"If you don't know where you are going, you are certain to end up somewhere else." - Yogi Berra

At its core, a strategic plan is really a roadmap to help you reach your desired future. It’s about taking what feels like an impossible goal, and breaking it down to smaller achievable tasks to help you get from where you are now to where you want to be. Sequoia uses a well-defined, six-step framework to help clients better understand their business and develop the optimal path to achieve the desired outcome. To do so, we help our clients to:

1. Define their culture and values
2. Analyze their current business to better understand strengths, weaknesses and opportunities
3. Determine where each of those fit into the larger industry environment, including how innovation may disrupt these positions
4. Understand where the firm is in its growth / contraction cycle, its appetite for change and ultimate objective
5. Identify impediments and pillars for growth within the “Four Ps” (Personnel, Product, Process/Technology and Positioning)
6. Pinpoint achievable short-term tactical priorities as well as long-term strategic initiatives.

As the industry continues to experience change, the landscape around what products are selling and what products remain “on the shelf” is also shifting. Asset owners’ increased focus on solutions, transparency and cost along with rapidly evolving innovations in technology will continue to put pressure on the way asset owners and managers buy, manage and distribute products and services.

Sequoia works with clients to take the long view and build on existing expertise to develop products and strategies that respond to current and future industry trends.

One of the chief problems with growing is that it can stress your business if you don’t properly plan for it.

Our deep experience developing and managing technology-driven processes for a $30+ billion quantitative manager has given us considerable insight about how processes can improve efficiency and help to manage risk as organizations grow. From processes that manage and communicate around key business risks such as client take-ons, terminations and cash flows to those that manage content development and distribution – we understand the importance of harnessing data for use throughout your organization.

Within the financial services industry, we firmly believe a brand is not just a logo, a business card, or your name on a building – it is, instead, almost entirely experience-based.

What this means is that the power of your brand comes from the collection of the many touch points (whether face-to-face, verbal, written, or visual) that you have with your clients, prospects and influencers. At its best, a solid brand ensures that each point of interaction has the potential to add value to key constituents – ultimately making them smarter consumers as well as an important part of your new business development.

At Sequoia we start with your most important constituent: your target audience. We work with you to clearly identify their needs and build a strategy that directly connects your firm to them through those needs. We then map out important touch points to build out a full communications strategy that enables you to reinforce your key advantages.