Value creation efforts

As someone who has been consulting micro SMEs on value creation for 7 years now, I have come to the conclusion that "all business problems are people problems" ... perhaps one of the greatest opportunities for externally-sourced value creation is having an impartial, third-party agent lead larger change management initiatives (including collecting feedback etc. from the front line workers who are the target of such initiatives.)

Hopefully the "hard" skills the business needs to create value are mostly being brought in by the new owners/buyers. But those same people are not going to see organizational friction as readily as an expert on the outside looking in.

This is part of what we do at Cruxdata--while I'm in agreement with Renato on the low ROI from powerpoint slides, there is significant value to be created by consultants who actually have skills and implement (and I say this as an ex-MBB consultant myself!). The things we have done in this space focus on getting you/your hired exec team reliable and representative data to run the business by--many build M&A models with baked-in assumptions of improvement in operational drivers but don't have the instrumentation to allow them to activate the business against those drivers after acquisition. In a similar vein, we support with targeted process automations / system and data integrations to remove repetitive, manual work and release staff to focus on higher value tasks. Feel free to drop me a message if this stimulates thoughts