Our Capabilities
We recognize that strategy must be contextualized to each client’s capabilities and market conditions. Our methodologies combine evidence-based analytics, creative insights, and an operational focus in order to deliver actionable solutions tailored to each engagement. And during implementation, Tuscany is right there with you to ensure seamless execution.
Asset Integration
Mergers and acquisitions commonly fail to achieve their promised value due to lack of integration of vision, key metrics, reporting, firm culture, and or systems. Tuscany can provide both leadership and project management to support integration efforts that cross departmental functions. This may involve establishing realistic timelines, advising on restructuring to improve efficiencies, reducing costs, and organizing for execution of new initiatives. Tuscany strives to create transparency throughout the process.
Our integration work extends beyond acquisitions and includes products and services that are managed as independent entities. Where appropriate, Tuscany can facilitate their successful integration into a larger operating environment, taking advantage of scale and structure while carefully navigating the potential for internal competition, increased transaction costs, conflicting brands or messaging, and misaligned incentives.
Examples of our work:
For a regional healthcare provider, led and managed a nine-month integration of two acquisitions. This covered all departments and resulted in the development of new key metrics governing each organization. It also entailed the reorganization of service lines and their associated brands within the organization.
For a national service provider, incubated a new consumer set of service offerings, followed by integrating the offering into the parent organization to fuel rapid growth.
Brand Development
A brand should be a motivating reflection of the essence of a product or organization. Brand development can be a complicated process that simultaneously supports strategic direction while taking into account current customer sentiments, insights, and perceived value. Tuscany has managed far-reaching brand engagements to improve brand recognition, create messaging hierarchies, develop claims, and uncover opportunities for brand extensions. Tuscany partners with trusted creative resources to develop breakthrough names, identities, logos, and brand guides.
Examples of our work:
For a well-known consumer service, directed a brand evolution effort to accommodate the launch of a range of new services with the express intention of competing with the original brand position.
For a K-12 private school group, conducted detailed brand and messaging analysis to create a prioritized message hierarchy, test and recommend taglines, and develop the organization’s brand guide.
For a leading non-profit university, conducted in-depth interviews, focus groups, and quantitative research to assess and develop a new brand initiative that integrated the university’s campus based, satellite, and online programs.
For a specialized medical center, developed and supported a successful brand and messaging campaign.
Business Intelligence
All organizations are entering into an age of metrics, where streamlined access to data and accurate, fast interpretation can yield significant competitive advantage. Tuscany has assisted clients in developing Key Performance Indicators and dashboards enabling organizations to be more intentional in managing organizational performance and outcomes. This is particularly needed in educational and health care organizations where regulatory requirements and market pressures demand consistently high performance on a specific set of legally determined metrics. Tuscany assists clients in tracking inputs that demonstrably improve outcomes.
Examples of our work:
For a client integrating a new acquisition, Tuscany analyzed scores of internal client data sets and reports and guided the client through a process of dashboard simplification, elimination of non-actionable data, and synthesis of key metrics to enable the client to effectively steer key business functions in the newly integrated entity.
For a healthcare client with rapidly declining profitability, Tuscany uncovered a flawed measure of caregiver productivity which mis-directed managerial efforts. Tuscany analyzed the fundamental business operations and created new algorithms, reports, procedures, and training to standardize operations. The client returned to profitability within a quarter.
Demand Discovery
Uncovering the fundamental needs, pain points, and unspoken desires of potential customers can provide the basis for true differentiation and long-term sustainable growth. The demand discovery process can drive product innovation, pricing, marketing and sales efforts, or brand positioning, encompassing a range of powerful approaches to identifying fundamental drivers of value.
Our approach to Demand Discovery utilizes a variety of novel and established techniques including jobs-to-be-done and outcomes analysis, rejecter research, in-depth interviews, intercepts, and qualitative and quantitative research. Findings are then contextualized against both the overall market and key competitors. Our work can result in new product roadmaps, price strategy, organizational redesign, process improvements, and initiatives to operationalize and take advantage of customer insights.
Examples of our work:
For a national software developer, identified novel points of product differentiation and key messaging through an extensive jobs-to-be-done analysis that included current, prospective, and non-clients.
For a large K-12 private school group, conducted rejecter research (including prior customers, tire-kickers, and never purchasers) in order to prioritize product redevelopment and messaging.
For a nationally recognized public research university, created a blue ocean strategy addressing unmet needs related to K-12 gifted education.
Diligence, Mergers, & Acquisitions
Our diligence work prepares clients for key acquisition decisions and provides an independent assessment of achievable growth objectives. Tuscany conducts market and company diligence (both buy-side and sell-side) in acquisition transactions. Advance preparations, including extensive market assessments and forecasts, have yielded significant positive results for our clients in terms of enterprise valuation and investor commitments.
Tuscany supports deal execution through strategy validation, pricing evaluation, operational & sales diligence, asset separation analysis, communications management, and day one preparation.
Diligence engagements are conducted as an objective third-party voice in a transaction. Activities may include validation of market dynamics, key segment identification, quantifying short- and long-term trends, mapping the competitive landscape, and sizing growth opportunities. The depth of our reports is tailored to the needs of sellers or investors.
Our Engagements:
- Support the preparation of sell-side financial diligence.
- Detail the market dynamics to provide a clear understanding of the seller’s operating environment. This includes a focus on how these dynamics are changing.
- Identify and advise on issues that may be raised by the buyer.
- Provide thorough data documentation and sourcing.
- Identify potential post-acquisition opportunities/threats.
Because we have worked both upstream and downstream of transactions, we understand the underlying challenges and risks associated with a promising acquisition. Our team can help manage critical steps of the process to reduce risk, prioritize post transaction opportunities, and achieve your business goals.
Tuscany does not provide deal origination, deal structuring, bid preparation, capital raising services, tax diligence, or legal services.
Examples of our work:
- For a national education firm, conducted sell-side market diligence as the firm prepared itself for sale.
- For a publishing company, identified strategic targets for acquisition, conducted buy-side company diligence, and provided advisory services throughout the acquisition.
- For a mid-sized health services firm, provided advisory support, communications management, and integration services pre- and post-acquisition.
Market Research
The goal of our research is to create actionable, results-oriented insights. Working in close collaboration with our clients, our approach focuses first on defining the problems to be solved and outlining clearly how the research findings will be implemented. Starting with the end in mind enables us to provide our clients with actionable research findings directly aligned to key managerial decisions. We separate the “interesting to know” from truly actionable findings, which helps to avoid research that does not inform, or even clouds, key decisions. We marry sophisticated techniques with custom analyses that allow us to establish empirical evidence and derive critical customer insights.
Typically, engagements begin with an evaluation of available data from internal client sources. Additional data gathering may include secondary research on markets, products or programs, competitors, regulatory constraints, or other factors utilizing both proprietary and public sources. Data are analyzed using reliable and statistically validated techniques, and results are visualized for easy consumption by internal stakeholders to support decision-making.
Research capabilities include:
- Brand and Message Testing
- Market Scans
- Competitive Intelligence
- Customer Experience Evaluation
- Qualitative Research
- In-depth interviews (IDIs)
- Focus groups
- Purchaser and Rejecter Research
- Employee Satisfaction
- Quantitative Research
- Segmentation & Targeting
- Product and Price Tiering
- Panel Research
- Price Elasticity Testing
- Customer Switching Behavior
- Legislative and Policy Analysis
Marketing & Sales Optimization
Tuscany has extensive expertise in marketing and sales, including student recruitment for educational institutions, marketing, advertising and promotion for consumer goods and services companies, and patient acquisition for health care organizations. Tuscany activities include digital marketing (with a focus on paid search and activity attribution), website planning, brand messaging hierarchy and claims, spending efficiency, marketing planning and channel management, call center sales processes, enrollment management, and personnel selection, training and assessment.
Most Tuscany client engagements focus on creating revenue growth and enhancing profitability. Tuscany evaluates sales organizations to determine sales effectiveness. For example, in higher education this may involve enrollment management including the full arc of admissions process, financial aid, credit recognition, external marketing messaging, educational counselor scripting and training, tours and orientations, retention strategies, and outcomes. These elements combine to create an improved student experience for both initial enrollment and re-enrollment, and success may require adjustments to marketing, programs, messaging, organization structure, leadership, or training.
Tuscany also has experience managing customer experience processes, including mapping, analyzing, developing, and testing customer experience. Getting the customer experience right is particularly critical in education and health care, where institutions can rise and fall based, in large part, on their reputation.
Examples of our work:
For a leading regional university, transformed marketing and admissions by infusing highly effective digital marketing techniques into existing operations. Activities included leadership evaluation and replacement, holistic changes to digital media strategy, media agency selection, budget reallocations, and sales process adjustments. The university is experiencing double-digit growth of online enrollments.
For a K-12 services provider, re-engineered sales processes by first streamlining the human practices, migrating these new processes into Salesforce, and creating simple reports that allowed senior leadership to monitor and adjust sales on a weekly basis. This engagement also saved money by freeing up wasted administrator and analyst time.
For a major medical institution, developed patient and practitioner design requirements for an STI point-of-care test.
New Market Opportunity Analysis & Entry
Our market opportunity practice uncovers and assesses new market and growth opportunities across multiple dimensions: gauging demanding, evaluating likely competitive actions, recommending capabilities development and phasing, and guiding operational execution. This applies whether expanding geographically or extending into new areas of product or programmatic offerings. Our approach identifies and prioritizes opportunities and provides guidance for successful market entry. We pay special attention to organizational capabilities that may need to be bolstered in order to scale quickly.
Engagements include whitespace and market stage analysis, consumer or key buyer research and segmentation, geographic market or zip code evaluations, mystery shopping to reveal competitor weaknesses, identifying category perceptions through observed usage, and price/product tiering. Our opportunity assessments often include the development of a go-to-market and implementation strategies. Tuscany may also assist with execution, including project management, sales management, product or program design and development, and organization structure.
Examples of our work:
- For a leading provider of special education services, conducted a 48-state analysis of greenfield school opportunities covering the state legal and regulatory environment, revenue and profit opportunities, competitors, barriers to entry, and market size estimations.
- For a network of private schools, evaluated six cities as expansion opportunities using a novel product tiering and pricing methodology. Client has successfully expanded operations and is thriving in our recommended target market.
- For a global K-12 school group, conducted detailed zip code, segmentation, and messaging analysis to support the launch of a new $80 million state-of-the-art K-12 school.
Operations & Process Improvement
Tuscany managing partners have served as senior leaders and general managers in public corporations, colleges, private companies, and high-tech startups. They have had significant P&L responsibility up to $250 million, and with staff sizes as large as 1,800. Operational expertise includes revenue generation and management, organization design and staff development, product and program portfolio optimization, strategic planning, international expansion, enrollment management, building continuously improving hiring practices, cost reduction and profit improvement, and managing acquisitions or dispositions. We know what it takes to deliver actionable, evidenced-based recommendations to decision makers and to offer executional support in realizing the full potential of profitable growth opportunities.
By marrying powerful analytics and practical approaches we enable our clients to generate significant and sustained performance improvements. This includes helping our clients scale by minimizing operational complexities, identifying process improvement opportunities, increasing asset utilization, and improving the use of digital tools and analytics. In the current age, when nearly every organization is facing pressure to make analytics a core capability, we help our clients manage the integration of digital data into existing operations.
Examples of our work:
- For a college in the Midwest, designed and simplified enrollment, admissions, and financial aid processes resulting in a substantially reduced processing time.
- For a leading Catholic university, conducted research to identify pressure points in the student enrollment experience resulting in re-organization of key service departments within the university.
- For a provider of school food services, created a sales prioritization process by geography and prospective customer to improve sales performance.
Organization Design
Organizational design is a critical aspect of effective operations. Without effective reporting structure, hiring profiles, incentives, communication, performance evaluations, and culture, an organization cannot reach its potential. Both Tuscany partners have extensive operational experience and understand the stresses that growth or contraction can place on an organization and its people. We are adept at working side-by-side with staff to analyze and assess the internal alignment of people and business functions.
Capabilities include:
- Assessing Organizational Structure and Leadership
- Corporate Restructuring
- Sales Structure
- Training, Professional Development, and Corporate Learning
- Incentive and Compensation Design
- Re-engineering Hiring Practices to achieve an organization’s talent acquisition goals while maintaining culture and minimizing hiring bias.
Examples of our work:
- For a client with ambitions to expand from regional to a national on-ground presence, assessed sales organization and performance to recommend a structure for supra-regional and national coverage.
- For a client moving from local office sales structure to national call centers, recommended a revised sales process consistent with Salesforce implementation.
- For a mid-western college, re-organized the admissions and marketing organizational structure to align recruitment activities, costs, and highly effective promotional channels. The effort resulted a better recruiting climate for staff and students and ultimately higher yield.
Pricing
Tuscany has broad expertise in evaluating enterprise-wide pricing in highly competitive markets. Price can be a critical lever that is intimately tied to both brand perception and operational execution. Tuscany helps organizations understand their price position relative to competition, how customers think about and evaluate price, and ways to influence the perceived value of a product or service.
Our approach to pricing is adjusted based on the product/service, market environment, competitive intensity, and our client’s strategic direction. We are highly creative in our approach to contextualizing each market. This often involves detailed analysis of competitors, including both list and net pricing, and surveying customers with unique yet reliable techniques to assess price elasticity and market performance. With these techniques, Tuscany has produced verifiable market perspectives on price positioning for clients.
Past work includes utilizing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to gain access to hundreds of competitor/government contracts, building extensive product comparison databases that combine public and private data, price sensitivity testing, customer interviews, and sales team intelligence. Our work is designed to empower our client’s strategic growth objectives and can include changing price points (raising or lowering), establishing new or eliminating discount schedules, identifying market price corridors, and changing licensing terms. Tuscany has used such data to create visibility into pricing opportunities that can be exploited to improve competitiveness and profitability.
Examples of our work:
- For a large online university in the U.S., tested price elasticity through our unique quantitative methodology that combines Discreet Choice Methodology with an Auction model. This engagement assessed tuition price communication and messaging, pricing structure, and price points, all within a competitive context. The new price strategy and messaging was launched through a highly successful national television advertising campaign.
- For a national K-12 publisher, derived the in-market price corridors based on competitor prices. Because the educational publishing market is highly opaque, this required an extensive FOIA request process to gain public school district net price data for competitor contracts. By decoding hundreds of competitive contracts and building a systematic apples-to-apples evaluation process, we were able to create accurate competitor price comparisons leading to improved sales success at the school district level.
- For a healthcare firm, identified previously unpublished insurance reimbursement rates for the firm’s primary procedures, across major providers in ten target states. This engagement also included calls to insurance companies, state regulators, nonprofit organizations and patients to create a blueprint of market dynamics.
Product & Program Innovation
Tuscany assists clients with development of new products and programs, including creative exploration, customer/student research and assessment, concept development, beta testing, demand forecasting, launch planning, marketing and implementation. Tuscany has also assisted clients with re-conceptualizing under-performing programs and products, and optimizing client portfolios to maximize customer/student satisfaction and enterprise profitability.
Examples of our work:
- For a leading research university, explored online secondary curriculum for students identified as gifted and talented.
- For a leading K-8 schools group, provided guidance and executional support for creation of a new high school from the ground-up, including academic approach, culture, brand, extra-curricular activities, admissions criteria, pricing, pro-forma budget, and facility design.
- For a leading U.S. art college, conducted an opportunity analysis on five new degree programs resulting in the launch of four new degrees that were fine tuned to meet market needs.
- For a national home school provider, developed a full K-12 curriculum, including conceptualizing and developing academic philosophy and programs, and trademarking the novel educational philosophy Learn, Use, Teach™.
