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Growth Strategy & Business Planning

Growth Strategy & Business Planning

FSI works with clients to achieve higher rates of growth at a company, business unit or product level. We identify options, assess potential and then develop the action plan. Our data-driven approach enables prioritization and efficient execution on the action plan for near term results.

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FSI’s focus on growth includes developing options which are:

  • Organic: created with new products, services, price points, customers, channels and/or country markets

  • Inorganic: acquisition (large or small) and partnerships

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FSI delivers value by ensuring every growth strategy assignment culminates with actionable output in the form of a Growth Action Plan.

Commercial Due Diligence

FSI provides commercial due diligence for corporate, private equity and venture capital investors.

 

Most frequently, clients ask FSI to assist with diligence regarding:

  • Market assessment: size of addressable market, growth and trends impacting the target investment asset or company

  • Voice of customer research: understand the value proposition, adoption factors, future growth and potential risks

  • Competitive analysis: identifying and analyzing competitive advantages/disadvantages and their sustainability

  • Financial forecasting: model projected revenue, margins, and potential strategic and economic synergies post combination

  • Valuation and deal structure: analysis of industry benchmarks, recent transactions, deal structure, and DCF are used to advise clients about their existing and potential value

 

As well as testing investment hypothesis, our diligence provides new value creation options, strategic insights, and actionable recommendations.

 

FSI is prepared to support diligence efforts within the typically compressed timeframes.

Investment Diligence

M&A Opportunity Landscape

Clients ask FSI to do the research required to uncover a detailed and customized list of acquisition targets

  • Capabilities which leverage existing core competencies

  • Capabilities customers need that competitors are not providing

  • Emerging technologies that augment or disrupt the existing market

  • Suppliers, partners, etc. that broaden core capabilities

  • Alternatives to products and services being developed by competitors

  • Indirect competitors which expand market potential

 

Our senior leadership team enables an efficient, strategic analysis of relevant markets and develops of a comprehensive list of valuable acquisition targets. We work with clients to then prioritize those acquisition targets.

M&A Opportunty Landscape

Market Assessment

Clients request our assistance with research and analysis

  • Identify customer needs and basis of competitive advantage

  • Design and test new products

  • Analyze the potential of new products

  • Determine optimal product/service pricing

  • Prioritize end-markets for broadly applicable technology

  • Expand revenue within an existing account

  • Develop approaches to increase the win rate for new accounts

  • Determine the revenue outlook for acquisitions/investments in context of market diligence

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FSI’s Voice of Customer/Non-Customer Analysis delivers great utility 

  • Identify levers that drive adoption

  • Highlight management alternatives and high priority information needed to make decision

  • Build on client’s internal knowledge, collaborate closely with client on details of the research approach

  • Develop creative recruiting strategies given depth of FSI’s knowledge 

  • Gain insights as FSI professionals are “bilingual” in healthcare/scientific and business issues

  • Seek complete, consistent and unambiguous answers to form and test hypothesis

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In-depth qualitative primary research is often supplemented with quantitative online surveys

  • Inform financial models with adoption and usage estimates

  • Analyze and compare different market segments to prioritize marketing approach

Market Assessment

Competitive Advantage

Our competitive analysis develops information which is not public, through interviews with the competitor’s customers, former employees and business relationships of competitors. In addition, we use rigorous analysis based on primary and secondary research information to drive a data-driven action plan

 

FSI’s value-added is to assist our clients to understand and react to:

  • Prospects who considered our client and chose a competitor

  • Customers our client did not get the opportunity to compete for

  • How competitors sell against our client

  • What customers most value from competitors relative to our client

  • Product, marketing, sales, pricing, initiatives of competitors

  • Relative capabilities, costs and investments of competitors

  • How competitors will most likely react to client initiatives: “War Gaming” and “Growth Strategy Workshops”

Competitive Advantage

Strategic Valuation

FSI conducts strategic valuations to assist clients with major decisions regarding preparation for sale, partnering, financing, acquisition, portfolio optimization, etc. Clients requesting valuation assistance may be working on either a “buy side” or “sell side” decision.

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Strategic valuations are based on market sizing, revenue forecasts, business modeling, and financial analysis. The focus of our valuation work may be on our client’s company, other companies, or elements of a company, (i.e., business units, products, and intellectual property).

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FSI’s valuation work includes:

  • Building financial and operating forecasts, considering resources invested to date, IP contributions, management capabilities, etc.

  • Pressure-testing assumptions, e.g., pricing, through primary research

  • Researching analogs and/or best practices

  • Analyzing alternative values based on:

    • Comparable companies

    • Industry transactions

    • Royalty agreements

    • Risk-weighted discounted cash flows

  • Developing opportunities to increase value driven by insights from our analysis

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FSI’s strategic valuations are developed to both support client decision-making and inform potential investors, acquirers, and partners.

Stategic Valuation

Strategic Positioning & Value Proposition

Customers always have real needs and multiple choices. Marketplace success depends on achieving a competitively differentiated positioning, linked to the customer’s needs and overall “requirements to serve”. High-impact strategic positioning conveys:

  • Product capabilities in the context of solving customer needs

  • Pricing in the context of cost-effective

  • Services, training, purchase experience, etc. aligned with customer preferences

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FSI assists clients with the development of competitively differentiated positioning based upon primary market research with our client’s customers, prospective customers, and the customers of competitors. From that research, we extract the multiple factors on which purchase decisions are based to determine their relative importance. Our output is both an Economic Value Proposition (why cost-effective) and a Performance Value Proposition (how to meet customer needs). FSI then integrates the Economic and Performance Value propositions to provide the overall strategic positioning which becomes fundamental to both marketing and sales.

Strategic Positioning & Value Proposition

Go-to-Market Strategy

The healthcare and technology sectors provide an ongoing flow of research developments. Technical/scientific discoveries are not equivalent to business innovation. Significant work is required to determine how best to commercialize innovations. Among the critical issues to consider:

  • Feasible end-market applications

  • Technical, non-technical, and economic requirements for success

  • Advantages to pursuing independently versus with a partner

  • Prioritization of market opportunities

  • How best to accomplish the stages of commercialization

 

FSI has assisted thousands of innovators (corporate labs, universities, government labs, medical schools, and entrepreneurs) with commercialization plans and assistance. We have helped formed companies, created licensing deals, established joint ventures, and helped to rationalize R&D portfolios.

Go to Market Strategy

Partnering & Transaction Advisory

Healthcare and technology businesses have an insatiable need for innovation. That enormous need drives companies of every size to seek strategic partnerships to combine capabilities and/or resources for innovation success. Effective partnering requires thoughtful prospective partner selection and vetting, delineating the relative value of alternative partners, and determining the appropriate business aspects of the relationship.

 

FSI facilitates strategic partnering employing our experience, extensive industry contacts and situation-specific research.

 

FSI assists companies with major fund-raising efforts:

  • Creating documentation to best communicate the business opportunity, capital needs/use, valuation and return potential

 

FSI also assists companies in executing private placement capital raises:

  • Developing curated investor lists leveraging FSI’s decades of experience in venture capital and strategy consulting

  • Soliciting investor interest, facilitating meetings, coordinating due diligence efforts, advising on term sheet negotiations and closing documents

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Partnering & Funding Strategy
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