Be the One to Succeed Where 4 in 5 fail
For Entrepreneurs and big company Intrapreneurs alike, building a successful new product, service or business can be one of the most challenging undertakings in a professional’s career. In fact, 4 in 5 new products and businesses fail according to recent Nielsen and Startup Genome research. Why?
Failure is almost always the result of the wrong plan, misguided execution of the right plan or a combination of the two. Each of these errors can be tied to the same original mistake: ineffective “architecting” of the business plan.
Much like when you’re constructing a building, a poorly architected plan can lead to major structural problems — eventually, these mistakes lead to a crumbling building. Business architecture is no different. Launching with the wrong plan or poor execution leads to failure.
Frehner-Jens brings you effective business architecting experience when and where you need it. Our team combines 20+ years of experience architecting new businesses with a proven methodology, helping to turn a breakthrough innovation into a big and profitable new business, faster. In a world where 4 in 5 new businesses fail, we’ll help you be the one that succeeds.
The Traditional Challenges of Architecting a New Business
Operating a business is difficult because you’re using robust, complex data to squeeze out incremental productivity gains while minimizing the risk to the existing operations.
Architecting a new business is an entirely different challenge. You need to use limited amounts of data to assemble evolving and interconnected building blocks into a plan that delivers disruptive gains — a delicate balance of risk and rewards.
So, how do you architect a business plan that maximizes the commercial potential of your innovation?
The Big Company approach is to quickly architect one consensus, cross-functionally aligned plan to put into a disciplined and rigorous stage and gate process and create a robust pre-market dataset to guide the decision to launch. However, this process gets bogged down if that one plan doesn’t meet hurdles and the in-flexible process requires a new plan to be architected, cross-functionally aligned and to restart the process from the beginning. Worse yet, if the plan launches but struggles in market, the organization is not flexible enough to adapt the plans in-market as learnings come in, dooming the launch to a quick death, as customers move on to the next initiative.
In contrast, the Entrepreneur isn’t burdened with a legacy organization and is able to quickly architect a plan, get into market with a minimally viable product and then learn and adapt their way through multiple plans until they find the plan that scales. However, this chaotic, sequential pivoting through multiple plans in market is expensive and risky, and more often than not, fails to find a plan that justifies scale investment before they run out of money.
At Frehner-Jens, we’ve built a better process for successfully turning an innovation into a successful new business which combines the best of both approaches.
The Frehner-Jens Advantages of New Business Architecting
Over our 20+ years as new business architects working with Big Companies and Entrepreneurs alike, we’ve developed a process that combines the best of both approaches.
To guide architecting a new business, we combine the Entrepreneur’s ability to rapidly build, learn and adapt as they go, with the Big Company’s discipline and quantitative validation into a process we call Fast-Forward®:
- Fast-Forward® helps you architect the best plan faster because it enables your team to rapidly design and optimize multiple plans to determine the best plan, pre-market.
- Fast-Forward® makes it easier to get an initiative through the innovation stage, because the best plan more easily clears hurdles and drives clarity on what matters most — putting you on the fastest path to success.
- Frehner-Jens brings a complementary skillset to your organization — for significantly less costs than building the expertise internally — helping you be the 1 in 5 that succeeds.
Architecting a new business is a critical capability, as fixing a flawed plan in the market is easily 10 times more expensive, if not fatal. Yet, for most companies, architecting is expected to be one of the skills managers develop “on the job.”
In organizations with a strong operational mindset, the role that should be “architecting” too often becomes more of a project manager role, with success being defined as moving through a stage-gate system, missing the opportunity to architect the best plan.
As new business architects, Frehner-Jens helps business leaders rapidly get to the best plan faster by designing and optimizing multiple plans, pre-market, helping you to be one that succeeds — not the four in five who fail.
Our Past Results — Your Future Success
Our experience architecting new businesses as both Entrepreneurs and Big Company intrapreneurs brings unique and valuable expertise to your team:
Experience
We’ve done work on hundreds of new initiatives across dozens of industries, creating over $1B worth of value for clients, helping them turn their ideas, technologies, products and services into successful businesses.
Approach
Our Fast-Forward® process brings together the best of the Big Company’s disciplined planning and the Entrepreneur’s ability to learn and adapt quickly. Working together with your team, we’ll rapidly design and optimize multiple plans to determine the best plan before going to market.
From Fortune 100 multinationals to start-ups in Boulder, Boston and Chicago, over 80% of our clients have hired us multiple times to help them figure out the best way to build a new business.
“Frehner-Jens helped us make smarter decisions on how to best commercialize our proprietary technology beyond our legacy Hunting target consumers. We’ve hired them multiple times based on their unique and practical approach to determining the best path forward by “blueprinting and prototyping” a range of different options, enabling us to clearly understand which path is likely to drive incremental revenue and profit.”
Steve Hill
PRESIDENT & CEO | THERMACELL REPELLENTS
Design Your Best Business Plan, Faster
Turning a breakthrough idea, technology, product or service into a successful new business is challenging work, requiring unique skills and a proven approach. More and more companies are realizing the benefits of hiring new business architects to quickly build learn and iterate through multiple plans pre-market to ensure they’re focused on the highest-potential plan — with clarity on what matters most to succeed in execution — so their new business is the one that succeeds.
If you’re ready to turn your great idea, technology, product or service into the next great business, schedule a call with Frehner-Jens to learn more about how we can work together to design your best business plan, faster.
