Building a clear plan for growth

Transfield Services (now operating as Broadspectrum, a Ventia Services Company) is a leading global provider of operations, maintenance, and asset and project management services to key industries in the Industrial, Infrastructure, Facilities Management, and Property sectors in Australia and New Zealand.

Several years ago, George Spink was tasked with running the Facilities Management Group of Transfield Services – Australia. When George took on the role at Transfield services, he had his head around what facilities management entailed, but quickly realised that they needed to find new ways to continue to grow in a competitive and small market.

SNAPSHOT:

Founded: 1956
Industry: Infrastructure
align.me services: GTM design
Key challenge: Generating 20-30% of new growth

The challenge

Having taken on the challenge of heading up Facilities Management in Australia, George was desperately searching for ways to stimulate new growth. But at the time, competitive forces were increasing, they had a very small business team with limited resources, and George identified some clear issues with their strategies:

We had no clear direction and weren’t positioned with any specific customer or market
Our team of sales and BD people lacked marketing know-how
Our focus was on making a sale, not solving the buyer’s problem
We were presenting buyers with generic solutions

As a result, the team was finding it challenging to meet growth expectations. Transfield Services was expecting the FM business to grow in excess of 20-30% per year. On a turnover of $500 million, George needed to find about $100 million worth of growth a year.

George realised he needed to develop marketing capability that could actually generate demand for their services, and quickly.

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The strategy

Once George had engaged with align.me through a referral and participated in a deep-discovery conversation, the first step was developing a clear plan for growth through a workshop called Funnel Camp.

Funnel Camp is a single, intensive, 3-day planning workshop to provide organisations with the change required to break down impediments to growth. The facilitated program specifically addresses the most common sales and marketing management issues in business today, while delivering a highly actionable sales and marketing plan to prosecute strategy.

“By the end of day one of Funnel Camp, I sat back and said, ‘Wow!’” – George Spink

The result

By the end of the three-day Funnel Camp, the Transfield Services team was in a position they never had been before – and George was convinced that they finally had a marketing plan that would deliver. They left the workshop with:

A clear plan for growth – The Transfield Serves FM group left with a Funnel Plan™ – a one-page, 3-year plan for growth that the team had developed together and could be easily (and collaboratively) followed.
Aligned internal teams – For the first time, members from each team were able to align themselves to a customer problem that Transfield could solve in the market.
A switch to focus on the customer problem – After 18 months of trying to agree on a direction and having no luck, the team was able to agree on the direction they would take by focusing on the customer problem, rather than the service they were selling.

“We walked away with an aligned team around a common problem, and a clear plan for growth. It was a real turning point for Transfield Services.” – George Spink

A few years after attending Funnel Camp and achieving great success as head of the Facilities Management Group, George moved to the United States to take on the role of Chief Executive Officer at USM (Transfield Services’ United States subsidiary). So impressed by the power of alignment Funnel Camp has provided, he repeated the alignment process with his new team at USM.