BLACK CORNER CONSULTING
OVERVIEW
Black Corner Consulting addresses the critical questions facing senior executives and develops blueprints for growth and increased shareholder value. We apply the demonstrated insight and expertise to achieve an organization’s business goals, whether that involves realigning overarching strategy, or identifying how individual project units can make the greatest possible contribution to the entire organization.
Our understanding of market trends and drivers, along with our deep film / Tv industry expertise and analytical firepower, enables us to develop actionable strategies that create measurable long-term value for organizations. We tap our vast knowledge to uncover hidden opportunities and provide the evidence-based analysis executives need to make informed decisions.
We also work with senior executives to establish a framework for sustained innovation and growth. This can be anything from an incremental product / Project enhancement to capitalize on a market opportunity, to a seismic shift in a company’s visual direction and focus.
OUR GOAL
B.C.C goal is to help you level the playing field. By providing you with information, resources, and consulting services we can help you to take your project to the next level.
We drive breakthrough operating performance by helping your company define/refine where it’s going, and then assisting your company in building new ways of working to execute on that vision – those new ways of working are what B.C.C calls capabilities
STRATEGY AND OPERATIONS
Strategic insight. Deep industry experience. Rigorous analytics. Pragmatic solutions. That's what our teams bring to your most complex challenges. We bridge the gap between big ideas and execution to help you control costs, manage risk and achieve profitable growth.
CONTENT
Content is king, and today media and entertainment companies are finding content creation, aggregation, and distribution—their fundamental ecosystem—ever-evolving and morphing as new technologies come into play that disrupt traditional business models. From interactive gaming, films, music, broadcast radio, television, and print and e-publishing to live entertainment, websites, web Tv, advertising, and sports, M&E firms live or die based on how well they identify and manage trends. B.C.C. sees five major trends that are redefining media consumption. Digitization, wireless enablement, cloud computing, social media, and device proliferation are changing the media environment, often shifting the balance of power toward consumers, who now have the tools to manage and consume a nearly limitless volume of content. These technologies pose both challenges to overcome and exciting new business opportunities for M&E firms.
ACHIEVING GROWTH: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR INCREASING THE PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS
1. Strengthen the execution infrastructure by investing in ‘safe bets’.
Regardless of which growth strategy is selected, a firm’s infrastructure must be up to a standard that supports successful execution. An on-going commitment to creating such an infrastructure is a ‘safe bet’. Achieving this requires (1) eliminating departmental or regional silos, (2) utilizing leading indicators and performance drivers that align with the strategy and (3) growing leaders at all levels – managerial and non-managerial.
2. Initiate a process to identify strategies with a high probability for success.
Three customer growth strategies are presented below: (1) Growing the core business, (2) Growing by sub-segmenting customers and (3) Growing adjacent opportunities. It is recommended that the senior leaders begin the process by considering the growth potential within the present core business and/or the opportunities and growth potential associated with creating innovative value propositions for underserved customer groups. As the senior leadership group moves through this process, it will become clear if and when adjacent growth options should be considered.
MARKET SEGMENTATION
“Market segmentation” simply means picking a sub-set of the entire marketplace that you can organize your sales efforts around. Out of all the people in the world, who will you try to sell to?
Most big businesses are good at carving out their corner of the market. Then they do whatever they can to own that space.
Red Bull gets its energy drinks in front of a young, adventurous crowd: its segment of the market. Have you wondered why Red Bull owns a Formula One racing team? That’s why.
Pepsi was losing its battle with Coca-Cola to become the heavyweight cola company. Instead of trying to beat Coke at its own game, Pepsi focused on a young, fun-loving demographic. Many Pepsi commercials show younger music stars, celebrities or other young status symbols.
In other words, Pepsi stopped targeting the over-30 crowd and segmented its market. Coke is still the top dog, but thanks partially to market segmentation, Pepsi has built a very successful brand as well.
Most small business owners would be happy with building the next Pepsi, but many are afraid to eliminate part of a potential market. It can seem scary, but you need to focus on your core customer if you want a clear path to growth.
Segmenting your market comes down to making choices. Who will you serve? Who will you avoid? And which segment can you focus on to improve profitability?
BUILDING
Succession is part of every company’s future. The question is when it will happen — and when to start preparing. Whenever that day comes for your company, a lot will depend on choices you made years before — and not just about who will take over the top job.
Consider the fictional example of two closely-held companies — Alpha Films and Omega Films — friendly competitors in the same industry and region. Both are busy with strategic planning and operations, and both teams know succession planning is part of their talent management imperative. But the similarities end there.
Omega’s senior leadership and board are okay leaving succession to chance. In their view, they grow, hire, and promote all the time. At any given moment, they have a leadership cohort in place that knows how to run the business and create projects. If the pipeline ever breaks down, they can hire leaders and creators externally, which is better than trying to create them. As the CEO has said many times, leaders are born, not made.
Over at Alpha, the executive team views succession as
an integrated part of its planning process. Alpha leaders there have devoted a management retreat to defining their approach to management and project development. They know succession will put a new generation of people in charge of a company that may not resemble the current one very closely — and that planning, not faith, is the key to establishing a robust pipeline of capable new leaders and project creators. Most importantly, Alpha’s leaders know succession isn’t a linear progression of aligning people to job titles. They value “optionality” in their people — the potential to grow in multiple possible directions tomorrow, which in the long term outweighs the more tangible performance they demonstrate in their current jobs today.
Both companies in this example have made choices
about the interlocking challenges of developing the next generation of leaders and structuring their compensation in a way that both encourages and rewards that development. About the only lesson in common between the two examples is how profoundly present-day decisions can affect the fate of each organization years or even decades down the road.
We represent a broad array of clients from diverse industries ranging from the very top of the Fortune 500 to real estate developers, from the most recognizable cultural institutions to non-profits and everything in between. We represent a varied mix of corporate clients and non-profit organizations that all have one thing in common: they come to us for results, which we’ve been successful in achieving no matter how challenging the task.
TEAM WORK
B.C.C takes special pride in our firm’s philosophy of being proactive on every front. We work round the clock for those we represent, and make sure to cover every base. We also believe it’s important to work together with our clients and their professional staff as part of a team, to accomplish our goals.
OUR STRENGTH
Is the access we have to key partners with whom we’ve developed excellent working relationships over the years. But, it’s also about a unique system of services we’ve refined and our special formula for success that sets us apart. We approach every issue by considering a checklist of factors that affects our work and our clients’ interests. We believe there are many different bases to cover and a variety of perspectives to every project. We always consider the big picture because we understand the landscape, and know what will work and what won’t.