Business Challenge

Publicly traded utility company continued to miss operating targets and budgets for four years. They also missed their pension fund contribution threshold and needed new insights into the problems in order to find new and effective solutions.

Insights

The Eye-Openers

The primary diagnosis cut across 4 key themes that were big eye-openers:

Culture
They had a traditional culture, that followed the rules and did things by the book, which was an asset for those reacting to emergency response situations. However, leadership needed to shift their thinking outside the box to be more performance driven, profit and budget oriented in order to lead the company forward and achieve operating targets.
People
Leadership was not fully aligned around a performance culture, with a mixture of performance-based and more traditional individuals who were also not aligned around key business value drivers.
Performance
Customer service was highly rated, but often suffered from outdated processes and equipment, making it harder to do their jobs and taking more time/money.
Financial
The leadership team was singularly focused on operations and had very limited focus on earnings.
The Outcomes
The Results are Clear

With the new solutions they were able to implement via the LEADERSCAPE® platform, the company realized:

  • Increased profit margin by 11%
  • Revamped internal training to focus on annual budgeting and goals process
  • Implementation of business plan yielded EBITDA increase from 15% to 20%
  • Highlighted effective rapid emergency response in company marketing programs
  • Dramatic improvement in internal and external communications and transparency