Launch: This organization staked out two specific unclaimed areas of the telecommunications industry and has continued to focus the resources of the entire organization around these initiatives. For each area, it invested in understanding key trends and how those would affect industry players. Our client then developed a unique point of view for each market segment and developed solutions to support those points of view.

Ignite: It has been conducting aggressive market ignition and community-building campaigns on a daily basis for ten years. These have included key meetings with top executives and influencers in the industry. Company representatives speak at major conferences and frequently publish articles in trade journals. All of this market activity revolves around the two key points of view the company is promoting, each of which can be summed up in a single two-word phrase.

Navigate: The company helps clients navigate the journey toward the vision with robust service offerings. It does this through a sophisticated account management and service line matrix structure that allows one group to serve the day-to-day needs of individual clients, while another group leverages specialized skills to clients across the global market. The company is also very clear about the roles it does and does not play with clients; therefore, it has strong alliance relationships with other vendors who fill those voids.

Accelerate: And most importantly, the company continually accelerates, watching its back while also looking out toward the future. This organization invests heavily in competitive assessment, market assessment and strategic planning activity to ensure it understands and can meet changing market needs. In response, it has reinvented itself numerous times over the course of a decade to ensure that it sustains its unique position in the market place.

Speciality Training and Consulting Firm

One of our clients was acquired, because of its go-to status, by a larger firm building up its capabilities. The partners realized a 300% gain in the value of their equity. The larger firm expects to go public in the next year, at which time these partners are anticipating an additional ten-fold increase in the value of their holdings.

Launch: This company has a clearly defined scope and has a specific, unique methodology that solves a specific problem for a specific business circumstance. In the 12 years prior to its acquisition, the owners maintained a clear focus on their goals: superior client satisfaction, modest revenue growth and aggressive profit growth.

Ignite: In keeping with its goals, it ignited the market by developing strong relationships with heavily influential industry executives who helped them build momentum in specific market segments.

Navigate: It delivers a best-of-breed service offering that consists of training (in the methodology); consulting services to help clients apply the methodology; and alliance partnerships with software companies whose tools support the methodology. It has built and maintains relationships with a community of believers who have used the approach and proactively evangelize it in the marketplace on this company's behalf.

Accelerate: It constantly monitors the market place and modifies its offerings to stay ahead of potential competition and respond to client feedback on the effectiveness of the approach.

Systems Integrator

One of our clients went from being an unknown start-up in its network technology space to recently being named "the leader in the next generation" of its service category by an influential industry analyst group. The analyst said in published report to the industry that this organization is "the first professional services company to make a significant customer-facing move into the next generation [of its service category]." The industry analyst firm predicted that this organization will be the continued market leader because of this early commitment.

Launch: This organization realized it could not gain a foothold against an entrenched competitor who already clearly dominated the broader market. It conducted in-depth research to understand the inherent challenges certain trends would present to the industry and how to leverage its own company strengths. It determined that its competitor's strength in the current market of legacy systems would become a weakness in the future; it targeted that weakness by developing business process integration solutions that a particular sub-segment will need once the legacy systems become obsolete. It developed a point of view about what these companies will need to do to prepare for the upheaval this obsolescence will create.

Ignite: Once it had a clear point of view and solution for the legacy problem, this organization set about to motivate the market to look out on the horizon and anticipate the changes ahead. This market had traditionally not been one to move quickly or radically. Our client was out to change this. Through an aggressive campaign of publishing, speaking and one-to-one meetings with top industry executives, this organization brought visibility and a sense of urgency to a serious market issue and its solution for addressing it.

Navigate: This company had to put many pieces in place in order to be able to deliver the integrated vision it was advocating to the industry. As a service provider selling to a market that values software solutions, it was critical to develop a fully-integrated offering that included strong alliances with point solution software providers. This company also initiated a rigorous recruiting campaign to hire high-level executives in the industry who understood how to bridge the gap between the complex legacy systems and the future vision. Most importantly, it gained major credibility by implementing the solution with two highly-respected industry players who embraced the vision.

Accelerate: This company will be a dominant provider for only as long as it can sustain its position. It now faces the challenge of maintaining its lead as other competitors enter the race. It plans to do this through three major initiatives: 1) invest heavily in understanding how current market forces are going to impact the market and its participants; 2) develop a base of loyal clients and alliance partners who are heavily vested in this firm's success; 3) establish an interdependent community among these clients and alliance partners, so they participate in this firm's quest to continually enhance the vision.

For more information regarding our success stories: email us at success@linagroup.com, or call us at (415) 392-1800.

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