Insight Strategic Concepts Celebrates Its First 25 Years
Back when everyone was freaking out about the Y2K bug and the dot-com bust, Enimen was disrupting the music industry, American Beauty was the hit movie, and the International Space Station was launched. Shelley Moore was contemplating her childhood dream of starting her business.
In October 1999, Shelley started Renaissance Coaching from her basement, assisting small business owners with growth strategies by providing marketing and human resources services. Everyone had a hard time spelling Renaissance. The name was briefly changed to simply Shelley Moore Strategy Coaching.
The vision was to help business owners define their growth objectives, market plan, and marketing communications. In most instances, projects shifted to designing the internal team to execute the strategies. The void that small business leaders had to fill was abundantly clear: they had to think strategically and effectively communicate strategies and responsibilities to their team. Yet the day-to-day minutiae would get in the way, and the challenges to develop the needed skillsets to grow remained.
It was evident that small and medium businesses needed executive and management support. By 2002, when Insight Strategic Concepts was formally incorporated, Insight’s services expanded beyond growth strategy development, communications, and team responsibilities. Insight became a fractional services firm before the term “fractional” was a thing.
Relationships were formed with other experts, resulting in Insight’s Pathfellow Network —a network of specialists working together on a project-by-project basis to fill the gaps in client teams. Additional services provided by the collective network were accounting, estate planning, brand research, marketing design services, technology design and implementation, sales management, human resources management, organizational design, and leadership development. Insight and its Pathfellow network became a one-stop resource center for small and medium-sized businesses. These collaborations have evolved and still exist today.
The Insight Growth System and Organic Integration
In 2005, Insight Strategic Concepts® became a registered trademark when Shelley designed the Insight Growth System. This is when Insight created Organic Integration as the key to SMB success. Specific stages and steps were designed for each of the four elements:
Passion - leadership, self-awareness, vision, and alignment
Strategy - market research, strategy, brand integration, marketing communications, and sales revenue implementation
Collaboration - organizational design, role definition, team building, talent management
Process - accountability systems, reporting, analytics, process mapping, technology implementation
Over the years, these elements were identified as essential for aligning and accelerating scaled organizational growth. Maps were designed for each element, showing the processes and services Insight provides as a comprehensive sequence of processes that build upon one another for a complete solution.
The Organic Integration Business Model infographic outlines the outcomes required for the entire system that achieves accelerated growth. Moving away from the Insight Growth sequence proved to decelerate the client's pace of growth. The more Insight could support the Organic Integration principles and processes, the faster clients would grow their revenue and people. Insight has assisted clients in establishing a foundation that has generated almost one billion dollars in revenue over the past 25 years.
Trust Is A Must
We learned that Organic Integration was exceptionally achieved when a trusted relationship between Insight and client team members was more seamless. This was also evidence of Insight’s transition from just providing integration plans to being a fractional partner through the implementation of the growth plan.
Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the leadership and management talent to implement their growth plans, which is crucial for building momentum. Insight’s experience in fostering collaborative expert relationships to execute complex projects has filled the most unique gaps that clients have challenged us to fill.
This trust must be deep. The reason “Leadership Is Everything” is the motto for much of our current brand messaging is that while we can research the market and team to develop a growth plan, if our client’s leadership incapacity to implement the plan blocks progress, we all will fail. Research by SHRM and others has found that 9 of 10 managers and leaders do not have the skills to lead. There is no doubt that is true. The question is, do clients have the ability to trust us and others to fill those leadership gaps?
This truth challenges us to be upfront and transparent about the blockages created by client leadership to implement successful plans. More often than not, that is the reason that growth momentum is not built to the initial potential we discover in client projects that are compelling and transformative. We love taking on these challenges and have become more bold and decisive about the projects we desire to pursue based on the ability to build immediate and lasting trust.
The BLOOM Leadership Platform
In 2002, our partnership with Michael Connelly evolved into co-founding a SaaS platform that aligns strategy with people and their success. SaaS hardly existed in 2002, and we certainly didn’t know it started in 1999. We thought it would be clever to create a “website” that serves as a team development platform. The BLOOM Team Leadership Platform has evolved into a team leadership platform, enabling leaders to provide regular feedback and skill development challenges to their team members. The platform offers modules for creating role profiles, conducting various types of performance dialogues/reviews, developing and tracking learning and development assignments, setting individual development goals, managing growth plan levels and progress, and maintaining an overall performance journal.
Insight is now developing eight online courses that step out its highest demand planning and implementation solutions. These courses are delivered in the BLOOM platform, featuring free webinars and the BLOOM Leaders Circle, which offers monthly Insight Growth Kits to leaders committed to their leadership development.
Insight Growth System for Nonprofits
As our leadership clients grew to understand Insight’s comprehensive services and ability to achieve strategic outcomes, they invited Insight to assist nonprofit organizations, of which they served as board members. We tailored our services to meet the needs of mission-driven nonprofits that struggled to be focused on the business outcomes required for sustainability. Over the years, we have assisted nonprofits with growth planning that leads to expansion plans evolving to capital campaigns. Capital campaigns have raised approximately $200,000,000 and are growing.
Community Opportunity Collaboratives
Next, clients engaged our skills in broad community redevelopment projects. These projects require integrated private-public partnerships to develop a unified growth plan for the community that requires deep funding stacks at federal, state, local, and private levels to accomplish transformative community projects. Initially, as private-sector representatives, we often assumed leadership roles that the private sector lacked experience or interest in fulfilling. As our community leadership capacity was realized, nonprofits directly reached out to us to facilitate their large-scale capital campaign projects.
Our community development work has evolved into collaborating with cross-functional leaders from the private and public sectors to implement our proprietary Opportunity Collaboratives in partnership with OBE Advisors. These Opportunity Collaboratives are customized for each community to orchestrate workforce development solutions in densely populated and often distressed areas. In these communities, underemployed residents make up a large percentage of the population, seeking readiness to achieve higher incomes and more skilled career pathways that meet specific employer industry sector demands. We streamline nonprofit services to remove barriers for residents, thereby clearing the way for living wage opportunities.
The Next Five
Looking ahead, Insight is positioned to continue leading transformative projects for SMB, nonprofits, and community private-public partnerships. Alongside these projects, we will scale our growth by offering turnkey products and services for online learning through the BLOOM Team Leadership Platform, workshops, and opportunities for other professionals to implement the Insight Growth System and BLOOM implementations.
We look forward to deepening our relationships with service providers and aligning with clients whose leadership is positioned to build trust with us to swiftly achieve their strategic outcomes.
Deeper Insights