The Stress Test Every Business Needs

11How can you get the most out of your advisors?

Giri Varadarajan and Aayush Tulsyan

Successful automotive equipment companies must focus on three goals: winning new customers, retaining existing customers, and maintaining customer satisfaction through the life cycle of equipment ownership.

A global industry player was struggling to achieve these goals in Japan, and called in our colleagues from the United States to analyze its 160+ dealers in Japan and to work with them to develop an effective solution. The expected thing to do in this situation would be to hire a local advisor that understands the language, culture, and business.

Why hire advisors from the United States to help fix a problem in Japan? The client concluded that it had the required local business and cultural knowledge; however, it lacked sufficient process expertise and the ability to design and implement a standardized solution across the country—so it sourced the optimum talent globally. The client arrived at this decision after thoroughly evaluating its strengths and weaknesses, and clearly defining what it wanted from an advisor (more about this later in the chapter). EY worked with the client to develop a balanced scorecard at the outset of the project to define what success would look like for the dealer business. This helped keep everyone focused on the same goals, even with cultural and language differences.

The effort began by building trust rather than launching a national project. We developed ...