A French Telecoms service provider sought to enter the cellular telephony business in the UK. The problem was that the market was largely saturated and dominated by the subsidiary of British Telecom (BT). New entrants to the market were largely confined to the less profitable ‘pay as you go’ youth market.

We worked with them to target regional areas of account holder dissatisfaction with existing providers and establish an initial user base or 750,000 through targeted direct mail, e-mail and media advertising.

When a major University constructed a synchrotron accelerator as a business incubator they had some ideas about things the accelerator might be able to do but little idea a) who was doing it, b) where they were doing it; c) how much they were spending on it; d) who to contact; and, e) what downstream applications were in the R&D pipeline.

Synchrotrons produce an extremely powerful stream of monochromatic x-ray light about an atom wide. They are used to etch circuits and manufacture nano-components. We recruited a consortium of experts to define where the technology was going and identified the companies that could utilize the technology.

After qualifying the suspect companies a short list was contacted by a sales team from the institution. To date over $450 million of beam time has been booked.

After winning the Indy 500, a new constructor of high performance racecars was keen to expand both the market for it’s cars and specialized custom design and manufacturing capabilities. The problem was they were relatively unknown and lacked the long-term capital to sustain the high cost of development and testing new models.

We worked with them to simultaneously launch a below the line public relations campaign to raise their profile and create a business plan that would invite new investment. The company recruited $8 million in new sponsorship and was profitably sold to an entrepreneurial consortium that expanded their manufacturing capabilities into rally car construction and powerboat racing

A manufacturer of hand held wireless networked computers had a patchwork of sales staff, distributors, value added resellers, two of their own factories and systems integrators in country markets throughout Europe. The company wanted to know exactly what their market position was, what their 5-10 year potential market was and the best way to attain it. The market analysis was needed for a venture capital buyout proposal and needed to be completed in 8 weeks.

MSI conducted primary surveys with their major customers, competitors and distributors in 5 languages to ascertain their subjective market position. We integrated those findings with market data and made a series of strategic recommendations that included closing some operations, merging others and acquiring some of their competitors.

The report was delivered on time and the buy-out moved forward. Two years later the company was sold to their largest competitor at 500% of its purchase price.

“To be honest we didn’t think the research could be done on time. It told us exactly what we and our investors needed to know.”    Managing Director, UK