Preventive Care for Private Companies
Guiding PE / VC portfolio companies to focus on sustainable growth and profitability by maximizing value and optimizing capital since 2017
Since 2017, I have been guiding PE/VC portfolio companies to focus on sustainable growth and profitability by embracing efficient capital use and balanced value creation across stakeholders for the company’s desired lifespan. I developed my system thinking, One Company mindset, and fundamentals-focused method – Congruence – as a structured path to align the company’s purpose, strategy, and operations, which is the only path to achieving these outcomes.
John Oommen
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them." – Albert Einstein.
Every company is a unique combination of stakeholders and lifecycle. Focus on balanced company-level outcomes is the only path to sustainable profitability and value creation.
Basic, siloed, and short-term playbooks are tempting. But they aren’t sustainable value- and profit-centric success factors.
Optimal company-level design starts with embracing the Congruence Model.
Few companies proactively choose preventive care to maximize odds of optimal outcomes. Proactive evolution is a necessity to succeed through scale, time, and environmental shifts. It enables efficient use of capital to maximize value with the highest probability and least risk.
Implementation
Proactive company-wide fundamentals-focused assessment to discover hidden maturity growth and investment optimization opportunities in 1 day.
4–6-week hands-on root cause problem solving across all fundamental levers to frame a 1–2-year roadmap for the whole company.
Methodical transformation of the company’s strategy and operations in alignment with its purpose to minimize incongruence and build a self-evolving system that maximizes value creation, capital efficiency, and sustainable profitability.
In a landscape dominated by short-termism and individualism, Congruence presents a revolutionary and timeless method and mindset for building sustainable, high value companies – to rediscover the true essence of capitalism. This method provides robust philosophical constructs about a company's intrinsic nature while offering practical levers to create the best possible version of each company.
Congruence addresses the why, what, and how of every relevant aspect of a company, spanning purpose, strategy, and operations. It champions the Holistic Company model, where the value exchange among customers, investors, employees, partners, and society is appropriately balanced, fostering both sustainability and profitability.
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Acumes was created during the growth-at-any-cost era to offer private equity and venture capital portfolio companies a unique, forward-looking approach and hands-on partnership focused on the intrinsic properties of companies by embracing Congruence, system thinking, fundamentals, evolution, and sustainable profitability.
Playmaker | Systems Thinker | Problem Solver | Creator of Congruence
I am an electrical engineer turned business architect with 20+ years of experience driving strategic and operational transformations across industries. I have worked with more than four dozen publicly traded, private equity, and venture-backed companies. As a systems thinker and problem solver, I specialize in aligning purpose, strategy, and operations to maximize value creation and optimize capital efficiency.
My 20 years of company-level transformation work also led me to create and author Congruence: The Playmaker’s Guide to High Value Companies. To complement my personal and professional experiences across North America, Europe, and Asia, I earned my MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. I am also a GE Six Sigma Black Belt.
LinkedIn
Over my two decades of transformation and value creation experience, I have sought comprehensive and cohesive answers to a simple question: How must we build and manage a "good" company? The lessons I have learned through hands-on work across all functions and seniority levels at more than four dozen companies led to the creation of Congruence and my belief in the importance of preventive care.
First, any company achieves optimal outcomes when it focuses intently on optimizing value exchange across its unique combination of stakeholders – customers, investors, employees, partners, and society
Second, every company faces potential misalignments between its purpose, strategy, and operations, which lead to challenges in value creation and delivery, capital inefficiency, and unsustainability.
Third, these misalignments, and the resulting value exchange gaps and misuse of capital, are often the product of a reliance on short-term, extrinsic motivations.
The only path to optimizing and sustaining value exchange among a company's unique stakeholders is to proactively and preemptively maximize alignment between purpose, strategy, and operations. This fundamental idea is the foundation of Congruence and its three core philosophies: One Company mindset, fundamentals focus, and system thinking.
Buy Congruence
I build things. I fix things. I solve root causes of problems. The best word to describe me is “playmaker.” My innate desire to connect the dots between a company’s purpose, strategy, and operations has shaped my transformation-centered career. The behavioral traits of a playmaker is essential to align strategic decisions with a company's purpose and convert them into real-world operations.
My approach to value creation is persistently focused on expanding my horizons by addressing a broad range of market problems and unique combinations of company stakeholders.
