Strategy & Organizational Planning

HCP turns research and insight into clear direction. For four decades, businesses, nonprofits and public agencies have relied on HCP to define priorities, align stakeholders, evaluate opportunities, and build actionable plans for growth, performance and long-term impact.

Markets do not resist change. They resist confusion.

Trends are temporary. Platforms come and go. Insight endures. Good strategy identifies the patterns, risks and opportunities that matter, then turns that understanding into clear choices.

HCP helps leaders define priorities, weigh tradeoffs, align their organizations, and decide how progress will be measured. Depending on the challenge, that work may lead to growth and operating plans, organizational recommendations, community engagement and public affairs initiatives, communications strategies, research and policy recommendations, or brand positioning. Strategy sets direction. Marketing carries it forward. That order has not changed since 1986.

Twelve ways we turn insight into direction.

Research-driven planning and advisory services, delivered as a full process or as counsel on a specific decision facing leadership.

Strategic Planning

Multi year plans built with leadership and stakeholders, written so the objectives can actually be measured against something.

Facilitation & Workshops

Board retreats, leadership sessions and stakeholder workshops facilitated by someone with no internal stake in the outcome.

Positioning & Messaging

Clarifying where an organization sits in its market, what it stands for, and how it communicates. Brand positioning is one possible outcome of the broader planning process.

Brand Architecture & Naming

How a portfolio of services, divisions or acquired companies relates under one parent, and what each part is called.

Competitive & Market Analysis

A clear read on who else is in the room, what they own, and where the open ground actually is.

Organizational Alignment

Internal communications strategy and change communications, so the people responsible for the plan understand it, support it, and can put it into practice.

Executive Counsel

Ongoing strategic counsel for executives who need an experienced perspective in the room, not another vendor.

Crisis Communications

Plans built before the crisis, and counsel during it. Seven years of standing crisis planning for the largest Florida Port Authority.

Public Affairs & Engagement

Stakeholder engagement, grassroots strategy and public affairs counsel for organizations operating in front of a public body.

Communications Audits

An evaluation of what the organization is saying, where it is investing, and what it is getting in return.

Program Evaluation

Assessment of an existing plan against its objectives, commitments, and results.

Roadmaps & Accountability

Sequenced objectives with owners, timelines and the measures that decide whether it worked.

A plan is a set of choices, written down.

Assess what exists

The current plan, the analytics, the spend and prior results are reviewed before anyone proposes anything new.

Interview the people who carry it

Board members, executives, staff, and stakeholders are heard individually. What leadership believes and what the organization experiences are not always the same thing.

Facilitate the decisions

We put the tradeoffs on the table and make the group choose. A plan that avoids the hard choice is not a plan.

Write it and build the scoreboard

The result is a plan leadership can put to work, with clear ownership, measures and accountability so progress can be tracked over time.

Strategy measured by what happens next.

A selection from four decades of strategic planning, positioning and counsel across public, private and nonprofit organizations.

Attorneys

Troutman Sanders

Grassroots and public affairs strategy across a national firm of more than 650 attorneys in 16 offices.

Years

Troutman Sanders

Seven years designing, implementing and maintaining a crisis communications plan and a proactive public relations strategy.

Years

The Surgicalist Group

Seven years designing, implementing and maintaining a crisis communications plan and a proactive public relations strategy.

Hillsborough County Hotel & Lodging Association

A strong market position turned into a three year strategy with accountability built in.

The Westshore Alliance

A comprehensive strategic plan built with new leadership and district stakeholders, grounded in original resident and worker research.

Florida’s Adventure Coast, Hernando County Tourism

A strategic planning process evaluating brand awareness and setting the objectives to grow tourism over the following decade.

Pinellas County Economic Development

A strategic planning framework facilitated for the organization and adopted with County Administration.

Humane Society of Tampa Bay

Assessment of the prior plan, review of internal analytics, board and executive interviews, and facilitated strategic workshop sessions.

TerraNova Equestrian Center

A seat on the C level management team, facilitating evaluation of business targets and market potential.

Visit St. Pete/Clearwater

Counsel to destination leadership on restructuring the county film incentive program, and tourism strategy through the pandemic.

RFS

Branding and positioning recommendations extrapolated from the client’s own organizational planning work.

USF Federal Credit Union

Interviews with board members, students, alumni, university staff and credit union staff before any long term strategy was proposed.

Academy at the Lakes

Leadership stakeholder sessions with the head of school, staff, board, admissions and development before positioning work began.

SMI

A full research study across high end and staple retail chains, used to set the market strategy that followed.

Research. Strategy. Marketing.

Each discipline builds on the one before it. Research establishes what is true. Strategy determines what to do. Marketing puts that thinking to work.

Research

Establish what is true.

Strategy

Determine what to do.

Marketing

Put the thinking to work.

Bring us the decision.

Tell us what leadership is weighing. We’ll start by understanding the decision, what’s at stake and what information is already available. From there, we can determine whether the right next step is research, facilitated planning, strategic counsel or something else entirely.