Conducting Executive Business Strategy Planning Workshops for a Leading Produce Company
Clarkston Consulting recently partnered with a produce company to conduct executive business strategy planning workshops. Read a synopsis of the project below or download the full case study.
Download the Executive Business Strategy Planning Workshops Case Study Here
This client is a leading fresh produce company, primarily involved in the sourcing and distribution of fresh produce in North America. They are continuing to evolve their business, focusing specifically on how they can be customer-obsessed, consumer-centric, and use data-driven insights to unlock growth and innovation. Their CEO was looking to build and refine future plans for what markets they play in, the product portfolio they offer, and their investments for the next several years.
To continue their transformation and build on success, they engaged Clarkston Consulting to facilitate a series of strategic planning workshops with their executive team to refine their strategy and priorities for the coming years. The team leveraged the Clarkston Enterprise Destination Mapping methodology to help guide the discussions as well as tapped into insights discovered from previous work that utilized Clarkston’s Bring the Future to the Present methodology.
Clarkston jumped in with an in-depth working session in preparation for the workshops to conduct a deeper dive into supporting documentation, key topics, and facilitation methods. Clarkston then facilitated two in-person, one-day workshops, and developed and refined plans for the future assortment, key markets and channels, and core customer strategies. The team also reviewed plans for continued technology transformation and digitization across the business.
During the workshops, Clarkston and the client identified how to amplify pieces of the current strategy that are aligned with future ambitions, as well as which activities, initiatives, and/or processes were no longer aligned and needed to be removed or stopped to reallocate resources and best serve consumers and customers.
Among the outputs from the series of workshops, a product assessment framework was developed to more quickly evaluate opportunities to achieve future goals and make informed, focused decisions based on agreed-upon qualities that are a priority to the organization. In addition, the team put together a roadmap of special initiatives over the upcoming years that will reinforce the client’s commercial differentiation and enable them to test and learn from innovative new products, value-added services, channels, and business models while creating a sustained competitive advantage in the market. These two outputs fed into a comprehensive strategy refresh for the client’s board, giving them collateral to be leveraged to inform stakeholders on the revised business strategy and actionable next steps.
