Stratechia

Introducing Stratechia

A NEW KIND OF STRATEGY SHOP

Stratechia is a strategy and innovation advisory firm hyper-focused on helping technology-driven businesses grow purposefully and profitably. We work closely with leaders, teams and organizations to develop winning strategies and build the capabilities needed to achieve the success they envision for themselves.

What We Offer

IT'S NOT WHAT WE DO, BUT HOW WE DO IT

All of our services share a common element:
Unique engagements custom-tailored to fit your culture and challenge.

Our Method

We call it Framestorm.™

We use powerful performance frameworks designed into highly engaging visual canvases supported by our expert guided facilitation. This allows us to leverage your knowledge and expertise while simultaneously drawing out your best thinking. Inevitably, our Framestorm™ method produces winning strategies and solutions in a fraction of the time and cost of more traditional consulting. And, buy-in is built-in.

Core Services

Strategy Development
Strategy Alignment
Customer Experience
Agile Innovation
Lean Operations
Go-to-Market

Enabling Services

Training
Events
Insights

6 Core Services

Strategy Development

Strategy is about making winning choices. We use the Playing to Win strategic framework to help you develop unique answers to the two key questions at the heart of any winning strategy: where to play and how to win. We then help you test your assumptions, increasing your odds of success.

Strategy Alignment

Getting a winning strategy to permeate and drive the entire organization is no easy feat. Successful deployment rests on the ability to achieve cross-company alignment. We believe the best mechanism for doing that is Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), made popular by Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, and adopted by the likes of Google and Amazon.

Customer Experience

In today’s hypercompetitive world, business success is increasingly dependent on your ability to deliver a unique and compelling customer experience. Our proprietary Customer Experience System (CES) is a powerful turnkey approach to measuring, mapping, and managing your customers’ journey through all of their interactions with your company. We help you better understand your customers, choreograph unique experiences, and build enduring relationships.

Agile Innovation

Profitable growth requires a continuously flowing innovation pipeline, which in turn demands an ethos of lab-like curiosity supported by a simple, fast and frugal experimentation method. Our proprietary Strategic Innovation System (SIS) provides an agile innovation management framework designed to repeatedly and consistently guide creative concepts from inception to launch, regardless of whether the idea is internally or externally focused.

Lean Operations

After nearly a decade of working with Toyota, we have mastered the authentic operating principles behind the vaunted Toyota Production System. Our approach centers on making more room for what truly matters by eliminating what doesn’t. It’s a lean and subtractive approach to kaizen — continuously improving and simplifying even your most complicated workflows.

Go-to-Market

Winning ideas remain just that until they are brought to market. Whether you’re launching a new product, a new business, or entering a new market, a solid go-to-market strategy can be the difference between winning and losing. We work closely and confidentially with you to ensure that your business concepts take flight.

3 Enabling Services

Training

We offer a variety of training courses to build competitive capability inside your organization. While our engagements often have training built in, you may wish to offer standalone skills training in our various frameworks:

Playing to Win
Customer Journey Mapping
Design Thinking
Lean Thinking

Events

Break is the important part of breakthrough. When a well-worn pattern is broken, creativity emerges. It is the broken pattern that makes us sit up, take notice, and pay attention. We think differently, more freely, more resourcefully, when a break occurs.

Enter Stratechia events. Whatever the format — summits, sprints, hackathons, offsites — we design purposeful breaks that produce the kind of creative breakthroughs that lead to growth.

Insights

Inspiration for elegant solutions doesn’t come from locked-room brainstorming sessions. It comes from simply getting out more.

While we appreciate arms-length quantitative research, we know that unmet customer needs often lie beneath the surface. There is no substitute for deep customer empathy and understanding, so we employ the best discovery techniques to reveal those insights, guiding your teams through up-close field observation and engaging interviews with real people.

Strategy is an integrated cascade of choices that uniquely positions a player in its market to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

ROGER MARTIN

coauthor, Playing to Win

Who We Are

PASSIONATE, PURPOSEFUL, PRINCIPLED

When three true professionals with uniquely complementary talents and backgrounds decided in 2018 to join forces after over thirty years of pursuing separate but related paths, sparks flew. A new and different kind of hybrid strategy studio was born. One with over a century of combined experience in performance development.

We knew we wanted to have a significant impact on an increasingly more technological business world. We wanted to work closely with senior leaders to balance and blend the right dose of strategy, innovation and operations to create a winning path forward. We chose a name indicative of our focus on strategy and technology:

We chose three non-negotiable traits that we agreed would define and distinguish the character of our firm:

Passionate — the nature of our work must inspire us to engage fully.
Purposeful — every engagement must help drive profitable growth for our client.
Principled — our work must be performed at the highest levels of professionalism.

We constantly seek out new and stimulating challenges that fit these characteristics, in turn enabling us to achieve the kind of world-changing impact we aspire to.

Matthew E. May partner Stratechia strategy studio for tech-centric business

Matthew May

FOUNDING PARTNER

Deirdre Borrego

FOUNDING PARTNER

John C. Humphrey Partner Stratechia strategy consulting firm

John Humphrey

FOUNDING PARTNER

The Stratechia Way

Core Purpose

We exist to help our clients profitably grow to market leadership by catalyzing and coaching the internal creativity and capabilities that often lie dormant, hidden, or even locked away.

Service Focus

We aim our blend of strategic and creative services toward our passion: technology-oriented businesses, including the automotive, advertising, biologic, digital, financial, medical, and mobile technology spaces.

Unique Difference

Unlike traditional strategy consulting firms that sell you back your own ideas derived and repackaged from a long, drawn-out interview process, we facilitate your best thinking real-time from the inside out in workshops using our proprietary Framestorm™ method, typically in one-tenth the time and at one-fourth the cost.

Hybrid Capabilities

Gone are the halcyon days of in-depth analysis and three-year plans. The pace of change today renders traditional approaches to strategy and innovation irrelevant. Our nearly century of combined experience in traditional advisory spaces gives rise to a unique hybrid blend of strategic, creative, and information expertise.

Our clients benefit from the best of several worlds.

Guiding Principles

elegance rules
Achieving maximum effect with minimum means.
choices, not plans
Strategy is about making choices, especially what not to do.
frame first
Difficult challenges demand intelligent framing.
test everything
Every great idea is but a hypothesis when first conceived.