INVARIUS LLC
GROWTH
"Invarius LLC was a tremendous help in planning my new business pursuits - identifying opportunities in both existing and new business spaces for our small business. We anticipate double digit growth in the near future in the areas that Invarius guided us into. Their professionalism, contacts, and business knowledge are invaluable to our growth"
“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.”
- Lee Bolman
STRATEGIC PLANNING
A strategy is simply a plan to get from a current condition to a future one. In business, that strategy has to take both internal and external factors into account - internal things such as your company skills and resources; external things such as market and competitive pressures. The most challenging of all of these are the external, future influences on your business, such as:
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Customer perceptions
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Technology maturation and disruption
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Market evolution
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Workforce trends and demographics
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Competitor investments and actions
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Regulatory, economic, geopolitical, and/or social impacts
Human beings are linear creatures - we look at our past, draw a line through the present, and thus attempt to predict our future. But some of the processes affecting our future business are exponential, such as the rate of change in technology (Moore's Law). Will your business be the next Kodak film camera or Betamax recorder? Or can you pivot to maintain your current, or build new, competitive advantages? Invarius can help.
“Although a great proposal by itself seldom wins a deal, a bad proposal can definitely lose one.”
― Tom Sant
“Many business owners are too busy trying to avoid failure to plan for success.”
― Glenn Colby
PROPOSAL DEVELOPMENT
SCALING YOUR BUSINESS
At Invarius we have a knack for writing winning proposals. We've been on everything from huge proposal teams writing thousands of pages, to authoring the entire proposal based on interviews with our clients.
Have you ever had a must-win proposal and wondered how your approach stacks up to the competition? When it's do-or-die for your company, are you willing to make sure a poorly written proposal doesn't cause you to lose? When you're in stiff competition for a bid, how can you make your approach stand out to the decision makers?
Just a few of the things we've learned include:
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Customer language - Write the proposal in the customer's language of value, wants and needs. We so often write about how great we are without understanding the customer's perspective.
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Document organization - making it clear what you are proposing - is critical. There's nothing worse than shuffling through documentation trying to figure out what a bidder is actually proposing. When a customer looks at your proposal and how well it's organized, they get an idea of how well you will organize the effort if awarded.
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Be direct - it's amazing how many times you'll see ambiguous wording in a proposal. When there's risk, be clear about it. When you are sure about an outcome or performance, be equally clear. Ambiguous language often telegraphs an offeror's uncertainty about a bid.
Many clients come to us in two situations - they have a business and are looking to scale it, or are trying to get into a new business or market. So often folks will try to scale something without really understanding the underlying system - whether it has technical, human resources, management, cultural, production, competitive or other scale limitations - and then wonder why they don't get the result they expect. Sometimes the opposite can happen, and rapid growth occurs without a plan or vision for it! Such rapid growth without adequate planning can kill a company.
Some advisers would have you believe there is a model or formula that works - just do this and your business will scale rapidly. We've observed that 90% of businesses have the same half-dozen or so challenges, yet the solutions to those challenges are often unique. Instead of a formula, these obstacles require critical thinking to overcome.
Invarius partners with you to help you get past those scale roadblocks. Whether its growing a nonprofit, getting a startup off the ground, or getting past a growth "ceiling", we can help you succeed.
"I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game."
- Louis V Gerstner
CULTURE
Often attributed to the late management guru Peter Drucker is the saying "culture eats strategy for breakfast." Well if you're a business owner or leader, you eat culture for lunch and dinner - whether you realize it or not. That's another way of saying - if you see a problem in the culture of your organization - the problem starts with you. None of us are more blind to behaviors than our own. It takes a third party - someone we trust - to help us see what we are missing.
We have been there. We have been in the place of "being in charge" - afraid to admit that we might not know all the answers, or that our behavior could be the problem limiting our company or our team from achieving their best.
Invarius works with business leaders to identify their own blind spots and limitations affecting the company culture. This is not something theoretical or learned from a management course, but something we've dealt with in real life. From our own imperfections. If you're tired of hearing about all of the 5 things perfectly successful people do to be perfectly successful, then maybe we can be the right resource for you. Contact us.