Our Services

  • Strategy

    A fresh approach to strategy with two simple steps:
    Step one: Distil
    Step two: Unite
    Reduce complexity and align your team to accelerate your results.

  • Advice

    Wise counsel across and range of issues from the every day - culture, governance, risk, to the extraordinary including counsel for the CEO through M&A from both a buyers and seller’s perspectives.

  • Stepping up

    Support a new or aspiring CEO with a programme designed to combine easily accessible material with one on one mentoring to maximise the chances of achieving defined results.

Get in touch

I have seen many brilliant strategies. I have met many brilliant senior leaders. But I have very rarely seen a fully cohesive yet diverse senior team rally behind one clear strategy and deliver the promised land. Many theories can be applied to this common failure but I see two key obstacles to strategic success:

1) The strategy is often designed by too few people, sometimes external consultants, resulting in great ideas being overlooked and overall, limited real buy in by the people who are charged to deliver it.

2) The strategy is too complex allowing for factions to develop and competition for limited resource, often led by individual senior leaders who pursue one facet of a strategy at the expense of another. Everyone suffers.

If these problems sound familiar to you too, Cassiobury has a simple, fresh approach to redesign your strategy and accelerate your business.

Strategy

Our approach

Distil

You may believe your strategy is the one signed off at the annual off site. But your actual strategy is the one being delivered by your team and it may not match.

We work with your existing team to capture the current strategy and then distil it:

  • Capture the current strategy from the points of view of individual key stakeholders and operators

  • Identify the core strategy at the centre of all visions, as well as passion projects and sources of divergence.

  • Stress test if the core strategy will meet the company’s purpose and vision

  • Identify if any ‘non core’ strategies can be accommodated or need to be discarded.

Unite

An aligned senior team around a common strategy with resource allocations to match ambition will succeed in inspiring teams to deliver.

We work to align the team around the strategy and help them make the crucial allocation decisions that will precipitate success:

  • Align the team around the core strategy and ensure they are all are ‘on the bus’.

  • Allocate and sequence resource for the core strategy. Remove internal resource for non core projects.

  • Set measurable and inspiring goals

  • Recommend any structural changes to remove internal conflict and accelerate progress

Advice

The role of CEO is always pressured and often lonely. At the heart of Cassiobury’s advice offer, is the role of counsel and confidante. Daily issues are often not appropriate to share upwards the Chair, or downwards to your team. Instead, share the load sideways, to an advisor who has trodden the CEO’s path before, and can listen, share, advise and, in some cases, execute on your behalf.

All advice is bespoke to your individual circumstances but below are examples to illustrate where Cassiobury might be able to assist.

Examples and credentials

M&A

As strategies shift, corporate restructuring is inevitable. You may need to buy scale, divest unwanted business lines, or even be for sale yourself.

If you’re running M&A of any description, it’s extremely time consuming. We can help select your advisers to ensure best cultural fit, experience and connections. We can act on the inside, managing advisers and lawyers so that you can get the best results from your external team.

  • Ran Kiwi Wealth through its 12 month sale process while simultaneously executing the revised strategy.

    Sale of Hatch to FNZ for $40m.

    In house M&A expertise for Kiwi Wealth assessing a range of merger and acquisition opportunities.

    Full time investment banker for Murray & Company with range of M&A deals completed.

Team and culture

One person can only do so much – without the right team and culture around you, you will burn yourself out trying to achieve your goals.

We can help you work out who is up for the challenge of helping you succeed and how to find the right people to help you deliver your vision by through working through the team dynamics, identifying strength and weaknesses, creating a unified team and promoting a diverse and inclusive culture.

  • Restructured and evolved the senior team creating a complementary yet diverse team unified around the company purpose.

    Removed internal divisions in the company but without a full scale reorganisation that can destroy morale.

    Promoted an inclusive culture and managed for outcomes rather than location or style.

Innovation

In the corporate world, innovation can be stifled by process and love for the status quo. Creating conditions for successful innovation without wasting money is almost as rare as a tech unicorn...

We can develop the strategic foundation of ‘what kind of innovation’? Once that is complete, we can design the approval processes and structures for in-house innovation and once underway advise on subsequent capital and ownership strategies.

  • Wrote the strategy papers that greenlit the innovation lab that produced Hatch

    Led the project to assess capital and ownership options for Hatch at Kiwi Wealth

    Divested Hatch to FNZ for $40m in 2021, three years after initial launch and four years post innovation concept.

Appointing a first time CEO does not come without risk but with the right support, fresh perspective can lead to exceptional results. Cassiobury works alongside the CEO, with clear input from the Chair, to deliver digital content and one on one mentoring to maximise impact in the first 12 months.

In addition, Cassiobury also works with aspiring CEOs to identify their drivers, values and areas of improvement in order to help them ascend.

Find out more at: www.ceo101.nz

Stepping up

Our approach

Digital material

Traditional leadership courses require time out of the office, often for up to a week or more. But time is precious in the first 12 months as CEO and getting out of the office into the classroom is challenging. Instead, curated into your inbox at regular intervals are up to date articles, excerpts and synopses of the wide range of challenges and experiences of first time and established CEOs, with the same content accessible online at your pace if your inbox is out of of control. Chunked down into bitesize pieces, you’ll be able to pick up what you need to know at a time that suits you rather than a course coordinators.

One on one mentoring

To take full advantage of the material, one on one mentoring will enable a first time CEO to access the advice element of Cassiobury, testing new ideas in a private and safe space with an experienced practitioner. Working through strategic vision, team and culture, relationships with the Board, leading teams and whatever the individual circumstances of the company and CEO require, the bespoke element of Cassiobury’s stepping up service breathes life and fire into the digital material and enables the CEO to deliver results fast.