SME Growth Blueprint

Your plan for building a more efficient, more scalable, more profitable & more valuable business.

1. Audit

We work with your team to understand your business's vision, value, customers, challenges, & opportunities.

2. Analysis

We apply our value creation framework to understand how technology can be used at your business for maximum impact.

3. Action

You receive an actionable, prioritised blueprint for building a more efficient, more scalable, more profitable & more valuable business.

What Is It?

An SME Growth Blueprint is a detailed and actionable plan that identifies the tech related investments your business should make.

It is designed to achieve 4 key outcomes:

  1. Maximise the operational efficiency of your business
  2. Increase the scalability of your business with smart automation
  3. Grow your top line revenue through digital innovations and value adds
  4. Boost your business valuation multiple to amplify the value of business growth

Your blueprint has a fixed scope of work, a fixed price, and can be delivered in under 1 month.

Who Is It For?

The Blueprint has been designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses with the following characteristics:

  • Motivated to achieve rapid value creation
  • Historic underinvestment in technology
  • Lack of internal tech knowledge
  • Trading for 10+ years
  • £5-50M Revenue
  • Profitable

Graham has been an invaluable asset from the word go. He has helped us to build and implement a strategy to make a big technological leap as a business to work more efficiently and improve our offering to clients.
-- Matthew Houliston, Serve Legal Ltd

1. Audit

Aim

The audit will help us to understand your business's motives, vision, customers, challenges, roadblocks, frustrations and opportunities. It will reveal details about your IT landscape and approach to making technology investments. This information is invaluable when it comes to designing the best version of your business.

Process

  1. You will receive a questionnaire that is to be circulated for completion by key team members - the "Project Team".
  2. The questionnaire will request qualitative data, quantitative data and process diagrams.
  3. Before starting, the Project Team will meet with us virtually to ask questions and seek guidance on completing the questionnaire.
  4. Responses are reviewed and clarifying questions are asked where necessary.
  5. We meet as a group to review the responses and explore key themes in more detail.

Timings

The Audit phase should be completed within 5-10 days.

Grahams expertise cannot be overstated! He was incredibly valuable in guiding us through a new technical project and ensuring the project was to be delivered to our spec and in budget. He's a very rare case of top technical knowledge, commercial accumen and crafting 'laymen explanations' to complex issues.
-- Matthew Walsh, IMRG

2. Analysis

Analyse the audit results using our 4-step, "CIAI" value creation framework.

  1. Consolidate
  2. Integrate
  3. Automate
  4. Innovate

For full details of the CIAI framework click here, but here are the highlights:

Consolidate - Your IT estate needs clean foundations in order to realise full value from modern technologies.

The goals of the Consolidate phase are:

  1. A clean foundation for your IT estate
  2. Elimination of wasted spend that can be diverted to investment
  3. Time savings due to optimisations, simplifications and better supplier relations

Integrate - Your IT estate needs to be connected, with data flowing freely and accurately between your various systems with data silos eliminated.

The goals of the Integrate phase are:

  1. Define the value that can be created by integrating your IT systems
  2. Understand how difficult, risky, expensive, time consuming those integrations are likely to be
  3. Identify which systems should be integrated (spoiler - it might not be all of them)

Automate - You can leverage your integrated IT estate by automating key business processes. But remember, a bad process is a bad process even if you automate it.

The goals of the Automate phase are:

  1. Understand what processes could be automated
  2. Narrow that to the processes that should be automated
  3. Identify appropriate tools and technologies for implementing automations

Innovate - this step is about identifying asymmetric technology investments. That is, investments your business can make for uncapped rewards but limited downside.

The goals of the Innovate phase are:

  1. Finding opportunities to sell more to existing customers
  2. Expanding your reach to new markets
  3. Disrupting your business model through product or operating model innovations

Timings

The Analysis phase takes 5 days.

Graham is without a doubt one of the best consultants I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Always a useful thought, direction, and solution available. Incredibly personable, and an asset to any digital transformation project. I sincerely hope our paths cross again in the future and until then... If you're considering Graham to support your business efforts, I cannot recommend him highly enough. Do it, you won't be disappointed.
-- Joseph Symons, Actegy Ltd

3. Action

  1. We deliver your blueprint for building a more efficient, more scalable, more profitable and more valuable business.
  2. Your blueprint will include:
    • Gap analysis between your current state and potential future state
    • The roadmap to achieving that future state broken down into the 4 pillars of the CIAI framework
    • The top 3 priorities you should act on now
  3. A 2 hour workshop session to review the blueprint and define your next steps

At this point, you own the blueprint.

Do with it as you please.

Run with it internally, take it to a 3rd party, or retain us to execute the plan.

I have worked with Graham on a number of system integration projects over the last 3 years, Graham has always been extremely knowledgeable, diligent and excellent at producing and interpreting detailed specifications. I know I can rely on Graham to help out if and when issues arise.
-- Denis Jenkins, The Scouts Association

What Makes the SME Growth Blueprint So Effective?

There are several moving parts that all compliment one another:

  • By creating product innovations and value adds, more revenue can be earned
  • By making your business more scaleable, more revenue can be earned
  • By making your business more efficient, a larger percentage of that revenue lands on the bottom line
  • By making your business tech enabled, and potentially layering in some digital first products/services your business can appear less risky and more "exciting" to investors
  • By making your business more attractive to investors you can secure a higher valuation multiple
  • Valuing your business with larger profits using a larger multiple has a profound impact on your business valuation

Ready to get Started?

We take on 2 Blueprints per quarter.

Book your intro call to reserve your start date.

Frequently asked questions

What is an SME Growth Blueprint?

An SME Growth Blueprint is a detailed report that tells you have to evolve your current business into one that is more efficient, more scalable, more profitable and more valuable.

How long does it take to create the SME Growth Blueprint?

The blueprint can be delivered in under one month, but that is dependent on your team being able to engage in a timely fashion during the Audit phase.