Company leaders worldwide are feeling increasing pressure to improve the performance of their businesses. The challenge is to identify the key initiatives that will make the competitive difference. Our performance improvement diagnostic allows any company to perform a comprehensive review to identify the right issues that frame the opportunity for improvement, define a company’s market position and set compelling and achievable goals.

There is a constant stream of business fads and approaches, but a good general manager will conduct a hard-nosed, comprehensive review of the business to identify the critical areas for improvement. ExpertActions has developed a full-potential, performance improvement diagnostic framework that points the way. It starts from our understanding of the four critical variables in any performance improvement undertaking: costs, market position, changing customer behaviors and–perhaps the least understood–complexity.

We help firms attack complexity in order to serve customers better. Our research shows that organizations with the lowest complexity grew faster than their average competitor. High complexity is often a symptom of a larger problem, such as poor understanding of customers' needs in the case of product proliferation or poor accountability and decision making in the case of organizational complexity. Tackling the root cause pays off handsomely.

What results can you expect? Our diagnostic work leads to tangible goals and ready-to-launch initiatives to achieve them. As an example, one company we helped through such a diagnostic process targeted–and achieved–these concrete objectives:

• Reduce costs to move relative cost position.
• Increase relative market share; move share of high-profit segment, with a customer retention increasing.
• Increase share of profit pool by expanding into a downstream service business in the most profitable product segments.

ExpertActions has written the book on how companies can reliably achieve breakthrough perform.

• How does your cost experience slope compare with competitors'?
• What is the slope of price changes in your industry?
• Which of your products or services are making money (or not), and why?

• What is your relative market share? How big is your market and how fast is it growing?
• Is your profitability in line with your relative market share? Which capabilities create/reinforce your competitive advantages? What capabilities are you lagging on?

• Which are the biggest, fastest-growing and most profitable customer segments?
• What is your customer retention by key segment?
• What is your share of the competitive profit pools? How is that changing?