Food maker aligns to accelerate growth
$1 billion
The company grew its annual revenue from $750 million to $1 billion.
50%
The company grew its revenue in just 18 months — half of its 36-month timeline.
4
The Grant Thornton team completed its planning analysis in just four weeks.
At a glance
Client
Food processor and supplier
Industry
Manufacturing
Our role
Facilitate aggressive revenue growth
Our solution
Growth analysis, plan and activities
Alignment drives growth ahead of schedule
Scenario
A U.S. food and beverage company wanted to grow its annual revenue from $750 million to $1 billion in just three years, but it needed a clear path and internal alignment.
Approach
The Grant Thornton team analyzed internal and external factors to create a growth plan, facilitating alignment and activities for success.
Result
The company grew its annual revenue to $1 billion within 18 months — half of its target timeline — and now has a roadmap and alignment for continued growth.
Scenario
Aggressive growth goals
The executives at a U.S. food and beverage company wanted rapid growth — their goal was to take annual revenue from $750 million to more than $1 billion within just three years.
They understood that achieving this rapid growth would require a strategic plan informed by market and customer trends, all viewed against competitive dynamics. The plan needed a balanced portfolio of initiatives and investments across the business, with close alignment across management teams working together on one cohesive growth strategy.
“When growth capital is on the table, each senior leader naturally champions the initiatives that advance their corner of the business,” said Grant Thornton Business Consulting Managing Director Mark Owens. To cut through these competing priorities, the company needed an independent, data‑driven adviser to integrate perspectives, pressure‑test assumptions and build enterprise‑wide commitment to a single growth roadmap.
Securing broad managerial support required more than a top-down mandate. As Owens explained, “Even the clearest vision can stall unless each function sees how it advances their own priorities.” To bridge that gap, the CEO and CFO invited key managers into a structured strategy workshop — creating space for candid dialogue, surfacing individual concerns and co-authoring the growth roadmap. By involving everyone in shaping both the initiatives and the rationale for resource allocations, the leadership team built genuine ownership and momentum around the plan.
The company had no time to lose. “It was a relatively rapid case, with a high compound annual growth rate at its core,” Owens said.
Approach
Alignment on a clear path
The company needed clear insight and alignment for its initiatives and investments.
The Grant Thornton team conducted third-party industry interviews, customer surveys, secondary analyses and other research. “We tapped into our research network,” Owens said. “That gives us common benchmarks at the industry level — the three dimensions for this type of project to support management are typically related to market, competitor and customer research. When management gets access to true competitive intelligence, from leaders at their competitors, it really helps to paint a picture of the current state.”
The team created a comprehensive assessment of market economics and trends, evolving customer needs, decision drivers and evolving competitive products.
Owens said that customer feedback, when juxtaposed against perceptions from internal teams, can reveal important gaps. “When you run the customer study and show the gaps, you can say, ‘This is what your customers say about you. You have a big gap here, and these are the drivers of that gap. You need to put some action plans in place, make some investments, and close that gap to yield X dollars in profitability improvement.’”
The team collaborated with management to create an assessment of the company’s existing capabilities relative to its future capability maturity.
This "Capability assessment model" lists eight key business functions, and assesses the change needed in terms of people, processes and assets for each of the functions. This model shows that, in order to achieve its growth targets, the company needed to focus its investment in improving process capabilities across all business functions, along with asset capabilities in the business function of sustainability.
Key managers participated in a structured strategy workshop — creating space for candid dialogue, surfacing individual concerns and co-authoring the growth roadmap. By involving everyone in shaping both the initiatives and the rationale for resource allocations, the leadership team built genuine ownership and momentum around the plan. Using input from facilitated discussion sessions, assessments and research, the Grant Thornton team defined the company’s potential growth across channels, the products that should be key growth drivers, the best focus for investments and the capabilities that would be required to win.
The team’s analysis showed that the best growth strategy was to expand revenue from existing customers and core products before expanding to new customers and adjacent opportunities. “Everybody was focused on new customer acquisition, as opposed to retention and loyalty — the management of existing relationships and the expansion of product services and solutions that align with the needs of the existing customer base,” Owens said. “We found they could get a lot more top-line growth from selling into existing customers, and the cost of that sale would be much lower — improving sales efficiency.”
This "Opportunity assessment model" helps visualize three categories of opportunities: Core opportunities where the company wants to keep winning, adjacent opportunities where the company wants to leverage existing capabilities, and limited opportunities which the company wants to deprioritize for investment.
A three-category opportunity assessment model helped the company understand a path to growth that built upon core capabilities, developed adjacent ones and limited investment in areas that were not aligned with either.
“Essentially, we were trying to ring-fence the opportunities that would realize and drive near-term growth versus extend beyond a 24-month roadmap,” Owens said. “That ultimately kept management focused on how to expand the core business and the best adjacencies to tackle.”
Result
Growth ahead of schedule
The team worked to ensure the company had both comprehensive direction and comprehensive alignment. “We understood the nuances, empathized with management, and then helped to create a path where management felt like the right steps were being taken — that this wasn’t happening to them, it was happening with them,” Owens said.
The team spent four weeks analyzing the company and external factors before holding a facilitated discussion with management and aligning the activities required for success. “At the core of the project was a facilitated session with management,” Owens said. “We leveraged Finance’s views on profitability and financial performance, then facilitated activities to drive alignment across management and essentially create a rubric roadmap to guide the management focus. We worked with Finance on the back end to quantify the cost of those investments and ultimately package it up for management and the board’s approval.” The strategy incorporated product pricing with volume increases to drive top-line growth, facilitated by digital transformation with a new ERP.
The Grant Thornton team outlined its action plan and sequenced execution over three stages — short term (0–6 months), medium term (6–18 months) and long term (18–36 months) — in partnership with the CFO. The plan balanced the company’s cash flow, investment and return over the course of the initiative.
“Essentially, what we delivered was alignment with management on strategic initiatives to drive double-digit growth going forward,” Owens said. “Not only were they successful at delivering their top-line ambitions, but they had a clear roadmap and plan for how investments were going to be made to fuel growth into the future.”
The company successfully achieved its target of $1 billion annual revenue within 18 months — half of its original three-year timeline — with a clear roadmap for continued growth.
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Managing Director, Business Consulting
Grant Thornton Advisors LLC
Mark is a Managing Director in Grant Thornton’s Business Consulting practice, with a focus on Growth, Sales, Marketing, Customer Experience, Commercial Strategy, Digital Transformation and Business intelligence.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Industries
- Asset Management
- Insurance
- Life Sciences
- Manufacturing, Transportation & Distribution
- Private Equity
- Retail & Consumer Brands
- Services
- Technology, Media & Telecommunications
Service Experience
- Advisory Services
- Business Consulting
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