Overview
development 
At Dean & Company, we work with large corporations, technology start-ups, and, private equity funds. On our engagements, we employ a rigorous, analytical, and fact-based approach and we develop highly specific solutions for our clients.
In the private equity market, our fact-based approach to valuation provides both a strategic advantage when competing for attractive investment candidates and a blueprint for performance improvement once the companies are acquired. Our private equity work also provides a unique experience for our consulting professionals.
The nature of the problems we are called upon to address are often driven by significant change in the client's competitive or industry environment. These changes may create new competitors who threaten our client's traditional business practices and strategies, or create new opportunities which the existing organization and strategies are not well positioned to exploit. Examples might include:
- Increasing customer sophistication rendering older mass marketing approaches prohibitively expensive and requiring new, tailored strategies and programs focused on individual customer segments;
- Deployment of new telecommunications and computing technologies reducing the revenue potential of one generation of products while simultaneously opening up new growth possibilities for another generation;
- Reorganization of health care delivery and the growth of managed care requiring pharmaceutical companies to rethink their traditional means of promoting and selling patented products; and
- Deregulation of the U.S. utility industry, creating both new business opportunities outside a company's traditional geographically defined market, as well as the threat new competitive entrants in a company's "own backyard".
In most cases, clients generally recognize the existence of such fundamental change. What is not so clear is exactly how the business should respond. Often there are as many opinions as there are managers involved, and usually each opinion has some merit. What is required is an ability to synthesize all the relevant information, develop the means for quantifying trade-offs between options, and understand how competitors are likely to behave. These must then be translated into a set of actions that the client can realistically implement and track.
