Growth Strategy for leading SaaS player in the financial services industry

Situation

A fast-scaling SaaS provider, specializing in financial and accounting services, was looking to find the best way to maintain its growth momentum.

There were many possible options, including expansion into new markets, a partnership strategy, development of new customer and product verticals or expansion of the value chain.

The company had a very strong and open culture. From day one, the founders and management emphasized the wish to co-develop the growth strategy with the entire team.

Approach

As an initial step, we outlined the high-level option space with reference to product, market and time horizons, from short to very long term. This enabled us to establish multiple task forces for various aspects of the “improvement” vs. “radical innovation” dichotomy. Overall 20+ client team members participated in the task forces.

We developed a comprehensive model of the client’s core market. Despite the availability of a large volume of data, there was no quantified view of the company’s target accounting market.

Building on hypotheses developed by the task forces, we defined multiple expansion scenarios. These were then evaluated based on the ability to unlock growth versus the envisaged market development, feasibility and growth potential.

Results

The outcome was a concrete mid-term growth roadmap with clear action items for all teams. At the same time, management decided on certain “not-to-do’s”: opportunities that will consciously not be addressed or only at a later point in time. This roadmap enabled a highly focused approach.

All action items were reflected in the long-term financial plan which clearly outlined top-line, bottom-line and investment requirements and was the basis for large-scale fund raising.