Green growth in recycling services

Challenge

A recycling company’s new CEO wanted to review the company’s strategic direction amid a quickly evolving market. The situation called for openly considering different alternatives also beyond the company’s current core. Thus, we applied a scenario-based approach in the strategy work together with the client’s board and management.

Brave the Future

In less than two months, the board and management walked through a process to understand external trends, identify alternative directions for the company, and evaluate them based on analysis. Instead of building an exhaustive outside-in view, we focused the analysis efforts on the company’s own possible actions, thus serving decision-making practically.​

The process boiled down to three alternatives. One of these was built around investing in a new industry-leading recycling facility. This alternative also proved to be the right one, when taking into account different evaluation criteria.​

Having crystallized the company’s future core, we summarized the chosen direction into a new strategy documentation. Further, to ensure strategic agility, we also defined a set of ‘triggers’ and associated own actions for the company, to change direction in the future if needed.

Impact

Having evaluated the chosen direction against other relevant alternatives, the company’s board and management now had a clear and commonly shared direction for the future. The company has successfully continued in implementing the strategy by, among other things, building the new state-of-the-art recycling facility. This investment has not only strengthened the company’s market position, but also enabled a step-change in their customers’ recycling rate and reduction of CO2.