The knowledge that would have changed the plan usually exists somewhere in the business, just not in the room where it is approved and not with the people left to deliver it. SPG Advisory works across this divide.
The problem we solve
The business case arrives well made. It has been modelled, challenged, walked through multiple committees and signed off. Then delivery stalls and the explanations assemble themselves: the market moved, integration was harder than expected, the team needed more time. This is, almost without exception, untrue.
The shorthand for what actually happened is culture. The more precise description is ownership. The people who approved the case and the people who have to deliver it are, in most organisations, different people on different timetables. By the time the cost arrives or the revenue is missed, the authors have moved on and no one is left to close the gap.
A pattern, seen from the inside
The deal case rests on cultural and organisational conditions that do not, in fact, exist. What looked like alignment in the slide deck turns out to have been optimism. PowerPoint is a more forgiving environment than Teams.
The valuation strips out the intangibles, the trust, capability and institutional knowledge that took a decade to build and, with them, the things that were actually driving the returns. The arithmetic was impeccable, which was rather the problem.
The belief beneath it runs deeper than a skipped market test. A good enough product, the thinking goes, summons its own demand, which is sometimes ignorance and more often the arrogance of being too certain to ask. The customer, it later emerged, had not been consulted on their role in it.
Who is behind it
SPG Advisory is led by Stephen Grainger. I spent twenty years inside the institutions that move money and securities, building cross-border products and sitting in the deal rooms where business cases got made. I have approved plans I was not going to be there to deliver and inherited plans approved by people who had already gone.
By luck more than design, I worked somewhere that rewarded you for taking the hard, exposed call, so I know the gap can be closed. Most places have never tried, which is why the safe and wrong decision keeps winning. Have you?