The Power of Fast for High-Growth Companies

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure on businesses and brands to evolve and implement strategies in shorter and shorter time frames. As a brand strategy firm, we discovered that many of our high-growth companies, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, needed a much more agile approach to addressing the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a four-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them. Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast. Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important. The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Step one is Immersion: a week-long intelligence gathering and analysis phase. Week two is On-site : our team working in partnership with your core team to diagnose your key challenges, selecting the most pressing needs to focus on, exploring options, and then aligning around and work collaboratively to refine strategies, actions, and communications to achieve those objectives (it is intensely iterative). Weeks three and four are focused on producing the deliverables, which are finished at the Emotive Brand studio. At the end of the four-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns. The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process during the On-site Phase. The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers. Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation. Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Contact us to discuss how it can work with your business. Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy firm. Originally published at www.emotivebrand.com on April 21, 2016.