It's not about the Plan.
It'sabout Discipline
Strategic Performance
What We Do
Erin designs hybrid gap assessments to diagnose and treat critical performance issues affecting strategy.
Her goal is to ferret out hidden drivers and reveal connections that your leadership team is often too close to see, so that you can develop a tactical plan to get back on track.
SERVICES
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Strategic Gap Assessment & Analysis
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Enterprise Risk Analysis & Action Plan
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Leadership and Team Alignment
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Organizational Health Assessment
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Specialized Performance Assessment
Erin's Niche
Erin specializes in helping executive leaders gain visibility and traction in the most critical first 12-24 months of their tenure. This includes:
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Executives new to the top leadership role
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Seasoned Executives stepping into a new organization
Because the problems faced by every organization are unique, the assessments created are customized to the performance issue at hand.
Why Erin Does It
Getting it right is tough, but it happens to be her superpower.
Erin's clients are smart, capable leaders who know that it sometimes takes a fresh approach and new eyes to evaluate a situation. These are just some the problems they have brought to her over the years – sound familiar?
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"We’re not aligned and it’s causing us to drop the ball and miss opportunities."
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"We’ve grown so fast, everything seems ok on the surface, but something feels off."
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"We’re losing business and we aren’t sure why."
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"One of our execs took a risk that didn’t sit well with the board – we need to know what the board is comfortable with so we have well-established risk boundaries."
Getting to the root of a problem is never as easy as we would want it to be. Understanding why something is happening requires a broad knowledge base about the entire organizational structure from systems and processes to people and money. Every aspect of how an entity functions is connected – a seemingly unrelated thing could be the key driver of the issue we are trying to solve – it is easy to be short-sided if there is a lack in this understanding.
This is Erin's sweet spot.
She doesn't claim to know everything about your business – she doesn't have to because you do. Erin provides a fresh perspective and an unbiased analysis of how your organization operates. The gaps and issues she finds usually come as no surprise - it’s how they are connected, with cascading impact and previously hidden root causes that are a revelation to our clients.
The value she provides isn’t about handing you a solution on a platter – it's about applying our expertise to identify systemic constraints and drivers so that she can help build a plan to resolve their impact on performance. Then you can make the best possible decision on how to move forward.
We worked with Black Fox Strategy in 2019 to gap assess an issue we had affecting client capture in one of our groups. From the start, we thought we knew what the problem was and that Erin would simply confirm our suspicions. We were enlightened when her analysis revealed that what we thought was an issue wasn’t one at all – we actually had a completely different problem. She then worked with our team to create an action plan to get the group back to an optimum level of performance. The results have been extremely successful – we couldn’t be happier! Erin’s ability to get at the root of a problem and then support a team in crafting the solution is exceptional."
~ Lydia Griffey, Senior Principal at Stantec
How Erin Delivers
Better Outcomes
Erin has the breadth of knowledge and experience that will identify the real cause – not the symptom – so you have the tools to fix the problem and make it stick.
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Erin doesn't “off the shelf” anything. She works hard to customize every aspect of your projects with actionable outcomes and clear direction that makes sense to you.
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Every tool and system has value – she will work with you to optimize whatever you already have in place to create synergy without reinventing the wheel.
Erin believes in action-oriented outcomes, so you get not only her recommendations, but a prioritized action plan to help you take the next step.
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You need good return on your investment, so she'll show you how to define and measure real success on the project.
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Erin expects participation. Nothing we do will work without your involvement so we will all be rolling up our sleeves together.
Erin's Philosophy and Approach
Erin's philosophy is rooted in the belief that long-term organizational success lies in a balanced approach to purpose, growth and evolution that prioritizes its time, energy and resources on the vitju – the vital juncture where purpose, growth and evolution converge. This simplified approach brings the kind of clarity and focus needed to drive performance excellence, and creates the necessary link for best practice integration of strategy, risk and resilience capabilities.
We invite you to read more about Essential Strategy and its creator, Erin Sedor.
