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RA Consultants has seen significant growth over the last few years, but not without facing some challenges. This led to changes in key positions, hiring the right way, and creating a strategic plan for growth.
MLA Principal Doug Leconey began serving as a Financial Advisor to RA in 2017. Below is the last in a series of four stories that describe that engagement and what it accomplished. You can visit the RA Consultants’ client page to read the whole story.
Out of the Business Redeemed Process, Doug made a few recommendations. The first was to begin developing John’s team so RA was less dependent on MLA for the day-to-day financials. This led to the second recommendation, which was that John complete a strategic plan. This would provide the essential Roadmap John and RA needed to execute on his Dream.
Doug guided John’s team through a strategic planning process in 2019. That plan helped John and Doug create a Roadmap of how to get to John’s long-term goals and objectives.
“Once John saw it laid out it, it gave him a sense of direction,” Doug recalls. “John was able to start thinking about the other things that were important to him.” This Roadmap was essential to create the Courage to stay focused, and measure progress toward the Reward, the last steps of the Business Redeemed process.
“Strategic planning provides a focus for the organization and its people, defining what is important,” Doug observes. The process involved in developing a strategic plan is valuable to building a goal-oriented, high-performing, and cohesive top management team.
Team-building, brainstorming, and in-depth discussions are as important to the organization as the plan itself. “Perhaps most importantly,” Doug states, “a strategic plan defines how the precious resources of the organization are going to be allocated or applied in a manner that helps ensure success in the future.”
After completing the Strategic Plan, John and Doug could begin to work together on allocating the resources needed to follow the plan and the metrics that would measure their progress.
Things are well underway. John is working through many staffing improvements and Doug is preparing to transition into a purely strategic advisory role. And he was there when COVID hit, quickly helping John assess what steps he needed to take. “Doug helped us prepare the PPP application” John recalls, “and that was a big help.”
At Doug’s encouragement, John has also established a Board of Advisors for RA, bringing in Scott Liston, another Strategic Principal at MLA. The rest of the team has also responded to the new direction, and a better culture has formed around the strategic plan and a restructured financial system. “Having Doug and MLA come alongside is a blessing and continues to be so,” John observes. “It’s all working out great.”
MLA Provides Strategic Planning, among other finance, strategy, and solutions services.