Rapidly design and optimize multiple business plans pre-market to determine the best one.
Innovation is hard and success rates are low. To reduce the risk of launching a new product or service, many companies have implemented a “launch planning” process. However, these processes have become inflexible and slow. Oftentimes, the process of aligning teams and management to a plan can take even more time than creating the launch plan itself.
Given this, people often look at the Entrepreneur with envy because they see them launching quickly, learning and pivoting as they go, but know their own company, like most, is not built to be able to learn and pivot once in market.
If the first plan doesn’t work, they don’t get a second chance because the organization moves on to the next innovation.
Over the past 20+ years working with business leaders at companies of all sizes, the team at Frehner-Jens has come to understand the strengths and challenges of both sides and have developed a way to combine the best of both the Big Company and the Entrepreneur’s approach: Fast-Forward®.
The Fast-Forward® approach brings together the Entrepreneur’s ability to learn and adapt in market and the Big Company’s strength in rigorous planning and pre-market research to enable a team to rapidly design, research and optimize multiple plans — commonly referred to as “pivots” — pre-market to determine the best plan to build a big and successful business.
Learn more about how we can use the four phases of Fast-Forward® to help create the best business plan to unlock the full potential of your innovation faster:
Value-Based Landscape
One of the most important components of building a new business is finding the right target buyer group. By using the Value-Based Landscape, we’ll identify the most valuable prospective buyers of your innovation — well before going to market.
Value-based targeting combines the Big Company’s quantitative, population-based analysis with the Entrepreneur’s focus to find the most profitable customers as quickly as possible. And, beyond identifying the highest-potential target buyer group, the Value-Based Landscape will also uncover key business-building insights to guide critical decisions on the business building blocks (e.g. concept, product and price) to enable designing stronger Business Blueprints.
Business Blueprints
Business Blueprints enable us to collaboratively design and evaluate more ways to build a new business in less time. Our approach combines the discipline of the Big Company’s rigorous and detailed business plan with the Entrepreneur’s “sketch on a napkin” to understand how different building blocks of the future business could best fit together.
By creating multiple Business Blueprints, we’ll be able to explore the divergent thinking of your team, which ultimately, leads to stronger thinking on how to build a new business and a more engaged commercialization team.
Activity-Based Prototypes
Using Activity-Based Prototypes, we quantify the financial potential of a blueprint, while understanding which business-building activities drive the most value.
This approach combines the Big Company’s traditional profit and loss forecast with the Entrepreneur’s practical in-market understanding of how time and money spent on specific activities results in sales, profits and cash in the bank. Using Activity-Based Prototypes, we’re able to deliver clarity on how investment in activities (e.g. driving target buyer awareness) translates to performance on those activities (e.g. the cost per aware target buyer) and into financial return (e.g. project NPV).
Launch Simulations
By simulating the launch of a new business thousands of times using the Activity-Based Prototype, we quantify the range of financial outcomes (including revenues, profits, cash flow and overall NPV) and the key activities that drive financial value.
With the understanding of financial potential and key drivers of value, your team will be able to make better decisions on which blueprint(s) to pursue, adapt or eliminate. And, for the blueprints that are pursued, you’ll know where to focus resources to unlock the full upside potential.
Designing your Successful Business Plan
Using Fast-Forward®, we’ll work with your team to design the best plan to build your new business — with the value of the best plan being significantly greater (in fact, on average across our projects, the “best plan” is 2.5x greater than the starting plan).
