Furze Product Update: Sept 26
In the words of Lana Del Ray, it’s feeling like Summer time sadness whilst we pen our most recent updates on Firehills and Furze. Long gone are the long summer evenings and the morning chills are here in the UK. But it brings a renewed freshness to our mission and only just last week we sat down as a team and reviewed our plan as a business.
Highlights included: Firstly, bringing together firehillsconsulting.com and firehills.io into a single website with a clear set of messages around our philosophy, outcomes we deliver and how we do it. Second to our public web content, developing a bigger and bolder go-to-market strategy for Firehills as a company and how we reach more of our intended customers. This makes for a very busy and highly active next 3 months for us, across the the entire team. But we can’t do this alone so we’ve also been busy hiring!
Investing in talent
We’ve made two really important hires at the Firehills team as of Monday 21st of September, let me introduce them:
Phil is our latest senior full stack developer working on Furze. Phil brings a long cv working across start ups and various technology stacks. But Phil really made us think differently about Furze. It’s possibilities and just flipping our thinking on its head. We loved this about his approach. To be curious and act is a huge part of what we value, so with that it was an easy yes to bringing Phil onto the team. Phil will help us accelerate on data pipelines and will break ground on a brand new piece of functionality and value around systems roles.
Mika is our very first hire focusing on economics and applying economics models to strategy development. We’ve known (and most will recognise) that if the economy is travelling with your strategy then you’re going to get compound effects. Higher returns, less risk. Mika will be working over the next 6 months to prove the value of this linkage in several ways. Around industrial arenas, such as electrification, health and urbanisation. With a target goal to connect this into Furze in a meaningful and insight driven way. No mean feat!
We wish them all the best with their new roles and can’t wait to see what they can accomplish.
Developing growth options
In our preview product update we talked about our newly emerging Growth Assessment, you can find an easy link here: https://www.firehillsconsulting.com/blogs/furze-product-update-august-26
Assessing growth claims is just one use case for Furze. Pointing our IP and data at a given need for a given market and customer.
But we’ve always been considering about how to create a range of strategic options based on the market data, its incumbents and their activities in the market.
We’ve called this Growth Scenarios
It’s purpose is expand the thinking at the executive table about the possibilities and to do that whilst holding the market and its relationships in hand at the same time. We do this in 5 ways.
| Lens | What it means | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| 1Deepen | Take more from a position you already hold. | Gets more value from the suppliers, clients and assets you already have, especially the ones competitors cannot match. |
| 2Emulate | Do something peers already do, and you do not. | Surfaces proven moves in your market that you are missing, so following them (or not) becomes a deliberate choice. |
| 3Channel | Reach the same buyers a different way. | Opens routes to market through partners and platforms, so growth is not capped by the size of your own sales team. |
| 4Extend | Take what you are good at into a nearby market. | Finds adjacent buyers, sectors or geographies where your existing capabilities already travel. |
| 5Invent | Combine what you have into something new. | Creates an offer nobody in your market sells yet, usually in response to a shift in what buyers need. |
We’ve already tested this with one of our current clients who is considering investment and acquisition and this helpfully made him step back and consider what he was doing. It’s true to fashion that executive spend 95% of their time running their business, and proximity to the business often hinders the chance to come to a higher level of thinking. The Growth Scenarios artifact delivered.
But this isn’t just for incumbent executives. Its also a highly valuable way to look at value creation of an asset held under an investment house beyond the obvious strategic levers.
Our call to action for all readers is if you need to test new strategic ideas and want to invest some time with us. We are willing to run our new growth scenarios report for you at no cost in return for your honest feedback. Please email: rob@firehills.io
That is all for this month, next month we will get into some of the newer assets we have built around our data engines which have had a big revision on quality and recall.
Rob
