was designed and put into implementation.