Strategy & Growth

Most mid-market strategy work suffers from one of two problems. It is either thin — a market overview, a few benchmarks, an opinion the executive team already held confirmed in expensive prose. Or it is detached — an elegant set of choices that does not survive contact with the operating realities of the business or the patience of the capital structure behind it. Halverson Reed's strategy and growth practice exists to do neither.

Our work begins where it should: with the question the leadership team is actually trying to answer. Sometimes that question is positioning — what is the role this business will play five years out, given what is happening in the industry around it? Sometimes it is growth — where will the next $50 million of revenue come from, and is the path organic, inorganic, or a combination? Sometimes it is transactional — should this business be acquired, sold, or restructured, and on what terms? We are equally comfortable on each of these, and we do not push an engagement toward a predetermined deliverable.

We are most useful in three situations. The first is the strategic review — a board, a CEO, or an ownership group commissioning an honest re-examination of the firm's positioning, often before a planning cycle, an investment, or a transaction. The second is the growth program — typically a twelve-to-eighteen-month engagement, building and then helping execute a coherent set of strategic moves. The third is the transaction itself — pre-deal commercial diligence, integration design and execution, or the strategic work that precedes a sell-side process by a year or two and meaningfully changes the outcome.

What distinguishes our strategy work is its insistence on the operating answer. A strategy that cannot be implemented by the organization that exists, with the resources it can plausibly assemble, is not a strategy — it is a wish. The strategy partner on every engagement is a partner of the firm, and the partner is in the room for the difficult conversations: the ones with the executive team, the board, the lenders, and the customers whose retention will determine whether the strategy works.

We work with mid-market companies between $10 million and $500 million in revenue, across most industries we cover. We are particularly experienced in privately held and family-owned businesses, where strategy must be made compatible with the constraints and ambitions of the ownership group, and in sponsor-backed situations, where the alignment between operating priorities and the path to a return event is rarely as straightforward as the value-creation plan suggests.