Four Corners Consulting

PHILOSOPHY

BUSINESS PRINCIPLES:

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Winning Strategies Are Executable And Profitable:

• Four Corners believes that strategy must be linked with operational and financial outcomes. Effective strategies are executable everyday, not merely presented once a year. To achieve these goals, operational action plans and detailed financial models must support company or business unit strategic plans. Too often strategic plans fail to incorporate competitive realities, implementation challenges, investment spending and/or actual performance. Visioning is not strategic planning, although sometimes a useful separate exercise.

Invest In Innovation But Smartly:

• Four Corners believes in always watching the competition and asking whether an innovation truly differentiates a company in a way that a customer wants or needs (or will learn in a reasonable amount of time to want or need). Companies often fail to truly understand the cost benefit trade-offs and risks involved for new initiatives and to examine whether the organization has the necessary people, skills, competencies and tools to be successful. Invest in new profit pools, but remain focused on staying competitive in core markets and essential competencies.

Build Infrastructure to Support Business Decision-Making:

• Appropriate operational infrastructure is essential to allow market-facing organizations to focus on its customers and the competition effectively and profitably. Four Corners believes companies should invest in systems that provide operational and financial visibility and that organizations should utilize that information to differentiate between and among business units and opportunities. Make the tough decisions based on data not conjecture. The failure to invest in effective infrastructure systems, processes and people can lead to non-competitive cost structures and poor business decisions.

Finance and Operations are Business Partners:

• Four Corners believes that the Operations and Finance functions must be business partners, not silo organizations, always striving to consider the best interests of the entire company and its customers first. Inherent in this belief is that Finance is a strategic and customer service oriented function that is forward and not backwards looking. Every financial decision should be made within the context of a compelling and insightful strategic framework that is communicated throughout the organization and consistently applied. As such, capital and overhead allocations within a company become strategic and not purely financial decisions that are supported with on-target operational and competitive analyses.

MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY

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Plan For Tomorrow But Build For Today:

• Four Corners believes companies should aspire to be the market leader but develop strategic and operating plans that realistically reflect the resources and capabilities that an organization can bring to bear today. Create financeable action plans with vision and manage to realistic internal stretch plans. With 15+ years of Wall Street experience, Four Corners is well aware of the pressures brought to bear on CEOs of public companies. But over the long-term, investors reward consistent performance not promises and organizations, not consultants or analysts, implement strategies.

Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly:

• Prioritization is one of the most difficult challenges facing management teams today. Every initiative is critical to someone. Every issue is someone’s roadblock. Top ten lists become top one hundred lists. Four Corners believes that one of the most important outcomes from a strategic planning process is deciding what not to do, what not to fund, what not to be distracted by. Focus on what’s important and forget what is not. Let the little fires burn. Implement new initiatives in phases, focusing on the 20% that creates 80% of the value. Yearn to fly but crawl, walk and run first.

Four Corners Consulting • 578 Golden Eagle Trail • Ridgway, CO 81432