Overwhelming case for strategic DIY

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Question: when should you consider managing your own strategy development processes, rather than outsourcing them to a management or marketing (or any other type of) consultancy?

Answer: when the implementation of your strategy can only be executed effectively with the wholehearted commitment of your internal stakeholders/employees, at least in part.

Key action points

Whether or not you decide to outsource any non-core activities, usually depends on your answers to some of the following questions:

1. where will you find the best skills for the task – internally or externally?
2. do you have the human resources to do it internally?
3. do you have the financial resources to outsource it?
4. is doing it internally a distraction from your core business activities?
5. how much control do you want over the IP Intellectual Property?
6. what is the risk of the competition copying you using the same supplier?
7. how much experience do you have of setting up and managing outsourcing agreements, SLA Service Level Agreements etc.?
8. do you need to reintegrate the end product/service back into your organisation?
9. what recourse do you realistically have to demand corrective action for any mistakes by an outsource supplier (Do you carry sufficient weight? Are you able and, above all, willing to take legal action, if necessary?)?

On this basis, outsourcing all or some of your brand marketing activities can make sense.

The key issue is reintegration.

If your marketing activities do not need to be reintegrated into your organisation, then farm them out to the experts.

However, if they require the full co-operation of your staff to implement them, it is best if those employees feel that they are in charge of the process.

When it comes to business strategy development and implementation, the case for the core of your strategic planning being managed internally is even clearer. For a strategic plan to really work, you need a lot of A. U. B., a Flemish acronym for “Please”, and in this case a business acronym for Awareness, Understanding, and Buy-in/Belief.

In more detail ….

Whether or not you decide to outsource any non-core activities, usually depends on your answers to some of the following questions:

1. where will you find the best skills for the task – internally or externally?
2. do you have the human resources to do it internally?
3. do you have the financial resources to outsource it?
4. is doing it internally a distraction from your core business activities?
5. how much control do you want over the IP Intellectual Property?
6. what is the risk of the competition copying you using the same supplier?
7. how much experience do you have of setting up and managing outsourcing agreements, SLA Service Level Agreements etc.?
8. do you need to reintegrate the end product/service back into your organisation?
9. what recourse do you realistically have to demand corrective action for any mistakes by an outsource supplier (Do you carry sufficient weight? Are you able and, above all, willing to take legal action, if necessary?)?

Brand marketing strategy

On this basis, outsourcing all or some of your brand marketing activities can make sense.

After all, your main task is to develop software, run a kindergarten, save the world, manufacture widgets, be a professional lawyer, or whatever. Why invest enormous amounts of time and energy in developing and managing marketing campaigns, when you have, at best, limited experience, and no passion for the task?

A TV advertising campaign rarely needs to be integrated back into your organisation, promotions can best be managed by a handling house, and PR experts will have the chutzpah and networks most of us lack.

But what about strategy? Is this ever a non-core activity for an organisation?

Going back to, say, advertising strategy, we have seen advertising agencies run rings around clients. Watching this, you could draw two diametrically opposite conclusions. The first is that the advertising agency really knows its strategic stuff, the client is clueless, and so the only real solution is for the client to devolve responsibility for strategy development to those with the appropriate expertise. The second conclusion is that if the advertising agency is running rings around your strategy, it is probably doing much the same thing around your budget.

So long as you are getting the ROI Return on Investment you require from your advertising, perhaps this does not matter too much, but if you have only a limited interest in strategic issues, what is the likelihood of your having developed robust systems to track your advertising performance? The advertising agency handles all that, right?

Business strategy

And core business strategy?

The problem with outsourcing core business strategy is reintegration.

You can go out and hire E&Y, Accenture, McKinsey or similar to propose a solution for your most pressing strategic problems, for a nice five figure fee. You can invite an army of their consultants to camp inside your offices, and to mingle with your staff. They can even fraternise over lunch.

However, if you have an organisational structure much more complicated than the cellular structure of an amoeba, will they ever really understand the unwritten, unspoken culture, modus operandi and politics of your organisation? Almost certainly not. Will they be seen as intruders? Almost certainly yes. Will their beautifully crafted strategy, elegantly designed to meet the requirements of the CEO and her/his Board, ever be implemented effectively? Quite probably not.

There is not much point in developing a detailed strategy unless you intend to implement it. There is not much point in trying to implement it unless you are trying to change something fundamental.

Business strategy implementation is change management.

Unless the critical implementers of your strategy, both internal and external to your organisation, are wholeheartedly committed to delivering your strategy, they and your strategy will walk past each other in the corridors with no more than a polite “Hi!”.

Clearly it might well be highly advantageous to bring in outside expert support from strategic consultants when you are developing your groundbreaking business plan, but those of your stakeholders, who are critical to the implementation of your strategy, need to sit right at the centre of events, to feel like they own the process, and to be in a position to steer both the strategy itself and its execution plan into a direction where the organisation itself, with all its peculiar rules, regulations, modus operandi, culture and politics, is capable of implementing it.

What you need, in fact, is a lot of A. U. B. Awareness, Understanding, and Buy-in/Belief.

So our advice is, outsource sub-elements of your strategic processes by all means, but generate the core inside the core of your organisation.

They say that people who own their own houses in the vast majority of cases look after them better than those who merely rent them.

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