It’s All About the Chocolate

Practical visionaries

First and foremost, our focus and expertise is on winning markets.

We define strategies that succeed. Using our methodology, we find a practical path to success and present you with the one best approach to fix the problem. Our back-end process helps us test and tailor ideas until we find the right one. We won’t stop until you succeed.

These are some of the techniques we use:

Problem Architecture — We use a seemingly simple diagnostic approach — we listen and we ask questions. But the key is our ability to know what to look for. Often at the heart of every business problem is the fact that companies are not asking the right questions or have left some areas undiscovered. On the front end of every project we ask the key questions to quickly get to the core of your issue and then architect an approach to solve it. We insist on every engagement starting with mutual agreement on the underlying real problems, not just symptoms.

Solid Methodology. We have a unique set of quantitative and qualitative tools and methods, honed over our many decades of collective real-world experience. These help us quickly analyze and frame your business situation, develop possible scenarios, design economic models, and ultimately determine the recommendations that give you the most profitable results. Our methods and insights are based on hands-on experience and past success, not just theory or business degrees-although we have plenty of those too.

Operationally Experienced Ensemble. Hire a consultant who’s the ex-VP of such-and-such company, and you’ll get the experience of his four or five companies. With Rubicon, you get an ensemble of talented people who have been just about everywhere in tech — covering over 100 relevant examples and companies. Our staff and principals have launched nearly 100 products, created five developer platforms, designed 18 channel vendor programs, run numerous user influencer marketing initiatives, and defined over 30 new markets. We understand product adoption at every phase and what it takes to win in the market, including organization requirements. We’ve also done many kinds of optimization programs and guided clients through tricky change management issues. When you engage with Rubicon you won’t get one guy or gal writing slides at 1:00 am- you’ll get the benefit of the whole team’s creativity and blended talent. And we’ll be around when you need us again.

Murder Boarding^™ — Our recommendations are reviewed, checked and tested. The Rubicon team applies its judgment and operational experience to determine how all the facts fit together and find any flaws in our thinking. The entire staff spends hours together to torture-test the solution, run success and failure scenarios, and surface potential execution problems. Our solutions are realistic, do-able plans that win markets.

Customized Execution Plans. A brilliant solution that can’t be implemented is only a binder on the shelf. We work with you to understand your team’s strengths, and we offer multiple ways to attain your goal. We will provide execution coaching, operational and implementation guidance, and measurement techniques, if you need them. And you won’t get just concepts, you’ll also get a plan to make them real.

Over 80% of our business is from repeat engagements or executive referrals from clients. Why? Because we help you deliver results. And as former operating managers, we know the only result that really matters is your marketplace victory. We look forward to the day when we help you achieve a big growth goal, conquer a market, or a launch a critical product. We’ll all go out and celebrate BIG. Champagne could be involved. And for sure there’ll be chocolate.

Success Showcase

SaaS Company Opens to New Markets

A client had limited resources, but needed to find new sources of revenue as growth from its existing products had slowed sharply. Under consideration were incremental additions to the existing product to make it attractive to a larger base, new add-on products to better monetize the existing customer relationships, and building completely new products. The question was what products should they consider and which offered the best long-term growth opportunities.

• Read this entry
• Insight+