The Icehouse
The Situation:
The Icehouse is a not for profit organisation intent on building a high performing NZ economy. Since 2001, they have worked with over 5,000 established and entrepreneur business owners to lift up capability and enable businesses to thrive through learning and development programs and access to venture capital. In 2018 their Board started questioning how future fit their business model was in the face of the changing role of business and the future of work.
The Transformation:
Having been an advisor to their exec team and business coach on their entrepreneur accelerator program for a number of years, Andy Hamilton, The Icehouse CEO asked Melissa to “do her thing”. Namely, to help them answer the question the Board and the Exec were asking themselves ‘Are we future fit?’. So Melissa commenced with her systems-based design-led process.
1. Discovery Research
- Review of all existing research + desk top research of wider business ecosystem - macro and trends, competitors and exemplar analysis + analysis of their business model. It became readily apparent how broken their model was - narrow pipeline, unscalable, low lifetime value, with significant risks.
- In depth qualitative research consisting of Melissa interviewing one-on-one 20-odd business owners (both clients and non-clients) around NZ to deeply understand their world view. What motivated them, the problems they faced, what they needed help with, alongside their perceptions of The Icehouse.
- Insight was distilled and furthered with a quantitative survey of 100+ customers to gain a wider perspective on some of the key issues surfaced.
- Melissa then calibrated all research strands together and distilled them down into key insight which she took The Icehouse Board and Exec through as part of their Strategy review process.
2. Strategy
Melissa then translated the distilled insight in strategic terms which she then used to architect a future strategic direction that would build The Icehouse strategic advantage, provide greater sustainability of revenue, enable scalability and create demand-led growth. Most importantly it would provide a stronger platform to enable more NZ businesses to thrive and create a wider, thriving NZ community - economically, socially and environmentally. This was socialized with Board, Exec and wider team for further input.
3. Design
The new strategic direction was used to filter territories from which Melissa created design challenges to take into the Design phase, kicking off with Ideation. Melissa ran two rounds of design sprints with a select group of The Icehouse customers, alongside one round with staff members. Ideas captured were distilled down, and Melissa used this to architect draft Design Solutions which blueprinted a future potential business model for The Icehouse – bringing to life the design concepts as user experiences, value propositions, and supporting monetization and organizational operations.
4. Prototype & Testing
With Covid-19 hitting them in full force, the Prototype and Testing phase was done via live market testing and roll out of new offerings over 2020 that reflected the design solutions created. As 2020 drew to a close, learnings from the testing process fed into end of year strategic reflection with Melissa facilitating the Board strategy offsite and helping them bed down their strategy and transition them towards their new future business blueprint.
The Result:
Rolling out from 2021. Work in progress.
“Melissa is a super power for me because I know the ‘data of reality is drawn out’ from a process, which gives me confidence that these are anchors to go forward. Her frameworks, and the translation of data have been real gifts. She serves up gold for the team. She’s engaging, empathetic, purpose driven and challenging. That has led to a change in how we go about with our agenda forward.”
— Andy Hamilton, CEO The Icehouse
