The Wolverine Building Group: A Structural & Strategic Planning Case Study

OVERVIEW

  • A nationally recognized construction industry leader, specializing in industrial, multi-unit residential, healthcare, office, retail and restaurant construction.
  • General Description: Commercial Construction
  • Geographic Location: Michigan
  • Services Performed:
    • Design/Build
    • Construction Management
    • General Contracting
    • Historic Preservation
    • Building Services & Management
    • Self-Performed Steel Erection
    • Industrial Customer – Engineered Metal Buildings

THE SITUATION

Wolverine Building Group (Wolverine) is financially healthy with highly satisfied clients. The current Owner/CEO recently purchased his partner’s equity, and now owns controlling interest in the company. Following this ownership transition, the company is looking to the Owner/CEO to adjust the organizational structure to enhance its effectiveness. The Owner/CEO has significantly improved the company’s culture, but desires to push further beyond the current state. Some key long-term Wolverine employees are nearing retirement age and Wolverine’s business segments face different challenges and opportunities against different competitors. They want to have a commonly shared understanding of core business strategies to galvanize the team toward a clear north star.

THE SOLUTION

JACO Advisory Group (JACO) along with our strategic partner DWH, completed a comprehensive company assessment, utilizing our proprietary tools. The owner, the executive leadership team, and other key employees were involved. Wolverine has a prioritized, three-year strategic plan to build two groups of capabilities:

  1. Strengthen the team and the organization’s structure.
  2. Develop and implement of process enhancements to build upon and expand today’s capabilities.

Wolverine’s Owner/CEO and executive team received candid, non-personal communication from JACO and DWH. These frank conversations, leveraging DWH’s benchmarks, helped align Wolverine’s leadership.

THE OUTCOME

Wolverine is building upon its strengths: customer orientation, talent, and industry reputation and is adding incremental leadership roles to enable the Owner/CEO to focus on his strengths. Wolverine is expanding roles as outgoing leaders transition into retirement and is adding new capabilities and competencies identified by the assessment conducted by JACO and DWH. Wolverine is adding structure to scale its service platform to easily add capacity and expand into adjacencies and is galvanizing the company around a shared vision. As a result, Wolverine expects to enhance employee engagement and satisfaction, improve their delivery of services to their customers, bring additional stability to their future while minimizing risk and maximizing cash flow.

About Chris

Chris spent the past 3 decades as part of high performance, global businesses in general management (P&L responsibility), marketing, sales, strategy, and M&A roles. He partnered with customers to drive growth in business to business environments at General Electric and consumer products at Scotts Miracle Gro.

When he’s not working, he spends time with his family, physical fitness, and announcing football, basketball, and baseball games at the high school and college level.

If you have a business challenge around strategy, marketing, growth, or leadership, let’s talk.