Inward Strategic Consulting

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the engagement manager for a large aerospace and defense company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Inward Strategic Consulting?

We needed a partner to put together a platform for a virtual new hire onboarding experience for our company on a global scale.  

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started with the inception from a design standpoint, looking at our objective as well as the system’s design. They provided us with 4–5 potential design themes. Once we selected a design theme, we discussed our preferences and expectations for content, marketing, design, logos, fonts, and all elements of branding. 

They worked to weave everything into a format that met our company’s brand guidelines while catering to new hires on a global level. With the branding content we gave them, they handled all aspects of web design, security, and development.  

What is the team composition?

I primarily interacted with the CEO and the developer staffed against the design work. 

How did you come to work with Inward Strategic Consulting?

Someone internal to our company had worked with them on a similar project in the past. Based on our initial conversations with them and their impressive credentials, we decided to move forward with them.  

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $10,000–$50,000 on the work. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them since January 2019. While the bulk of the project is complete, they’re still working with us on the continuous maintenance of the platform.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

When we first rolled out the content, our HR leadership had very positive things to say about the work. Many learned something about our company that even they didn’t know beforehand. The format of the solution also impressed. 

How did Inward Strategic Consulting perform from a project management standpoint?

They were communicative and timely, always delivering by the deadlines identified. Project management was very positive.  

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have significant experience working with reputable companies in an employee engagement and marketing capacity. Their background knowledge is essential to guiding decision-making in those spaces.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be great for them to ensure that all of the small details are looked through with a fine-toothed comb. That attention to detail would be helpful.  

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They value communication and want to know what their client expects of them. Have your vision and timeline ready to be shared, and they’ll ask questions if something is unclear. They’ll appreciate your preparation.  

Introduce your business and what you do there.

At the time I worked with Inward Strategic Consulting, I was working in global communications as an employee experience manager for McDonald’s, one of the world’s largest fast-food brands.

What challenge were you trying to address with Inward Strategic Consulting?

We have a lot of employees who work in a variety of office roles to help support our operations in the restaurants, and often they will get questions about the food service side of the business that they are simply not familiar with. We wanted to design a solution that would help those individuals learn about the food service and community involvement aspects of the organization in a fun and engaging way.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Their team created a microsite that could integrate with our network and intranet to provide a platform where people could learn about different areas of the business. They were able to bring together a really eclectic team from different perspectives who really all brought something valuable to the table.

What we arrived at in the end was a library of quarterly-generated images and descriptions and all kinds of content about our food, and our people, and some of the events that we participated in. They helped us to match up each photograph with a basic fact so that we were delivering simple, conversational content that people would want to read.

The content ranges from fun facts to myth busters addressing questions people might see on social media or from their neighbors. That way, we are giving these employees the tools they need to answer those questions when they are asked, or if not, to be able to tell the person that they’ll get them an answer and know that they have a resource where they can go to get it.

On top of all of that, we then implemented a Jeopardy-style game at the end of the content to test how much of it you remembered, and you go through a few different levels of difficulty and get rewarded with points that you can trade in for brand merchandise. So the full solution really served to equip our employees to be better brand ambassadors to the public in a very holistic way.

What is the team composition?

The group of about 6–8 people working on the project ranged from writers and graphic designers to developers as well as a really great coordinator who helped make sure the project stayed on track.

How did you come to work with Inward Strategic Consulting?

I’m not sure how my manager found them, but I was directed to work with them from that level. I gave her some basic ideas of what I anticipated the needs would be for the project, and then she went through the vendor identification process and let me know it was Inward who had won the rights to the project.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of the project was all managed by other people, but I know that it was very reasonable based on the technology, level of expertise, and hours of work involved.

What is the status of this engagement?

We brought them on around the end of 2012 and worked with them to launch and maintain the product until around mid-2015.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The final product that we created because of this initiative really is one of the achievements I’m most proud of having accomplished in my career. The fact that we had so many people across the world participating spoke volumes to how valuable they were finding this information. We never expected to see representation from thousands of people in 80 different countries on the platform, so that was really great.

We had a lot of great feedback, as well, from the folks who were surveyed about the tool, which pretty much confirmed that we had met all of our goals in developing a solution that was fun and easy to use. It also had very few issues and wasn’t being flagged by our tech service people very frequently at all.

In the end, the project was canceled, but it had nothing to do with the success it had seen. The company was going through a large reorganization and reevaluation of where funds were going, and the leaders of the company stopped a lot of projects simply for restructuring purposes, unfortunately including this one.

How did Inward Strategic Consulting perform from a project management standpoint?

I could not have loved the project manager that we were assigned from their team more. She’s no longer with Inward, and I have been trying to get her a job at McDonald’s ever since because she was an absolutely phenomenal coordinator. I think it is a great reflection on Inward as an organization that she was one of the most impressive people I have ever worked with.

She was able to carry an unbelievable amount of detail in her mind and was always on the ball with all of them. We used a lot of different tools to help keep everything organized throughout the work, and she was totally responsive to any questions we had on any of them, regardless of the time of day. Their service was at 150% the entire time we worked with them, and really exceeded every expectation we had for the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It is incredibly rare to work with a vendor that performs as well as they do across every aspect of a project. I was happy across the board with their service, their responsiveness, their creativity, and everything else involved in our work with them. We have an in-house creative group at McDonald’s but working with such a talented outside group was an absolute breath of fresh air in terms of the perspective they brought to the work. I never once felt like I was getting the B-team from them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

This really wasn’t a problem at all, but one thing I noticed is that Allan (CEO) has a tendency to restate everything that is said in a meeting. I understand that it is because as the leader of the organization, he feels a sense of responsibility to the client to make sure they understand everything that’s going on, but he really has an excellent team, and I think that he could demonstrate a little more trust in that context. I applaud him for pulling together the teams that he does, but I would just encourage him to take a breath every once in a while and let them do their thing.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Inward has worked with a lot of different clients and has a lot of experience with what makes certain engagements go well and what makes others not. In all of our work together, they never steered me wrong, so the best advice I can give anyone is just to ask them what they think you can do to make the partnership as successful as possible. You don’t have to do everything they say but hearing their perspective on that will give you the perfect place to start from.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the senior director of customer experience for a major retail conglomerate.

What challenge were you trying to address with Inward Strategic Consulting?

A couple of years ago, I was responsible for member insights at a subsidiary company, and we had to prepare a strategic document to recommend some changes in the positioning of their brand.

One of the elements we needed was industry benchmarking to help us compare our practices with other retail companies doing graded customer service and employee engagement.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The focus of their team in this project was on delivering a high-level summary of how the importance of strong culture in delivering great employee satisfaction was translating to great customer experience.

They helped us to develop a framework for how high performing companies were delivering strong employee engagement and translate that information into specific recommendations that we could implement within our own stores. The final product was a very detailed, 80–90-page explanation of each of the particular strengths of the more than 25 companies we used to benchmark.

What was the team composition?

For most of the work, I communicated directly with Alan (CEO).

How did you come to work with Inward Strategic Consulting?

I had worked with their team in the past on other strategic plans and have always been incredibly satisfied with the level of work that they deliver for us, so it was an easy decision to bring them on again here.

What is the status of this engagement?

This particular project was executed very quickly, starting and finishing all within January 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The deliverable that they provided and the specific facts and frameworks that were included in it helped make some of our pitch to the CEO of the company successful. It also helped to situate our top three opportunities in positioning ourselves against other companies moving forward, and we have made great progress towards those since then.

How did Inward Strategic Consulting perform from a project management standpoint?

We were very tight on timing for the project, and one of the reasons we went with them was because they have a lot of experience in the industry and knew exactly what we were looking for.

With just a very short brief, they understood the task and were able to set goals, touch base a couple of times to make sure they were going the right way, and then deliver the product with almost no need for any further changes. Because of that, most of the project management was handled on their side, but whatever they did worked extremely well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

One thing that really stands out about Alan in particular is that he has an extremely vast array of experiences and is constantly publishing thought-provoking articles in social media and other places. Their thought leadership really speaks to the level of focus that they have on strategy and execution that you don’t get at a lot of more cookie-cutter organizations.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s always some way to improve, but I don’t have anything in particular that I wish their team had done differently.