We help purpose-driven leaders align their organization around a vision, strategy & story that maximizes value + impact. 

Our STORYdriven approach to strategy is unique, but it really shouldn’t be for 3 simple reasons:
1) if you’re planning to raise money (or attract talent) you need a fabulous story, but your product story isn’t going to cut it… you need a strategic story… because: 
2) … investors (and talent) aren’t buying your product, they’re buying your vision. To attract the best talent and the best investors, you’re going to need a riveting ‘TED-level’ keynote that helps them ‘see what you see’ (from your epic insight & compelling vision to your genius strategy for maximizing impact and capturing value along the way)… but:
3) … no matter how compelling your story is, if the way your organization thinks and executes doesn’t align, you’re going to lose credibility (and nothing kills a deal faster than that)

We’ve helped over 200 companies hone their strategy & supercharge their story… we can help you too.

THE FASTER YOU GROW THE MORE IMPORTANT STRATEGIC STORYTELLING BECOMES
why?... because, while market growth is critical, it doesn’t guarantee value growth. That’s a PROBLEM, because it’s nearly impossible to attract top investors or talent if your story doesn’t convince them that you’re on a clear path to increasing company value (because that’s how they get rewarded for helping you succeed).

… AND NOW THAT THE FREE-MONEY ERA IS OVER, STRATEGIC STORYTELLING MATTERS MORE
why?… because the investor mindset has shifted and returns are now priority#1. That means that if you’re not on a clear (and defensible) path to growing the value of your company, you’re going to find it almost impossible to attract the money (& talent) that you need bring your vision to life. In this era, your story needs to demonstrate both market growth and value capture. To do that, you need alignment on:
a) what success looks like,
b) where value will get created… and
c) what you need to execute on to capture (and defend) your fair share.

FASTER EXECUTION… THE UNEXPECTED BONUS
Aligning your organization on these 3 things is a major unlock and will immediately accelerate execution, because everyone will be pulling in the same direction.

HOW WE WORK
Our practice is focused on digital innovation across multiple sectors (but the bulk of our work is focused on digital health & wellness innovation).

WHERE WE FIT… most of our clients are digital-first and growing fast. Most are post A-round, but the importance of value-strategy / story for raising investment means we often help with investor readiness ahead of a raise. We also work with innovation teams inside enterprise and with corporate innovation initiatives more broadly.

OUR JOB… is to help you align your leadership team and execution trajectory to maximize value + impact, but while we’re at it, we also help you develop an internal capability for agile strategy to help your entire organization maximize agility and investor readiness.

FIVE ARENAS:

When you boil it all down, most of our work falls into five areas:

1.ALIGN ON WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE… proven frameworks combined with facilitated discussions to help you and your leadership team remove ambiguity about the end-state. You’ll refine your thesis on how the forces of disruption are unfolding, figure out where the value will get created and decide how you will capture (and defend) your fair share. LEARN MORE ABOUT VALUE CAPTURE HERE

2. SUPERCHARGE YOUR STORY… it’s not possible to bring your vision to life on your own.. you’re going to need to attract talent, and that takes money. Your product story is not going good enough for convincing the best talent and best investors to come on this journey with you, because they need to see what you see and find it so compelling that they want to help you bring your vision to life. Our STORYdriven framework is a ‘strategy-first’ approach to ensuring that your vision and strategy are easy to understand and insanely compelling. It’s astonishingly effective, and we know that because we’ve helped over 200 leadership teams hone their story and they’ve told us over-and-over that our Story-Driven approach is a 10 out of 10. LEARN MORE ABOUT STORYdriven HERE

3. ALIGN EXECUTION… to maximize value and impact, your past milestones, your current priorities and your future roadmap all need to align with the story. We use proven frameworks to help you build that alignment and bake-in the agility needed to keep alignment when shift happens (because it does). LEARN MORE ABOUT ALIGNED EXECUTION HERE

4. INVESTOR READINESS… the requirements for investor packaging are well understood (pitch :: documentation :: comparables etc.). We are able to help reduce the time and effort through a combination of templates & samples and decades of experience. LEARN MORE ABOUT INVESTOR READINESS HERE

5. DEVELOP YOUR OWN STRATEGY OFFICE…  eventually, every successful company creates a strategy office to help them rise above the tyranny of the urgent, absorb fresh learnings and adjust strategy & execution to stay ahead of the change-curve (and the competition). An important part of our mandate is to provide the frameworks and coaching needed to help you develop an Agile Strategy capability in your organization. We call it O.H.3 (Office of Horizon-3) and our STORYdriven approach is a remarkably effective way (time & cost) to deeply integrate agile strategy into your organization. LEARN MORE ABOUT OFFICE O.H.3 HERE

WE ARE ALL-IN ON ALIGNMENT
As strategists, we are there to help you figure out what opportunities and risks are unfolding and where to place your bets. We’re good at that, but the truth is that the best strategy in the world is worthless if the folks in your organization don’t buy-in. In fact, execution grinds to a halt when one or two folks on the team think they’ve ‘figured it out’ on their own, because that inevitably leads to a ‘do it my way’ attitude (the ultimate culture killer).
That’s why our #1 priority is to help you align your leadership team and your organization on three critical things:
1. how are the forces unfolding and what risks and opportunities does that bring
2. where will value get created and how will your organization will capture and defend it’s fair share
3. what does success look like, and what execution progress is required to prove that you are on-path

WHY? … because we deeply care about entrepreneurs and we think they deserve their fair share of the value they create. The thing is… most startups don’t go up in value and that’s a tragedy. After years of strategy work, we’ve become absolutely convinced that the secret is to align your organizations ‘thinking’ & ‘doing’ with a plan to capture value (there is literally no other way to get there).

… AND OUR OBSESSION WITH STORY (DON’T EVEN GET US STARTED)
Storytelling is central to everything, but we’re not talking about the fluffy / marketing stuff. We mean a complete story-arc, from insight & vision to impact and value capture, but simplified, so the whole world can see what you see (and want it).

WHY? … because if the world can’t see what you do (ie: they just don’t get it’), you’re doomed. The thing is, it’s not their fault. As innovators, it’s our job to simplify the story and get it into a form that is easy to grasp and so darned compelling that people want to help you bring your vision to life.
We call it STORYdriven… and yeah… we’re all-in. LEARN MORE ABOUT STORYdriven HERE.

STAGE SPECIFIC

We operate across all stages (from ideation through liquidity event) and adjust the the mix of services we provide to match your priorities, budget, culture & cadence.

PROVEN FRAMEWORKS (and formal artefacts) are immensely helpful, both for initial alignment building as well as downstream agility. We bring expertise, frameworks and a deep library of samples to draw from, but every situation is unique, so everything we do is custom-fit to match your stage. Want to learn more about the frameworks we use, LETS TALK

WE’RE CONSTANTLY LEARNING (AND SHARING)
We believe that synthesizing what we learn and sharing it openly helps innovators, but it also helps us because the feedback and discussions inevitably push our thinking to the next level.  For all of these reasons, we routinely create and share video briefings on topics that feel important for innovators, and why we co-host ‘THINKsummit’ events with our clients (and their customers).

If you’re interested in pushing your thinking (and ours), why not join the conversation. We’ll make it easy for you to access our hot-topic briefs, join (or co-host) a THINKsummit etc.  We promise to keep the value high and the number of interruptions low. Of course, if you’d rather just have a discussion, that’s OK too… lets talk jmcdonald@rampworth.com

FOR MORE INFO
jmcdonald@rampworth.com