About the Author
Phil Lurie
Phil Lurie is the Founder of Logical Approach and the strategic architect behind its M&A advisory and innovation-driven transformation work. He brings decades of leadership experience at SAP, Simon & Schuster, Deloitte, and PwC to help industry leaders convert transactions into long-term competitive advantage.
Euki Binns
Euki Binns is a Senior Partner and Practice Lead for M&A and Digital Transformation at Logical Approach. She brings a performance-driven mindset and execution-first philosophy to complex transactions, post-merger integration, and technology modernization from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Topic: Resilient strategies for senior leaders. How volatility can sharpen focus, reveal strengths, and unlock new paths for growth. This is the first of a three-part series.
Why Restart and Why Now?
After being dormant while our CEO took a full-time role at SAP, we reawakened Logical Approach last year. Amid shifting market conditions making most businesses leery, we chose to actively recruit former Logical Approach partners and senior leaders from SAP.
Our timing wasn’t an accident. While most consultancies waited it out or cut staff, we leaned in.
For us, resilience wasn’t just about weathering volatility, it was about building new ways to deliver value.
Volatility favors leaders willing to reassess their playbook — to see weak spots not as liabilities, but as openings for leaner, faster, more direct ways of delivering value.
In fact, the instability provided an opening for firms that could provide better support for their customers. With the capability to deliver small, senior teams, our modular services give clients direct access to seasoned professionals, deliver faster results, and avoid the drag of big-firm layers. At the same time, our 40 years of experience in end-to-end transformations and Fortune 500 leadership meant we could step into the big roles just as easily. We knew it was time to act.
Starting with People, Not Processes
Our first goal was to bring together a small, high-performing group of proven professionals. Timing was fortuitous because SAP was going through a reorganization, making senior leaders with current, enterprise-level expertise available. Before formally recruiting them, we discussed adding new partners, and early group calls confirmed the chemistry — our mix of skills and perspectives worked. Given SAP’s position as one of the world’s largest business systems providers, our partners’ capabilities would reinforce Logical Approach’s technology and M&A strengths.
With our team assembled we now proceeded to direct our collective expertise. What services clients would value most in a turbulent economy, and which could we deliver exceptionally well?
Clarifying What We Do Best
When you start with a room full of senior executives, the list of what you could offer rapidly gets long. We began with a simple question: if Logical Approach were an individual, what would its capabilities and strengths be?
The answer had to reflect both our firm’s rich history and the new infusion of partner skills around the table. Through a series of group exercises, those threads shaped the first draft of the services portfolio we would take to market.
They also revealed how our seemingly disparate strengths could combine to make us collectively stronger. However, we risked spreading our services too broadly. In volatile and highly competitive markets, generalists get punished. We needed more focus.
Seeing the Market Through Our Clients’ Eyes
Precision meant looking outward. The test was simple: did our strengths align with what the market valued most, and where clients were still investing?
We put that question to the test. In surveys and collaborative sessions, each partner shared insights from decades in their field. We were interested in what they were seeing, how client needs were evolving, and which conditions were shaping decisions. To support this, we also applied AI-supported forecasting tools, useful for pattern recognition at scale, to scan for growth and regulatory shifts likely to influence demand.
The result was a forward view: where clients would continue investing, and where volatility would likely force industry contraction.
Finding the Sweet Spot: Where Our Strengths Meet Market Needs
A considerable volume of data now lay before us. We built a matrix to clarify how each offering addressed real client problems and where we stood apart from competitors. As a result, some services and sectors we had once considered important dropped off our roster.
Heat maps of fit and priority revealed openings to re-frame our traditionally large engagements into more flexible formats. While we continue to deliver full-cycle implementations and end-to-end M&A, we now also offer targeted, modular services that fit seamlessly into any phase of a project lifecycle.
It was at this stage that we also deliberately rejected the large-team model favored by many consultancies. Our experience has already shown that small, senior teams deliver greater impact and value at lower overhead, while avoiding the inefficiencies of layered staffing. Revived and applied to our modular services, this approach gave us the efficiency and agility we viewed as essential.
This combination of modular services with senior teams has proven especially relevant in turbulent times. Data reinforced what our instincts told us: together, these keys became one of our strongest differentiators.
Pressure-Testing the Portfolio for Resilience
Now came the moment of truth: did our service roster truly reflect who we were and what our current team could deliver for customers? Just as important, would it hold up as the foundation for our website, marketing, and outreach?
To stay objective, we tested the portfolio against three realities: business goals, available resources, and budget. The exercise reinforced the laser focus we needed, cutting away anything that stretched too wide or failed to demonstrate either clear returns or strategic value.
What remains is a streamlined portfolio anchored in services with shorter sales cycles, tangible results, and relevance across industries. With clarity on what to offer and how to communicate it, we were ready to move to the next phase: building the digital foundation that would carry that message, showcase our expertise, and support business development as we scaled back up.
Lessons in Building Resilience
- Re-frame setbacks as openings: when volatility exposes weak spots, turn them into new plays for progress.
- In every game, generalists get outpaced: know your sweet spot and play to it.
- Expertise doesn’t sell itself: strengths become solutions only when clients see value in what you do.
- Alignment drives resilience: keep customer needs at the center of every decision.
With clarity on what to offer and how to communicate it, we were ready to build the digital foundation to carry that message.
Stay Tuned for Part 3 of This Series
In Part 2: Building for Change—Rethinking Digital Resilience, we share how we approached building our new digital foundation — the choices, trade-offs, and safeguards that shaped the backbone of our restart. Could we build a digital presence strong enough to deliver that message, yet lean enough to adapt as conditions changed?
We’ll show you how we did it. Subscribe below, or follow us on LinkedIn, so you don’t miss Part 3.
This piece is written for senior leaders navigating change through times of volatility and disruption. Need a partner in building resilient strategies through Digital Transformation or M&A? Let’s talk.
Let’s discuss your goals – connect today.
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