In partnership with 7Mountains
Strategic seminar
Two days with your leadership, product or marketing team to decide on your priorities, and who owns each one. The seminar is prepared through one-to-one interviews beforehand and followed through until the decisions are in place.
I run these seminars with Olivier Njamfa, founder of 7Mountains. Olivier has built and sold several companies, including Eptica in 2019. He now sits on a number of boards and invests in tech startups through Seed4Soft.
When should you hold a strategic seminar?
- “Our leadership team is aligned.”In one-to-one interviews, that’s rarely what we hear. Everyone has their own list of priorities, and the disagreements nobody voices in leadership meetings end up slowing every decision down.
- “We already did a seminar last year.”The real question is what’s left of it today. A seminar that ends without an owner and a deadline for every decision mostly leaves a good memory.
- “Growth is slowing, we need new levers.”A company that has plateaued rarely has too few priorities. It usually has too many, and the first job is deciding which ones to drop.
- “We can’t afford to stop for two days.”That’s often the sign you need to. Two days to make decisions cost less than six months of decisions being pushed back.
How it works
Before the seminar
We meet every participant. Our diagnostic method, proven with teams in six countries, brings out what’s really holding things back, including what nobody says in leadership meetings.
Over two days
This isn’t a team-building retreat. We work from 8:30am to 6pm on concrete topics built from the diagnosis: the ambition, the priorities, what the company stops doing, who owns what. The agenda isn’t set in stone: we’ve already rebuilt an entire second day because the first one surfaced a problem more urgent than anything planned. Your team leaves with a shared ambition, clear priorities and an owner for each one.
After the seminar
Follow-up lasts at least 3 months, and we recommend 6. Decisions made in a seminar quickly run into day-to-day reality: there are trade-offs to make, adjustments to agree on and priorities to hold. For some teams, a product team for example, we run a review seminar six months later to measure how well the strategy has been adopted and adjust the roadmap.
Why not in your offices
The first seminar almost never takes place at your offices. It’s a moment to build trust and lay solid foundations, and it needs a team that’s fully focused. At the office, urgent matters quickly pull people away, and it’s hard to think out loud a few metres from your own teams. We choose a small, quiet venue, in France or abroad, depending on where your team is based. We’ve already run seminars in the US, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the UK and France.
FAQ
Who takes part?
It depends on the seminar. For a leadership seminar, the CEO and the members of the leadership team. For a product seminar, the product team, often joined by a product marketing lead and someone from engineering. For a marketing seminar, the marketing team and their counterparts in sales.
Why a marketing consultant in a strategic seminar?
Because most strategic decisions end up translating into marketing: targets, positioning, acquisition priorities. I make sure what’s decided over the two days can be put into practice by the marketing team the following week. See marketing strategy →
How much does a seminar cost?
It depends on the number of participants, the venue and the length of the follow-up. We’ll send you a detailed proposal after a first call.
Planning a seminar?
A 30-minute call to talk about your team, your challenges and the format that would suit you.