Summary:
Clouded by uncertainty in their growth trajectory amid a rapidly evolving federal health market, a federal healthcare company looked to Pinkston Strategy to help define a path forward. We focused on designing a customer- and capability-centered framework to define a 5-year path to market expansion and to achieve ambitious revenue goals. Within months of completing the growth strategy, the federal healthcare services company has focused efforts to achieve ambitious revenue targets, taken steps to restructure the organization to enable the growth strategy, and boosted targeted federal and state agency engagement in pursuit of upcoming opportunities.
Background:
A federal healthcare company, HealthCo*, experienced substantial opportunistic growth since their inception by providing valuable services to clients and quickly responding to health needs across federal agencies. However, as federal and state health markets continued to evolve and existing contract revenue stagnated, the path to continuous growth became less certain.
The HealthCo executive team asked Pinkston Strategy for support in developing a new growth strategy that would solidify their revenue base in core capabilities while supporting an ambitious pivot into adjacent agencies and transformational capability areas. We knew that driving revenue-generating transformation in the federal healthcare industry would require unified internal direction, increased customer intimacy, and strategic expansion of HealthCo services and capabilities. Together, we set out to design a 5-year growth strategy that clearly addressed customer engagement, capability investment, and revenue generation.
The Pinkston Strategy Approach:
We applied a 4-stage approach to develop a 5-year growth strategy in partnership with HealthCo executives.
Stage 1: Define the Possible
Internal Landscape: We performed a current state maturity assessment across HealthCo business units to determine greatest organizational strengths, design unique capability frameworks, validate short-term priorities, and assess long-term financial health.
External Landscape: A thorough market assessment was conducted to identify high potential market opportunity areas measured against a standard set of criteria co-developed with HealthCo.
Stage 2: Bet on the Achievable
We facilitated a two-day executive offsite with HealthCo executives to synthesize internal and external landscape assessment results, prioritize federal market opportunity areas, and define overarching strategic objectives to support prioritized opportunity areas. Following the growth workshop, these strategic growth objectives became the high-level growth strategy that would determine resource allocations and financial investments over the next 3 – 5 years.
Stage 3: Set the Direction
Growth objectives were further validated with key HealthCo leaders and expanded upon to develop an actionable roadmap to achieve them. Within each growth objective, the Pinkston team partnered with stakeholders across HealthCo business units to design 10 initiatives focused on expanding HealthCo federal footprint through customer entry and service expansion. Each initiative was supported by a detailed action plan, a 5-year revenue projection, and an investment overview considering both resource and technology investment needs.
Stage 4: Mobilize the Organization
Finally, Pinkston leveraged their communications capabilities to develop a comprehensive communication strategy to help the executive team communicate a unified growth story, both externally and internally. At Pinkston, we believe a strategy is only as powerful as its ability to inspire the organization at all levels – our approach emphasizes the need to bring not only the leadership team along for the journey but the entire organization.
Results:
The impact of the growth strategy was immediately tangible in the way HealthCo operates everyday:
Unified Direction: The Leadership Team is aligned on the path to achieve 2x revenue in 5 years and has established an initiative management office to track progress, formalize partnerships, and minimize risk while realizing growth ambitions.
Strategic Customer Engagement: Business Unit Leads are proactively engaging new federal and state agencies and customers in alignment with defined growth objectives for discrete opportunity pursuit and strategic demand generation.
Pipeline Expansion: Business Unit growth teams have expanded pipelines to manage 5-year pursuits of known opportunities in support of the growth strategy roadmap, ultimately driving operations strategy and strategic customer engagement.
*We hold our clients’ confidentiality to the highest respect. Company names are artificial, but the impact is tangible.