Founder’s Story: Inspire and Equip Every Client to Innovate and Grow

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was working at a strategy consulting firm doing a lot of Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) research. At that time, VoC was considered the best practice for discovering customers’ unmet needs to guide the creation of new or improved offerings. And yet, after applying VoC to a variety of businesses and situations, I found that although it was reasonably effective at discovering opportunities for improving current products and services, it was ineffective at discovering opportunities for new products and services.

That’s because VoC was based on getting feedback from customers about the performance of a current product or service. But if you’re trying to create a new product or service, then there’s nothing for customers to respond to. I think you can see  the problem.

While I was trying to figure out how to improve the VoC process to help a client create new products, I happened to read an article in the Harvard Business Review by Tony Ulwick, Founder and CEO of Strategyn Consulting, in which he described the very same problem I was experiencing and how to resolve it as well. I immediately recognized the power in this new approach, an approach now known as the Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) version of Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD).

Not surprisingly, however, there’s a lot more to it than I could learn from reading a few articles so, I figured that if I wanted to continue helping companies create new and improved offerings, then the best thing I could do would be to work with Tony and the Strategyn team. So, in late 2005, I reached out to Tony, the timing was right, we hit it off, and I started working there six weeks later. I’m very grateful for the nearly seven years that I had working with Tony and the team helping Fortune 1000 companies create new and improved offerings. In 2012, I started Reveal Growth Consultants “to inspire and equip every client to innovate and grow without guesswork.”

Most companies don’t lack creativity or ideas; they lack focus. They lack clarity about where the market is under-served, about where the best opportunities lie. We reveal the unmet needs of our clients’ target customers and then help clients apply their expertise to the issues they now know their customers care about most. If that’s something you want, let’s talk!