Do not optimise what exists. Transform it.
The complete transformation process for companies in special situations. Developed in 2016 and refined in every assignment since. It starts not with costs but with the people who know the company best.
Restructuring applied to a transformation problem is like antibiotics against a virus.
Classic restructuring cuts costs and raises efficiency. That works as long as the business model holds. Once it is attacked at its core, there is no point making something more efficient that is no longer in demand. What you do has to become different before it can become better.
The restructuring adviser has to fix it now.
The employees are the solution and can implement their own ideas.
We have to become more efficient.
We first have to become different before efficiency makes any sense.
Customers will not pay for that.
Customers would gladly pay if they knew what for.
We have no money. We have to cut costs.
There is enough capital in the world.
People, ideas, money. And someone who holds it all together.
People
The employees move from being affected to acting. Their creativity produces ideas nobody in the company had been looking for. The works council and the union are involved from the start.
Ideas
The focus is not on saving costs but on recombining what is there: machines, plant, competencies, networks. The question is: how can there be a future with today’s employees, starting from the operation that exists?
Money
Money is not the bottleneck. The lack of interest in what a company in crisis offers is. New business models attract groups of investors who would never put money into a classic restructuring.
Shaper
A small team brings people, ideas and money together and connects the innovation process with the restructuring under way. GRANTIRO takes on that role.
From apparent lack of alternatives to several financeable business plans.
Out of many possibilities come several financeable business models. The process runs under time pressure, usually within a few months, alongside day-to-day business and the restructuring.
Creativity selection
How pronounced a person’s creativity is can be measured with scientific methods. GRANTIRO has built a creativity selection from that, which assembles teams from the entire workforce, across every function and every level. These teams carry the GRANTIRO Process.
Result The core team: voluntary, regardless of the org chart.
Ideation
In a short time the core team generates hundreds of ideas, bottom-up and around the existing core competencies. The tools are innovation management methods such as design thinking, which participants learn as they go. Aligning with the existing corporate strategy is deliberately not part of this phase.
Result Several hundred ideas across different fields of opportunity.
Integration
The ideas are assessed with active market participants: customers, suppliers, technology partners, investors. Whatever meets interest is condensed into concepts and tied to the plant and competencies of the site.
Result Around thirty viable concepts with a response from the market.
Implementation
The most durable concepts are developed into business plans and taken into the investor process. The search for capital or new owners is almost always part of it: it tests which ideas the market will actually fund and prevents expensive misjudgements. Shareholders can implement the ideas with the workforce or sell the company on that basis.
Result Several financeable business plans.
I know again what I get up for in the morning.
The process does not replace restructuring. It runs alongside it.
In the situations we are talking about, a core project for financial recovery is always running: the restructuring, with fixed rules, deadlines and rights for those involved. The GRANTIRO Process does not interfere with those rules. It opens the restructuring path up to new options without questioning the economic solution.
This is where new products, services and business models emerge. The employees and their ideas are at the centre.
Everything else that is needed for a new path to be possible at all in a crisis: translation between the workforce, the restructuring advisers, the financiers and the investors. The shaper’s path.
The restructuring under way, with its deadlines and rights. The more acute the crisis, the narrower the room for manoeuvre and the more important the coordination.
Everyone involved gets an answer of their own.
Shareholders
The existing plan gains alternatives that rest on the ideas of its own workforce. Implement them, or sell on that basis: both remain possible.
Financiers
More solutions mean less risk. An economic comparison of closing against continuing replaces gut feeling.
Restructuring adviser
The workforce’s ideas widen the solution space of the restructuring. The GRANTIRO investor process wins over groups of buyers who would not have considered the site before.
Workforce
Motivated again instead of merely frustrated. A clear goal, and the proof that it can be done after all.
Works council and union
The workforce turns from a cost factor into the source of the solution. The GRANTIRO Process runs together with the works council and the union, not against them.
Citizens
When a site closes, everyone pays in the end: the region, the municipality, the taxpayer. The GRANTIRO Process keeps industrial cores and competencies where they grew up, and turns those affected into participants.
Neither a restructuring nor an innovation department.
The first GRANTIRO Process saved the industrial site it was built for. That is how the GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank began.
Schaidt Innovations, Wörth am Rhein-Schaidt
Twelve fields of opportunity produced more than 30 business ideas in seven months. The site was sold and every job was kept.
More cases 2017–2020Ledvance, Eichstätt
Closing turned out to be the economically weaker option. The site was sold and all 333 employees were taken on.
More cases 2023Eickhoff Wind Power, Klipphausen
More than 500 ideas in the first month, 30 concepts, and a playbook from the Saxon Ministry of Economic Affairs.
More casesFirst a preliminary talk, then everything else.
The process can be used as a whole or in parts. In the preliminary talk we work out what will hold in your situation and how fast it has to go.
Please address enquiries to Andreas Ollmann, the contact for the GRANTIRO Process.
