Behind the curtain at FT Strategies: how we are different and how we work

When discussing a potential project, we are often asked two questions:

1. What is the difference between working with FT Strategies and other consultancies (or individual consultants)
2. What would a project look like in practice?

What is the difference between working with FT Strategies and other consultancies?

• We leverage the experience and personnel of the Financial Times to help organisations achieve better outcomes. We regularly share examples of FT experiments, key learnings and best practices with our clients. We also facilitate conversations between current FT employees (for example our Newsletter Editor) and people within client organisations.
• Our team is a blend of media industry practitioners and strategy consultants. This allows us to provide practical support to news organisations based on our personal experience. Our consultants have spent time at world-leading organisations including the BBC, The Economist, Conde Nast, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times, Accenture, Monitor Deloitte, KPMG, L.E.K. Consulting. 
• We have worked with over 700 news organisations across the globe since our launch in 2019. This has given us an unrivalled understanding of the news and media ecosystem and the paths to success.
• We are a specialist media consultancy and we are deeply invested in the sustainability and success of the news/media industry. We believe that access to high-quality information is fundamental to a positive, functioning society. This guides everything we do.
• We want the experience of working together to be as positive as the outcomes that we collectively achieve. We place a significant amount of emphasis on building trust, empathising with team members, listening to feedback and empowering clients with information. We often find that a positive experience leads to lasting outcomes.
• We have the resources to do work that independent contractors don’t have. Our team of 70+ can write code, conduct complex data analysis and financial modelling, facilitate workshops with senior leadership, design AI experiments, conduct customer surveys, help you set up your tech stack, deliver world-leading industry research and much more. 

What is the difference between working with FT Strategies and other consultancies?

Project lengths vary depending on what you are trying to achieve and your budget. Typically, projects range from 3 weeks (for example, a tactical project focused on improving conversion rate) to 6 months or longer (for example, a transformation project focused on transitioning a newsroom to digital-first).

During initial conversations (pre-sale), we work closely with clients to agree on the scope of the project. This means defining the ‘problem statement’ - a description of the issue that needs to be addressed. We are always mindful of designing a project to meet different budgets.

What are the phases of an FT Strategies project?

1. Discovery

The Discovery phase comes at the beginning of the project. The idea of the Discovery phase is for us to understand your business and assess its current performance. To evaluate the performance of a company, we conduct both qualitative and quantitative analysis. 

Qualitatively, we conduct interviews with key team members to understand their role, any pain points that they experience and the opportunities that they have identified; in addition, we may interview and/or survey your existing or prospective customers to understand their experience of the brand. 

Quantitatively, we conduct an in-depth data diagnostic that benchmarks your company's performance against a set of key performance indicators. To do this, we make a data request which will often include: financial performance, web analytics, and subscription / advertising data (e.g. funnel performance). Our specialist consulting teams and data scientists then take that data and evaluate it to identify where an organisation is performing well or perhaps has opportunities for improvement - based on benchmarks from the 700+ media organisations that we have worked with and leading industry research that we have conducted (for example, the News Sustainability Project).

At the end of the Discovery phase, we present one or more “Diagnostic” summaries to your project team. This presentation - including numerous charts - not only details what we have found in the data, but it also examines key market trends relevant to your organisation. During this session, we also share practical recommendations for improvement. Below is an example slide from one of our Diagnostic summaries.



Our clients tend to find the Diagnostic summary extremely useful. Although they often have a good idea of what is going well or not so well, they may not have a holistic view and generally don’t have access to benchmarks of “what good looks like” for comparison.

2. Strategy

After the Discovery phase comes the Strategy phase. Based on all that we have learnt during the initial phase, we co-develop a strategy based on our industry experience and expertise. In practice, this involves a series of interactive strategy workshops (aligned to an organisation’s objectives - e.g. reducing churn) that provide actionable recommendations on possible improvements.

Our Strategy workshops (typically 60 to 90 minutes) are delivered by a combined team of FT Strategies consultants (many of whom are ex-media) and FT employees or subject matter experts. This unique approach - bringing practitioners into strategic workshops - helps us provide recommendations that are grounded in experience and acknowledge practical constraints that you may be facing (for example, cultural challenges or technological constraints). These workshops and recommendations are completely bespoke and specific to your organisation’s context. It is important that these workshops lead to organisations making decisions about what to prioritise and when.

During this phase, we will share numerous examples of industry best practices (from the FT, the clients that we have worked with and the media industry writ large) and provide details on how our clients can replicate these examples. Think of these as shortcuts to get good results and a way of avoiding making the mistakes that the FT and our clients have made in the past. During, in between and after each workshop we catch up with the project sponsor to analyse, stress-test and refine the strategy to make sure that it is realistic. 

The workshops are intentionally collaborative - we always look to get feedback in real-time from clients and provide plenty of time for Q&A. Our clients tend to find this phase of the project the most exciting - it is an opportunity to come up with new ideas and initiatives that genuinely drive improvements in performance.

Below is a slide from the FT’s Head of Newsletters, Sarah Ebner examining what makes a great newsletter. This has been taken from a recent strategy workshop on improving audience engagement.

3. Implementation

It’s no good having a great strategy unless it is implemented. That is why the final phase is focused on implementation. In practice, the Implementation phase of a project can vary significantly - on some occasions, it may mean setting you up for success and leaving you to execute the strategy (if budgets are tight) or it could mean FT Strategies actually doing the work for you - for example, building a propensity to churn model on behalf of the client. 

For almost all projects, we will start the Implementation phase with the creation of a “North Star”. The North Star was the strategic framework used by the Financial Times to hit 1,000,000 paid-for subscribers a year ahead of schedule (read more here). Although many media organisations now talk about their own “North Star”, it is worth saying that our experience (having created 500+ on behalf of clients) helps us to ensure that they are well thought through and stand the test of time. The North Star provides you with an overarching organisational goal and the structure for growth. 

Once the North Star is established, we help you translate it into outcomes (often known as key performance indicators) and experiments (both quick wins and longer-term strategic investments). We also support the process of prioritisation and plot experiments on a 12-month implementation roadmap. This will leave you feeling like you have a clear plan of action post-project.

Rather than just stopping there, we often provide ongoing support or mentoring (e.g. monthly catch-ups with your leadership team) or provide FT Strategies support on the ground (actually executing the recommendations or experiments that have been agreed). For example, we have recently worked with a leading European news organisation to launch a first-of-its-kind paywall in a market that hasn’t historically relied on digital subscription revenue. Another example is supporting a publisher to code and build their own propensity to churn model which outperformed their subscription management solution. 

What results can you expect?

We know that you expect a tangible return on investment. Given that imperative, we measure ourselves on the basis of our clients’ results. We have numerous detailed case studies on our website, but here are a select few:

• We helped a leading European broadsheet halve its churn rate and hit its North Star subscriber goal ahead of schedule (read more here)
• We helped the National Theatre grow its video-on-demand platform by 29% in one year - having experienced declining subscriber numbers pre-project (read more here)
• We helped a French financial newspaper to double its B2B subscriptions in a single year (read more here).

Alongside tangible returns, we want you to enjoy the project - that’s why endorsements are also very important to us:

• “I am so grateful for the work we have done together over the past few months - it has been a tremendous learning experience. You have put us on such a strong path for success.”
  - Juliette Morris, CEO of Adweek (read more here)
• “This is a new form of consulting! You’re coming with the brains and FT experience. First time in my entire career I’ve worked with consultants who already know the business before they come into the situation and work in this impactful way. You’re changing consulting for the better!”
  - Chief Data Officer of a client (read more here)

How do we work?

Ultimately, we aim for our projects to be both successful (e.g. driving the desired results) and enjoyable. That translates into the way we work and our values as an organisation:

• Integrity - we always act in your best interests
• Empowerment - we want to empower you to achieve your objectives, as opposed to “telling you what to do”
• Empathy - we understand that delivering projects (especially in media organisations) is not easy

How can we get started with an FT Strategies project?

It’s as simple as reaching out. You can get in touch with our expert consultants here if you have any projects that you are thinking about or want to discuss. It goes without saying that having a chat doesn’t mean you have to sign a contract.