Book excerpts - Ch3(E21): Last minute rescue

Managing Growth and Reducing Stress: The Outcome of Effective Problem-Solving

When I met Ori, a CEO of a fintech startup, his company was two years old and had already burned three million dollars of investment without generating much growth or traction. Their former CEO, a decorated manager, has spent most of the budget on marketing and operations. But the company didn't take off. So now Ori took the reins but was operating on fumes. He had three hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and a team of 5 people, to save their venture.

Ori asked me to help with their product innovation strategy. But, as soon as he told me what was going on with the company, it was clear that although there were product challenges, there were also many other issues regarding the business model, sales tactics, marketing focus, operations, and customer service. An enterprise design approach was needed to organize and integrate all the business elements together. So I started telling Ori about enterprise design practices[https://www.enterprisedesign.io/enterprise-design/]. Ori was interested but acknowledged that his attention was limited due to the stress of the ongoing operations and that things needed to get practical really quickly.

Next, I scheduled an ideation session with Ori. I knew I needed to bring up the need to rethink the enterprise and its entities. Still, I knew I had to do it in a way that would encourage Ori to understand the issues, not accept an expert opinion.

I started asking Ori questions that would allow me to draft a GAP sketch. We started the conversation by inquiring about Ori's Goals for himself and the company. He had ten months to acquire enough customers to convince his investors to refrain from pulling the plug on the company. Next, we talked about what they have achieved so far. The company had some clients, set up its sales operations, organized backbone IT systems to support customer success, and ran its marketing efforts at full steam. Ori confessed that finding customers was an expensive task and that he wanted to improve the conversion rates of leads to customers. Finally, we talked about the different tasks and projects that the company was engaged in. All this time, I sketched a GAP sketch on a piece of paper in front of me. It was a basic sketch, but it included the Goals, Achievements, and Projects Ori had just told me about. But it was enough to reflect back to Ori the essence of his story about the company's states, desires, and activities.

As I showed Ori the GAP sketch, I said - "This is what you just told me, without all decorations… Now, what is the problem that you see here?"