Strategising For The Years Ahead
Organisation
Hmlet (now known as Habyt)
Primary Role
Facilitator
Project Type
Real estate, Workshop, Business strategy
Date
3 Sept 2019
Secondary Role
-
Hmlet is a co-living company which subleases rooms in private apartments on a minimum stay basis of 3 months. As it transitions from startup to a sizeable operating company with VC backing, the need for concrete work plans and quantifiable business strategy had become more pressing. I led the design of my team’s 2-year plan based on analysis of both bottom-up (looking at internal capabilities and customer needs) and top-down (competitive landscape) factors. This was presented to the Board of Directors.
The Problem To Be Solved
The team / company had no proper medium-term work plan in place, and strategy was more a function of meeting near-term needs rather than planning for profitable and scalable operations in the long-run.
Demand for co-living is high, but so is competition, though we only had a vague idea of our company’s positioning.
Approach
Workshop Facilitation (Full day)
Defining purpose of session
Looking back on wins and fails
Competitive mapping
Potential market positioning and ideation
Strategic plan sign off by C-suits and VCs
Workshop Facilitation
Group Understanding:
Before the workshop, i arranged 1:1 sessions with each team manager to better understand their thought processes. These private sessions revealed that the majority of managers actually had similar levels of awareness about the business as a whole. Some had ideas / options on how they want to grow the business but most did not.
I thus designed the workshop around exploration of strategic growth options.
I kick-started the session with a simple question: “What would you like the Financial Times to write about Hmlet?”
Exploring Options:
I grouped the managers in pairs and got each pair to spend 15 minutes brainstorming as many ideas as possible (quantity over quality).
Outcome
Team managers left the workshop excited for the future of Hmlet. Each of them was clear about the next steps their teams needed to take in order to turn concepts into reality.
This also gave the VCs confidence in the business direction and the teams driving it.
Lessons Learnt
Due to time and resource constraints, the workshop setting was less than ideal. If I could do it differently, I would space the workshop over 2 days, allowing participants more mental space.
I would move the workshop offsite - non-workplace spaces generally encourage more creativity - and engage multiple senses by having more life-sized props to play with. Instead of a team of purely managers, I would also engage employees from all levels of seniority. That would likely result in more cohesive and granular points of views which would inform better decision-making.