Gyptech is a Canadian success story, a massive player in the global gypsum/ wallboard space. A change in structure a few years ago unlocked more opportunity, including an acquisition in an adjacent space. The core business involves the design and manufacture of equipment, and has been the dominant cylinder in the growth engine over the past ~5 years. However, aftermarket now represents another large-scale opportunity with a huge installed base already in place/ forecast.

The management team was presented with a quick turn opportunity to make a case to their board. The size of the case to be made would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And the window was to get it ready was under one week.

We started with a very sharp definition of the aftermarket opportunity and scope, starting with the end in mind and deciding on precise deliverables – including the format and number of slides required. We completed this in less than a day.

We then set up a fairly high stakes, high pressure facilitated workshop with the senior team, knowing we had to have the full story – from global opportunity size to investment hypothesis to capital plan – crafted in one day.

And we planned for two days of presentation development and iterative polishing.

The facilitation was the key stage. We used a studio space with screens for presentation of facts and 30-foot wall for live storyboarding. Pre-work was assigned and well executed, we came into the room with enough facts and figures to be able to do the math and sketch out the landscape. The story arc was built around a customized version of my Context -> Strategy -> Structure -> Resources frame, which worked very well in laying out the potential, the logical approach and plan, and the capital/ expenses/ talent required. We worked intensely for 6 hours, pushing for airtight logic and roleplaying board member and industry expert pushback on assumptions and numbers. In the end, we crafted a very tight, bulletproof strategy and investment case.

I put together a summary of all the numbers, arguments and the story arc following the workshop. The slide builds were there assigned to different members of the management team, along with me, and we executed on the presentation over the course of two days.

The board presentation went very well, the team was complimented on the soundness of the case.