At Excolatur Consulting, we take pride in our industry knowledge and the more elusive Holy Grail - industry understanding.

 

Deep industry knowledge is the pre-requisite to sound advice. Business fundamentals are important, but there’s no substitute for knowing an industry inside and out.

 

We specialize and hire consultants who have worked in the trenches of these industries. Our consultants draw upon years of direct, front-line experience and often need to migrate to-and-fro, thereby retaining their feel of the pulse.

It is this familiarity with the key industry issues, trends and challenges that enables us to help clients harness change and boost performance.

 

Financial Services

Financial Services industry is not only at the center of this great storm, it will also be profoundly affected and changed by the same. From loss of leverage, to more regulations, to declining return on equity, to out-right failure of some business models, the changes are truly systemic.

 

All types of financial services firms will face massive changes. Commercial Banks will face increasing competition for retail deposits and will have to reduce reliance on wholesale markets even after the credit crisis eases, simply to manage their liquidity risk. This coupled with the lower leverage and much less opportunities to engage in the structured products, will reduce ROE. To juice the same, all banks will have to focus on profitable growth and maximizing life-time value of each client.

 

Excolatur Consulting has a record of advising executive management team on dealing with profound change and we are well positioned to work with the financial services firm on crafting new path forward.

 

We help our Financial Services sector clients achieve substantial, positive, and sustainable impact in their performance. The practice serves a broad spectrum of clients in traditional and non-traditional financial industries, including commercial banks, investment banks, brokerage and securities firms, property and casualty insurers, life insurers, asset managers, consumer finance companies, credit card companies, and other diversified financial institutions. We work with our clients on the critical challenges they face today: strategic innovation, growth and industry consolidation, risk and regulation management, operational efficiency, and talent management.

 

We have specific solutions to enable financial services firms to reduce costs of sales and cost of customer touch-points while maximizing the value. We also work with executive management of financial services firms to set up appropriate risk management policies and dash-boards so that our clients can take intelligent and measurable risks and the capital gets allocated efficiently. Both these solutions are critical for the financial services industry as it digs itself out of the hole.

 

Energy

Energy industry has always been a very volatile industry, where making long term predictions and investments based on the same has been an exercise fraught with danger. However, the volatility in the past few years have been unprecedented.

What remains unchanged in all this drama over energy prices volatility is however that the long term trends for this industry is crystal clear. We have recently passed several milestones – first ever decline in reserves, rapid growth in BRIC countries, China accounting for more annual increase in oil consumption than US, near-universal acceptance of global warming and drive towards cap-an-trade, etc. The current economic stress may have pushed these issues to the back burner but they will return.

 

The Energy industry should use this period as a grace period –to prepare for the oncoming storm that will yield both opportunities and threats. We help our Energy sector clients both in meeting their near term performance challenges and in devising strategies to succeed in today’s complicated world.

 

We work with the executive leadership team to tackle pressing issues like shifts in regulation, the introduction of alternative energy technologies, the emergence of new competitors, dramatically increased M&A activity, cost volatility in primary commodities, and ever-increasing concerns among their customers about the environment and security of supply.

 

Our work is balanced between service to the corporate center and to the various business units (e.g., upstream, refining, marketing), on a variety of strategic, organizational, and operational issues. We distinguish ourselves by providing both high-level strategic advice and hands-on approaches to improving performance, such as growth and defensive strategies: vertical (dis)integration; separating production from refining, distribution and downstream marketing activities; investments in alternative and renewable energy production; geographic expansion; acquisitions in new markets; and deeper, more insightful customer segmentation.

 

Healthcare

Healthcare sector is expected to be the fastest growing sector of our economy for the next several years and this is already reflected by their sector weighing in the S&P 500 index.

 

And that’s where the good news stops.

 

For over the next ten years, the healthcare industry will change beyond recognition. Traditional business models for Pharma, healthcare care providers and insurance firms will face wrenching changes as government in US and most of the large emerging economies introduce some form on Universal healthcare, which is fast becoming a potent political and social issue.

 

We help our Health care sector clients around the world in meeting the same challenge: how to manage the growing gap between human needs and financial resources. Aging populations in Europe and North America are demanding more and better care, and the cost of that care is surging. Though health care systems differ in every country, current trends in the U.S. and Europe suggest that all systems will require exceptional managerial discipline to survive the turmoil ahead.
Our projects encompass corporate strategies, growth strategies, mergers and acquisitions, customer and loyalty management, and sales/channel management.

 

Retail & Consumer Goods

Retail and Consumer Goods industry have been powered by the US consumers for the past three decades. And this is about to change.

 

Businesses operating in the consumer products sector, which includes both durable goods and packaged goods, are increasingly challenged to sustain their historical levels of growth and profitability. The past boom in retail consumer spending was un-sustainable as it was built on massive leverage – and the de-leveraging process we are witnessing will take a long while to complete.

 

Today’s changing environment is the result of a wide range of factors, including maturing product categories and markets, consolidation among retailers and resultant private-label pricing and margin pressure, increases in the price of raw materials and other costs, shortening product life cycles, the decline in effectiveness of traditional advertising and promotional models, the fragmenting and increasingly sophisticated consumer landscape, and new, non-traditional competitors. These forces will change our current understanding of mass consumption and the retail industry will be completely remade before we are through with the de-leveraging process.

 

Although the landscape is challenging, we see many opportunities for consumer products companies and the retail industry to harness their organizations and their considerable resources and assets to adapt to these changes, create substantial competitive advantage, improve their operations, and drive sustained growth and improved profitability. In this changing environment, companies must re-learn customer centricity - what it takes to build winning brands and maximize lifetime value. The path to winning brands starts with understanding consumer needs and behaviors. And it requires converting such consumer insights into effective platforms for innovation and go-to-market strategies. In addition, companies will have to continue to improve performance by reducing costs, making their supply chain, marketing and trade dollars work more effectively.

 

Media & Entertainment

The media and entertainment industry is facing dramatic changes, as it surges toward an era in which audiences will access any content, anywhere, anytime — and with full interactivity.

However, the most critical challenge to the media and entertainment industry is undoubtedly the new business model that is rapidly cannibalizing the traditional business models. The industry is trying to fight the trend and slow down the cannibalization but that has as much chance of success as trying to stop an aircraft carrier.

The key for this industry is not cost cutting – the revenue is declining too fast – but to embrace the new electronic distribution cannels and innovate in terms of content, delivery format, pricing. It needs to re-connect with its audience and offer what the customers value and are willing to pay for.

Our projects cover a broad range of issues, such as transforming traditional media businesses to a digital environment, acquisition screening and integration, and content and rights negotiation. We help our clients launch new channels, find new ways to lower costs, segment customers, and pursue new technologies and business models.

High Tech

High-tech industry has been on the forefront of cost reduction and globalization for the past decade and is hence in a better shape than many other industries. However, the ongoing convergence of communication, media, computing and entertainment is radically reshaping this industry as its customer base has become more fragmented. This in turn is leading for rapid product obsolescence, shorter product cycle and importance of packaging over features / technology.

What is needed for going forward is rethinking the industry in terms of customer centricity, ease of use of the product and ability to keep per-product development cost low while dealing with more product variety.

Our Telecommunications Practice counsels clients on organizational, operational, and strategic challenges. We serve clients on fundamental issues such as product innovation, supply chain visibility and 360o view of the customer.

 

Private, Social and Public

We assist private, social and public sector in addressing some of the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems.

 

Corporations: Today, corporations are taking into account an array of environmental and social issues to gain competitive advantages. These corporations are looking for opportunities to create business value across a variety of industries by broadening the scope of sustainability beyond compliance toward value creation. Apart from the moral imperative, substantial business benefit can be achieved through a combination of leadership commitment, focused and practical initiatives, and improved systems and processes.  Excolatur assists corporations in identifying, designing and delivering such initiatives so that they can not only become a good corporate citizen but also gain sustainable competitive advantage by adopting ethical, clean and green practices.

Foundations: Excolatur committed to providing clients with advice related to trusts, private, community and corporate foundations. We assist our clients in setting up new foundation or giving program, in developing a plan for trust or foundation operations, in designing proposal management policies, devising evaluation and tracking mechanism for monitoring impact and facilitating learning and the exchange of best practices.

 

Government: Excolatur is committed to serve national and international government agencies and institutions. Our diverse expertise in advising private and public sector becomes our strength while we advise our public sector clients in creating strategies for financial, health, human, infrastructure and environment and sustainable initiatives.

 

Nonprofit: Nonprofit constitutes one of the largest economic sectors and a major contributor to the U.S. gross domestic product.  In 2004, the sector reported nearly $1.1 trillion in total revenues and $1.9 trillion in total assets. Given the dispersed and fragmented nature of this industry, it is still seen an industry that has not reached it’s full potential as far as mobilizing resources and making a greater impact. Today the Nonprofits which rely heavily on grants, donations and interest income from their endowments are facing major challenges due to current economic downturn. The financial crisis is already resulting in a steep drop in funding for these organizations, forcing them to cut their budgets, and eliminate staff and programs.

Over little less than a decade, our partner firm The Class Consulting Group, has successfully provided pro bono and subsidized solutions to many global, national and regional not-for– profit organizations and assisted them in governance, marketing, human resource management, IT, PR, fund raising and operational needs. For more information on pro bono or subsidized services kindly visit www.theclassconsultinggroup.org.