A supplier of solar panels that sells through installers and, until now, also directly to consumers. It has a promising energy-sharing service whose app keeps failing, a single Chinese supplier for its panels, and margins that have been eroding for several years.
New owners took over from the founder and want a plan that gets the business to profitability without abandoning what it is for.
Sunergie is the fictional company the book uses to work through the method. Any resemblance to a real business is coincidental, which is the point, because the plans of real customers are confidential.
What to notice
One action is worth the whole plan. Phase out the direct-to-consumer online store. That channel makes money today. It also competes with the installers the company depends on, some of whom are unhappy about it.
This is what a strategy looks like when it is real. The first strategy is not “support installers better” as a sentiment. It is a decision to stop doing something profitable in order to commit to a channel. You can disagree with it. That is the test.
Notice too that this appears as an action with an owner and a quarter, not as a vague intention. Closing a revenue stream tends not to happen unless someone’s name is on it.
The Goals answer the Objective word by word. Successful becomes profitability above 15 percent and revenue above €35 million. International becomes five countries at €3 million each. Returns for consumers becomes the payback period and the NPS. Returns for the climate becomes 2.6 billion kWh generated.
And then employee satisfaction, which appears nowhere in the Objective. That is a precondition goal: not part of the ambition, but the ambition is unreachable without it.
The third strategy exists because of a weakness. Positioning the energy service as reliable and innovative is, in plain terms, a response to an app that breaks. Building an IT department is not glamorous. It is the honest strategic answer when your differentiator does not work.
A supplier risk is handled in one line. Contract a second panel supplier. One action, tucked under the profitability strategy, addressing a dependency that could take the company down. Good plans often deal with existential risks in a single unglamorous line.
Where this plan could go wrong
Two countries, five countries. The Goals say active in five countries. The KPI for the international strategy says two. Those are not contradictory (the KPI is the target for this period and the Goal is the five-year end state) but it is exactly the kind of gap that causes an argument in a review if nobody says out loud which number applies when.
Q4 is crowded. Four of the fifteen actions land in the final quarter, including closing the online store and achieving an ISO certification. Add up the deadlines before you commit to them; the first version of an action list is almost never feasible.
The horizon
Five years, set by the supervisory board. That is at the long end for a company this size, and it works here because the ambition involves entering markets and building a capability: both of which take longer than a plan cycle. The quarterly strategy review is what keeps a five-year plan from being a five-year guess.