Business Growth Strategy Consulting

Corporate Finance and Strategy

Determining the right business strategy is anything but straightforward and the approach should be constantly refreshed. BCG helps clients define a path to win in today’s game—and tomorrow’s.

If corporate strategy is about determining the optimal allocation of capital across a portfolio of strategic business units, the role of business strategy is to deploy that capital to drive growth, generate value, and create sustainable competitive advantage—in other words, to put it to work in the most effective way possible.

How We Help Business Strategy Clients

A business only prospers if it can satisfy the changing needs of its customers both more fully and more profitably than its competitors. Today, with digital disruption blurring industry boundaries and geopolitics challenging long-held assumptions, those needs are changing faster than ever. Adding to the complexity is the fact that different strategic environments call for different types of business strategies.

Rich Insight into the Strategic Environment. How are the priorities and options of leading-edge customers changing? Where are today’s profit pools, and how are they likely to evolve or be disrupted? How well are competitors, whether traditional or emerging, positioned to respond? Which combination of choices on where to play—by customers, markets, and investments—has the greatest potential to create value relative to rivals and improve business unit strategy?
A Candid Assessment of the Business’s Real Competitive Advantages. What factors—for example, cost, capabilities, intellectual property, unique access to data, or position in an ecosystem—are at the heart of the business unit’s right to win? Are key moves required to acquire new assets or capabilities that are essential to future advantage?
A Direct and Agile Connection Between Strategy and Execution. What’s the best way to create alignment around the business unit strategy? To set and communicate goals? To create tight market feedback loops that enable rapid learning and adaptation while also ensuring programmatic rigor in execution?

BCG’s Client Work in Business Strategy

A storied quick-serve restaurant chain achieve 18 successive quarters of peer-beating, same-store growth by rethinking its business unit strategy to focus on two critical demand spaces where the company had a clear right to win.

A semiconductor equipment company took an unexpected opportunity to enter an adjacent health care space; the move generated a third of the company’s revenue in the first five years and quadrupled its valuation.

Our Featured Solutions and Resources

Our business strategy consultants use a variety of solutions and tools to help clients define, execute and accelerate their business strategy.

Digital Strategy

In digital transformation, the critical question is, which strategic bets should we make and in what order?

BCG’s Center for Growth and Innovation Analytics

The center helps clients find tomorrow’s best opportunities by mining vast, unstructured data sets for insight.

The Strategy Palette

Strategic environments are increasingly diverse. And different environments call for different styles of business strategy.

BCG Center for Sensing and Mining the Future

The center tracks more than 90 known and emerging megatrends that can provide critical tailwinds to accelerate strategic moves.

Business Unit Strategy for a Changing World

Leaders spend more time on their strategy philosophy than on how it will be executed throughout the organization and on customer interactions. To create an adaptive business unit strategy, BCG’s Dan Wald reveals three success factors: context, advantage, and execution.

Our Insights on Business Strategy

IBM’s Roger Premo on Open Source, AI, and Competitive Advantage

What’s behind IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy? The company’s lead strategist offers an inside scoop.

Moody’s David Platt on Accelerating Strategy with M&A

Transactions have been central to Moody’s transformation from bond-rating giant to integrated risk management leader. The company’s lead strategist shares his philosophy.