evolve & grow

Business development [biz-dev] looks forward and defines the course a company best take to optimize its chances of achieving its goals.

Logically biz-dev starts with Strategy: defining critical long-term and near term goals and priorities. Biz-dev maps these priorities against the current business and growth opportunities, the realities of key business relationships, supply-chain constraints, market trends, competitive and economic realities. The process aims to identify optimal incremental actions, ie best uses of assets to achieve desired outcomes and yield highest sets of returns to the organization/shareholders. It also assigns priorities.

The biz-dev working game plan is then reviewed and signed off with key players, communicated to those who are required to deliver key pieces and move the needle(s). Innovation is integrated into day-to-day activity; and results are monitored and measured. Progress is incremental. Each step yields reliable feedback that can confirm direction or demand course alteration.

Normally, biz-dev takes place in small steps; though, not always. Hughes has worked with startup clients on near term product introductions, with major manufactureres in launching specific products, to managing design innovation in the largest scale PE consultant-lead retail makeovers in North America - reinventing entire mass consumer retail chains.

In Hughes’s experience, the best processes are always well-researched, carefully thought-out, and incrementally-executed team affairs.