A British £100m manufacturer
Growth through Innovation
This is a story of a successful manufacturing business that had retained profitability and stable sales, but whose net growth had stalled.
EXO's long-term relationship combined our Executive Outsourcing, Innovation & Strategy and Venture Leadership services.
Executive Outsourcing
As an initial diversification strategy our client had acquired a smaller manufacturer using an alternative material for their products. EXO directed this operation on an interim basis and oversaw not only the integration into the main business but also relocated the whole factory into a new location.
Strategy and Innovation
Seeking further growth we deployed a programme to generate growth and new opportunities in markets immediately adjacent and relevant to the core business.
Our work here was built around our bespoke Innovation Methodology. Extensively networking, we created access to a wide range of available Intellectual Property and start-up ventures. From these we selected opportunities that met our adjacency criteria, and selected differing modes of investment, collaboration or control to take them forward.
Venture Leadership
In this programme our ventures required close collaboration, cooperation and support with existing leadership teams. In other cases the EXO team stepped in to run the venture. We took full operational control, including IP development, market development strategy, sales, manufacturing and also planning and fund raising.
We initially used development capital provided by our client until the ventures were mature and well proven enough to secure external investment. At this stage we accessed networks of private investors, crowd funding and institutional finance to capitalise ventures for their next stages of growth.
Additionally where existing leadership teams needed more support than initially expected, the EXO team took over operations, organised restructuring and directed the ventures forward with renewed focus.
121 Mentoring
Richard Strange, Director & Founder, Deeply Digital
’’… Bernard’s involvement helped us double in size. He has a pragmatic and hands on approach to business issues. He listened and worked with us to identify areas that were holding us back and made implementation suggestions. Bernard’s style makes growing the company feel achievable, manageable and planned. He has a very calm, encouraging and considered style. He facilitates us to be a better, stronger and healthier company – and more confident about the future.’’
Innovation Workshops
Sharing and Developing
The EXO team have delivered innovation workshops to a wide spread of organisations such as universities, industry trade bodies, Local Enterprise Partnerships and private corporations.
In our work with a Local Enterprise Partnership we were challenged with testing and demonstrating effective approaches to increasing business innovation in key growth industries.
Through a highly productive and engaging series of workshops we worked with over 40 SMEs, exploring their barriers to innovation, what opportunities they saw for growth, and how best to apply innovation methods in their industries. Feedback included:
'Lively discussion and helpful tools'
'I return to the office full of ideas and confident changes can be made'
'A good team of presenters who have real innovations experience'
