Marketing Saves The World: Stories about why capitalism works. by Bill Matassoni

Author:Bill Matassoni [Matassoni, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FIRMSconsulting LLC
Published: 2018-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

8

ADVENTURES IN E-COMMERCE LA-LA LAND

About two months after leaving McKinsey, I found myself on the beach in Anguilla. Pamela and I always celebrated her birthday there. A bottle of champagne appeared at our door. Then I got a phone call from John Hogan. To say John was a crazy-smart Irishman doesn’t begin to describe him. He was trustworthy and a great friend over the years. He asked me to consider cutting short the vacation and joining Mitchell Madison Group, a small consulting firm he and several other former McKinsey colleagues had founded.

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you. Let’s just say some investment bankers will be in the room.”

I really didn’t understand. The guys who started MMG were renegades. They represented the only major defection McKinsey had experienced. They had all been part of the banking practice. The heart of their strategy was to be number two next to McKinsey in serving financial institutions in the New York City arena. They focused on sourcing work. Believe it or not, banks buy a lot of paper despite all their investments in IT. The strategy worked. Mitchell Madison grew to $200 million in revenues in four years. For every client, MMG analyzed the structure of its major suppliers. It used cost curves and other frameworks to develop a unique understanding of the suppliers’ pricing and profits. It then used that knowledge to save its clients millions. They were a good example of a player in the upper right box of the process/impact matrix.

So, was there something wrong? One little thing. For every category of spending, MMG anointed one associate to be the world’s most knowledgeable expert. He or she would help the consulting teams do their work quickly and powerfully. But soon MMG’s rivals, the big accounting firms, for example, started to cherry pick these wunderkinds, offering them twice what they were making. MMG’s knowledge base began to walk out the door. Growth started to slow. And the three lead partners started to squabble. They concluded it was time to sell the firm.

That’s where I came in. I was going to help develop the “narrative” and write what is called the “green book” that investment bankers use to attract interest. Had I done anything like this before? Nope. The reason MMG called me was very simple. His name was Tom Steiner and he had founded MMG. I worked with Tom extensively at McKinsey. Among other things, I helped him write a book called Banking and Technology, Creating Value and Destroying Profits. The title basically captured the dilemma faced by financial institutions. They were spending huge amounts on IT but not gaining competitive advantage or widening their profit margins. Lots of client work resulted. Tom was intensely analytic and his book was filled with data. It just needed a story. He gave me a lot of credit for helping him and his colleagues.

So, a few months after leaving McKinsey and a few days from the beach in Anguilla, I found myself sitting in front of the entire consulting staff of MMG and a team of bankers.

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