Stratactics: Business Acumen, Leadership Management Training, Customized Sales Training

Success Stories

Our mission is to work with organizations that know they can improve company value when their people demonstrate personal and financial accountability in communication and behavior with each other, with vendors and with customers.

We have spent the last 20 years perfecting our ability to deliver this mission. Here are some of our recent clients:

This formerly family-owned, private-label food manufacturer had been acquired by an investment group, which installed a new management team. The team's objective was to improve performance and move from a "family owned" culture to one more focused on "business management." Stratactics'SM four-hour program was designed for rollout to all of the company's 400 employees, most of whom were production-line workers. Using business literacy and financial awareness as the content, the program shifted the company's culture to one in which everyone is engaged in "making a difference."

Following the program, employees and their supervisors meet regularly to brainstorm ways to improve key performance measures. Sturm's CFO, Rob Reugger, estimated an additional $5,000,000 in cost and expense savings with all employees and managers operating from a financial accountability mindset.

After years of mergers, acquisitions and dramatic industry changes, the Retail Investment Group (RIG) at Wachovia Securities was looking for a compelling, common culture for the future. RIG decided on a culture of Personal Accountability and a Strategic Objective of powerful, effective relationships at every level and with every function.

The core of this 18 month project was establishment of a process to permanently install the new culture and strategic objective. We worked intensively with the senior team and other key managers and with the training/coaching team in preparing them to demonstrate the new culture and behaviors.

The results have been dramatic:

The group collaborated to consolidate and simplify the management of its primary products resulting in large cash savings
Senior managers have facilitated the resolution of difficult long-standing issues and unleashed innovation and productivity
Project teams are dealing with and solving difficult challenges with greater urgency and in ways no one imagined possible
Internal clients are more free to ask for what they need and expect to get it

This Colorado based winner of the "National Home Builder of the Year" award had grown rapidly over a five year period. An increased number of managers and senior managers were making decisions that had great impact on company performance, but without sufficient financial acumen. This one-day financial training used the metaphor of a college student running his/her own development/building company (building cabins on a lake) to teach all the unique accounting/financial concepts that relate to construction companies.

Almatis, a manufacturer in the Chemical Industry, was recently purchased from an industry giant – Alcoa - by a private equity firm, creating a major culture shift for the company's managers and employees. The new management team wanted to move the focus of operational and financial decisions to EBITDA and Operating Cash Flow.

Stratactics was asked to create a program to introduce the new financial focus. The program implements thinking and behavior for a more entrepreneurial and accountable environment and teaches managers to understand and use the new financial measures in their day-to-day decisions to improve financial performance. This program's practical application sessions were extraordinarily successful. On average, participants created action plans that projected a 100 to 1 return on the company's investment in the training. These ongoing projects are currently being implemented.

Herman Miller is a furniture design and manufacturing company well-known for innovation in its industry. The company's training department leaders want to preserve and grow the company's innovation competency and deliver business learning programs that are equally innovative and inspiring. Stratactics customized and delivered its three-day Accelerated Learning Game and gave 50 of Herman Miller's course designers and presenters the most up to date tools and skills for design and delivery of Accelerated or Super Learning. We also delivered a custom Accelerated Learning Design Template to the training department as a common process for developing all future course designs.

The training group at Herman Miller is increasingly being asked to support initiatives and problem solving in operating groups across the company. StratacticsSM has recently returned to teach this group our "Accountable Communication" skills program to facilitate effective communications internally and with its diverse clients.

The Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) at Maricopa, Adda Alexander, wanted her staff of training designers and presenters to do a better job of engaging the busy doctors and nurses who were their audience. The trainers had critical, even life-saving information to teach in a learning environment that was hectic and highly charged. StratacticsSM delivered a customized Accelerated Learning Training and gave Adda's trainers the tools and skills to create a training atmosphere that was safe for its learners, brought personal meaning to the subject being taught and delivered an appropriate level of challenge to its audience.

In Adda's own words, "The hands on practice ... is perhaps the program's strongest feature. When staff left the session, they were equipped to implement what they learned … they are receiving high praise and compliments from other departments about the improved quality and effectiveness of their presentations. Staff is actually looking forward to our presentations—a true testimony to the program's impact and effectiveness."

With a corporate structure and philosophy that encourages independent thinking and innovation, Sunclipse needed its managers to understand and act on the implications and nuances of cash flow and profitability. Multiple locations spread over a wide geography in the United States made financial training in a classroom expensive and impractical. Sunclipse turned to StratacticsSM for My Remote Sunclipse Mentor, a financial training program delivered on the Web. We delivered a customized six-module format that uses Darrell Mullis's book, The Accounting Game™: Basic Accounting from the Lemonade Stand, to teach basics and the client's numbers, drivers, and terminology to teach issues critical to the company's strategic objectives.

This company had wide variation in leadership abilities and financial acumen of its Store Directors, and needed to create a baseline of common skills and practices across it 100+ stores. Our team did extensive needs assessment, a comprehensive 3-day creative design session with the client team, and created the basic design and design document for the client's three-day store directors' conference. The client's training team completed detailed development and delivery of the program.