Founded in 2008, Liberty Advisor Group, an advisory and strategic consulting firm offers original thinking combined with factual data to develop comprehensive, situation-specific solutions that help solve complex business issues and improve enterprise value. Built by industry veterans with decades of experience and expertise in business and technology transformation, data analytics, business threat intelligence, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), the firm has a proven track record in delivering its promise of “accelerating growth, driving efficiency, and reducing risks.” In this interview, Chad Smith, the founding partner and CEO and Brad Holtzman, the director of business analytics and data architecture of Liberty Advisor Group, share some insights about their organization and the uniqueness of their offering.
THE ONE-OF-A-KIND SOLUTION
We often see IT organizations implementing cutting-edge tools or technologies without specific use cases and inevitably struggle due to the fact that they adopt them based on market hype and no clear understanding. Liberty Advisor Group aids such clients by helping them make informed business decisions and execute a data and analytics strategy that is aligned with the desired business outcomes effectively. We are laser focused on delivering the benefit of a program and getting the dollars to the bottom line of that company. We help these companies set up programs where they can fund foundational type projects, so they invest more into transformation in the analytics space to improve as an organization. We have adopted a playbook approach to assess the current state of the organization from their people, process, and technologies and focus on the components that the customer needs to have in order to meet the specific stated goals of the program.
THE SECRET SAUCE
Primarily, it is the combination of the consulting units that we have. We do a lot of work in the M&A and the private equity space. In light of our experience, we are able to understand the business models of these private equity companies quickly and offer them an array of services. From performing analytics to showing private equity companies the key metrics, RoI and quick-win projects across their portfolio, we do it all, and that has been a big differentiator for us over the years. The acquisition of G²S Global has enabled us to revolutionize the way we help our clients on the cybersecurity front using analytics. By using analytics for security, we are able to make our clients understand the risk models to model their threat environment across their peer groups. We use machine learning to aggregate sources of data from all over the public and private web as well as the deep and dark web to come up with a risk modeling score for these companies. With this, we can make organizations understand and contextualize their threat in terms of real dollars. By leveraging our analytics team and combining it with our experience, we are able to come up with new solutions that are really relevant to various parts of our clients’ organization.
“HAPPY CUSTOMER”
Story Recently, a Chicago-based manufacturing company approached us with a challenge that they were seeing; they observed dramatic decreases in the pricing that they collected from their customers. They were essentially in a predicament where they were racing to the bottom on pricing against their competitors. They wanted us to take a data-centric approach toward looking at the problem and get to the crux of it. So we deployed a team of data experts in and got into the depths of their ERP system which was SAP. Additionally, the team interviewed a couple of people involved in the process and found that there were broken processes all over the place. By looking through their data and running some analytics against it, we saw vast discrepancies in their business processes across their Salesforce.
So we implemented a Salesforce effectiveness analytics engine and operationalized it for them. Now, the sales executives have data points to help them explain their pricing to the customers rather than giving them discounts based on the end-users’ request and the sales representative’s gut feeling. By doing this, we really changed the way that organization behaved and how they incentivized their sales teams. Additionally, we sent over a highly experienced sales coach from our company to train the client’s sales teams on how to handle these kinds of projects. By the end of it, the overall impact was about 450 basis points of improvement that dropped directly to the bottom line, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in profits for that company.
PLANS FOR DOWN THE LANE EXPANSION
We are looking to expand our analytics engine in the business threat intelligence and the private equity space in the next 12-18 months. We have already finished building an internal product that focuses on quantifying contextualized risk related to cybersecurity in financial decisions for companies. We are planning on scaling out this product to multiple verticals in the business threat intelligence area. On the private equity side, we aim to help our clients understand the analytics value that can be added either on the revenue side using advanced analytics and machine learning.
ABOUT LIBERTY ADVISOR GROUP
Liberty Advisor Group is a goal-oriented, client-focused and results-driven consulting firm. We are a lean, handpicked team of strategists, technologists and entrepreneurs – battle-tested experts with a steadfast, start-up attitude. Our team, with an average of 15+ years of experience, has delivered over $1 billion in operating income improvement and over 300 M&A deals for our clients. We collaborate, integrate and ideate in real-time with our clients to deliver situation-specific solutions that work. Liberty Advisor Group has the experience to realize our clients’ highest ambitions. This year, Liberty has been named to the 2019 Best Places to Work in Chicago and to FORTUNE’s list of Best Workplaces in Consulting and Professional Services.
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