Why our method ends with Renew

Most commercial engagements end the same way. The work is delivered, the two teams hold a handover meeting, a final invoice goes out and everyone moves on. If the client wants more, a new piece of work starts from a new brief, often with a new adviser.

The SBPG Core Method has ten stages, and the last of them is not delivery. Delivery happens at Execute, the sixth. After it come Measure, Expand and Institutionalize, and then Renew, where we sit down with the client again, set new goals and go back to Discover.

What happens in the last stage

The question at Renew is simple to state. At Discover, the first stage, we wrote down what the business wanted to become and what the partnership was meant to achieve. At Renew we hold the partnership up against that goal.

Sometimes the goal has been met. Sometimes it has been met in a way nobody expected, or half met, or overtaken by events, such as a new competitor or a change in import rules. Sometimes the goal itself turns out to have been the wrong one. All of these are useful findings. None of them comes to light if nobody asks.

The output is a renewal review. It gives an honest account of the cycle, including what we got wrong, and if both sides decide to continue, it carries the brief that opens the next one. The people in the room are the client's leadership, our engagement lead and the Group's leadership. It is a decision for the people who can commit their organisations, and it should not be delegated to the teams who did the work.

Why it comes last

Renew sits after Institutionalize for a reason. At Institutionalize we build what worked into the client's own systems and teams: the processes are documented, the people who will run them are trained, and reporting runs without us. The point of that stage is that the work should hold if we leave.

Which makes the next question fair. If the work holds without us, why continue? Renew is where that question gets asked out loud, by both sides, with the figures from Measure and the case from Expand on the table. A partner that has made itself unnecessary for the current work has to show what it would add to the next.

Either side can end it here

Renew is the natural place for a partnership to stop, and the method says so. Either side can end it at this stage, on terms agreed at Structure, without anyone having failed.

A partnership with no point at which ending is normal tends to continue by default. The retainer renews because nobody cancelled it. The review meetings shrink to a status call. The adviser keeps doing what it did last year, because that is what the agreement describes, and the client keeps paying for it, because changing it would mean a conversation nobody has scheduled.

At that point the relationship has turned back into a contract. Work is supplied and invoiced; nobody is asking whether it is still the right work. It may run like this for years, quietly, and both sides lose by it. The client pays for effort pointed at last year's problem. The adviser loses the chance to work on the problem that matters now.

Making the review a fixed stage, with a written output and a named decision, prevents that drift. It also means that continuing is something both sides chose. A client that renews after an honest review is a client that wants the next cycle, and that is the only kind worth having.

Back to the start

When both sides continue, Renew leads back to Discover, and the method starts again. The second time round is faster, because a good deal is already known, and different, because the business has moved. The goal may now be a second market, or a joint venture to replace an agreement that has outgrown itself.

That loop is the reason the method has a shape at all. The first five stages, from Discover to Structure, are about getting a partnership right. The next four are about making it work and making it last. Renew is what turns one engagement into a series of them, each starting from what the last one taught.

A method that stopped at Execute would be a good description of a project. We wanted one that describes a partnership, and the difference is the stage that asks, every cycle, whether there should be another.