SERVICES | Consulting

Our Expertise

Our management Coaching, Mentoring, & Consultation services focus on our clients' most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketing, organization, operations, technology and mergers & acquisitions, across all industries and geographies. We bring deep, functional expertise, but are known for our perspective: we capture value across boundaries and between the silos of any organization. We have proven a multiplier effect from optimizing the sum of the parts, not just the individual pieces.

Strategy & Organization

Customers are the source of real growth. The LANIS Group combines in-depth customer insights with practical expertise in operations and economics to help our clients create sustainable, organic growth. Applying an outside-in perspective and helping clients achieve growth are fundamental to our approach at The LANIS Group.

With our team of global experts, The LANIS Group brings depth of experience in the following areas:

Customer insights and segmentation: We help clients understand customer needs and behaviors using our approach and develop actionable segmentation from the resulting insights. We help clients define the target customer or "sweet spot"—the area of distinct advantage over competitors—to inform business decisions and investment allocation.

Product and category management: We help firms break down barriers to innovation and improve ongoing customer-led product development so their value proposition is differentiated and meets customer needs.

Pricing: We help resolve the pricing paradox—pricing is almost always the #1 profit lever, yet it remains under-developed in most companies—by building long-term pricing capabilities and capitalizing on in-year-revenue opportunities.

Customer experience: We work with companies to develop a series of positive interactions with the customer to earn their advocacy and inform consistent delivery of experiences to drive top-line growth.

Loyalty: We help companies nurture promoters—loyal customers who are more profitable, and who are active proponents of your business in good times and bad.

IT Management

Information technology should improve business results. The LANIS Group helps companies make sure it does. We look at IT issues strategically, in the broader context of our clients' business. Our experts provide an objective, independent perspective to help companies realize the full potential of their IT resources, investments and assets.

We bring a full range of IT capabilities to a variety of IT business situations, including:

IT strategy development:

Information technology helps companies transform themselves and grow their business. The LANIS Group helps clients identify the optimal future state of IT, aligned with business needs, and then works with them to develop a blueprint for implementation.

IT performance improvement: Underperforming IT hurts business performance. The LANIS Group works with companies to reduce costs, develop outsourcing and offshoring strategies that meet their needs, redesign their organization, and ensure a cost-effective application portfolio that supports innovation to deliver breakthrough IT performance improvements.

IT M&A:

IT synergies are key to successful mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and spin-offs, but too often they are overlooked early in the deal. We help companies plan and manage the changes in their systems to accommodate these changes in business structure.

IT project effectiveness:

The LANIS Group helps clients maximize the business results from major IT initiatives, including turnaround programs. We help executives evaluate the case for investment, set up projects for success, and ensure they capture value when implementing new systems and programs.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and channel effectiveness: We help companies identify quick, targeted, customized solutions as well as strategic and operational improvements to boost underperforming sales organizations.

Marketing and brand strategy: We help companies align marketing and brand strategy with overarching business objectives; ensure marketing investments are generating highest returns and reinforcing the brand positioning; and build a loyal customer base through branding that cultivates a strong, trusted image.

Loyalty: We help companies nurture promoters—loyal customers who are more profitable, and who are active proponents of your business in good times and bad.

Go-to-market strategy: We help companies build powerful, integrated go-to-market systems that build a bridge between a company’s strategy and the exceptional customer experiences that are the ultimate driver of customer advocacy and loyalty.

Sustainability

Companies have benefitted from our data-driven analysis, practical insights, and methodologies to address sustainability and corporate responsibility in their organizations. We work to ensure that sustainability efforts are anchored in business fundamentals and demonstrate a clear return on investment—and that those efforts are then firmly embedded within our clients' strategy and operations.

Our management consulting services focus on our clients' most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketing, organization, operations, technology and mergers & acquisitions, across all industries and geographies.

We bring deep, functional expertise, but are known for our perspective: we capture value across boundaries and between the silos of any organization. We have proven a multiplier effect from optimizing the sum of the parts, not just the individual pieces.

Corporate Development

Full Potential Transformations are at the core of what we've done at The LANIS Group since our founding.

While the term transformation can mean many things, we define it in the most literal sense: a cross-functional effort to alter the financial, operational and strategic trajectory of a business, with a stated goal of producing game-changing results.

Change programs can take many forms, from moderate restructurings to full-scale turnarounds, depending on a company’s needs. What our Full Potential Transformations clients all have in common is a readiness to disrupt the status quo in order to grow. In some cases, the impetus comes from a leader who wants to maintain a competitive edge or take the company and industry to fertile and uncharted territory; in others, the need arises from dire financial and competitive circumstances.

Corporate Finance

Cost & Capability Assessment

Cost & Capability Assessment The LANIS Group will work with you to understand a company's key drivers of profitability, target new sources of profit and design pragmatic, quick-hit profit improvements. Within weeks of starting a profit hunt, joint client and The LANIS Group will be piloting and rolling out improvements, and seeing very rapid gains to the bottom line.

A cost and capability assessment is focused on quickly identifying large revenue uplift, cost reduction and cash improvement opportunities that can be implemented quickly for results within the fiscal year.

We work jointly with client teams to assess opportunities across ten levels of performance spanning revenue enhancement (pricing, sales effectiveness), cost improvement (product complexity, purchasing cost, manufacturing, and supply chain), and balance sheet (net working capital). We quickly establish where the large areas of opportunity are, and prioritize those for further analysis or immediate implementation.

Sustained Cost Transformation

In the current marketplace, having a low-cost position is a key differentiator between leaders and followers. We help companies in a wide range of industries create disruptive changes in their cost position, be it to help them catch up with the industry’s cost experience curve, protect margins in spite of erosion of average selling prices, or to widen their competitive advantage.

Achieving a low-cost position is critical for most businesses both because of the obvious improvement to the bottom line, and for the ability to fund investments and growth initiatives that otherwise would be out of reach. Our clients typically use a portion of the captured savings to invest in R&D, marketing, new market entries or simply more competitive pricing.

While we many times work with companies to help them achieve functional excellence within individual areas of the organization, we unlock the most value by taking a cross-functional approach, and addressing operating problems at the nodes, or the points where business units, functions, and layers of management intersect and have to make and execute critical decisions. In our experience, this approach creates between three and four times as much value as the traditional approaches to right-sizing and functional excellence.

Cash & Capital Management

Until recently, many senior executives regarded managing cash flow and liquidity as tactical functions left to administrative managers. Yet when the global financial crisis choked off credit, it became clear that executives needed to think more strategically about cash management and capital allocation. Our perspective is that companies that aggressively manage cash and liquidity create opportunities to prosper regardless of what is happening across the broader economic landscape.

We work with clients across the liquidity spectrum. This includes helping firms with strong balance sheets improve resource deployment across lines of business to generate higher and better returns for investors. At the other extreme, it encompasses recognizing if and when an imminent cash pinch will threaten a company, and devising ways to address the issues, no matter how severe.

Companies have relied on The LANIS Group's cash and capital management expertise to help transform capital and liquidity management into a strategic platform of differential investment. Indeed, the downturn has only underscored the need for ongoing liquidity discipline and deep understanding of cash cycles. These inform the discovery of new and better ways to deploy scarce resources that strengthen business units, create desirable products, serve new geographies and meet customer needs better