The Financial Perspective

Faced with a set of brutally tough choices, Saatchi & Saatchi’s leadership team defined a new vision and global strategy by using a stretching three year financial goal. Paul Melter, explains how the balanced scorecard was used to turn ambitious strategic aspirations into operational reality.

Headquartered in New York, Saatchi & Saatchi had a vision “to be revered as the hothouse for world changing creative ideas that transforms client businesses, brands, and reputations.” Saatchi & Saatchi is one of the world’s leading creative organizations. Being a “full service integrated communication agency,” services range from communication and marketing strategies, advertising scripts and production for all media channels, to consumer research and forecasting. With over 7,000 employees in 138 offices in 82 countries.

Being itself a globally recognized brand Saatchi & Saatchi represents numerous everyday names throughout the world to include Toyota, Lexus, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, and Visa. In all, Saatchi & Saatchi works for 56 of the world’s top 100 companies and over 50 of the world’s most valuable brands globally.

The company founded in 1970 saw unprecedented growth, both organically and otherwise in the 1970s and the 1980s. It hit roadblocks though in the early 1990s that threatened the existence of the firm. The question then was how does Saatchi & Saatchi achieve their goals. The first thing to do was to get a thorough understanding of how the company worked, including all its offices in its different world markets, and how to ensure that each one fit the goals of their parent company, and if they were part of the bigger picture.

The company’s new Chairman Bob Seelert and new CEO Kevin Roberts along with CFO Bill Cochrane recognized that time was of the essence, so the first thing Roberts did was to spend the first three months visiting all 45 globally dispersed business units. Saatchi & Saatchi needed a new management tool that would help communicate and...