Who is Powerhouse Dynamics?
Powerhouse Dynamics’s IoT platform helps multisite restaurants, convenience stores, and retailers manage equipment, operations and energy. Its parent company, Middleby, is a leading worldwide manufacturer of commercial kitchen equipment, residential appliances and systems for industrial processing, packaging and baking, with more than 10,000 employees.
Situation
Powerhouse Dynamics’s Open Kitchen software solution is designed to help restaurants and convenience stores create a connected kitchen that maximizes equipment investments, unlock operational efficiency, and enable teams to make insights-driven decisions at scale. Powerhouse Dynamics was armed with strong cross-brand relationships and a focused team but operated without dedicated product strategy and positioning support.
Solution
By working with Fluvio, Powerhouse Dynamics gained expedited access to product marketing expertise. During the initial onboarding process, the Fluvio team identified quick wins to support brand and partner enablement. While executing on these, the dedicated consulting team began to catalog foundational needs and key initiatives that would deliver sustained value, and subsequently evolved the engagement to address those areas.
In moving to more strategic activities, Fluvio conducted customer and market research, provided simplified pricing recommendations, aligned go-to-market processes and, notably, reimagined the narrative that was being presented to other brands and partners. Powerhouse Dynamics was able to put many of these deliverables to immediate use, garnering quick feedback and praise from across the organization and accelerating overall sales conversations.
CLIENT INTERVIEW
We sat down and interviewed Jay Fiske, President of Powerhouse Dynamics, to get his thoughts on our work together over the past six months.
Jay Fiske
President of Powerhouse Dynamics
What problems were you encountering that led you to believe a product marketing consultant could help?
With aggressive growth goals, we needed proven assistance to both elevate the message Powerhouse Dynamics sends to the market, and support that message within our internal teams. We brought this goal to Fluvio, which quickly embedded with our team. They didn’t just solve for the defined goals we brought to the table, but also identified where we needed to invest for long-term growth.
How has Fluvio helped you?
Beyond execution and short-term wins with sales enablement, Fluvio took an objective look at many dimensions of our go-to-market and made relevant, immediately applicable suggestions to improve our approach. From surfacing opportunities to simplify pricing, to deeper analysis of our messaging and brand hierarchy, the Fluvio team delivered on diverse initiatives that we immediately applied to ongoing sales and partner activities.
The research and analysis undertaken by Fluvio underpinned many of our strategic activities in the latter half of this year. Beyond our messaging and enablement to partners and sister brands, their consultants consistently surfaced opportunities for us to rethink and improve our hypotheses regarding market needs. Then, they assisted us in prioritizing the highest-impact efforts to best capitalize on our innovation investments and market opportunity.
“Fluvio was the strategic partner we needed. The team wasn’t hesitant to challenge assumptions or take on challenging asks, all while keeping focus on the activities and initiatives that would drive long-term value for Powerhouse Dynamics.”
What are some of the benefits you’ve experienced since you kicked off the partnership?
Fluvio helped us identify gaps, close them, and stress-test the results. Without a dedicated product marketing function, our Product, Marketing, and Sales teams were tackling our go-to-market efforts whenever possible, but not necessarily with a singular focus. The Fluvio team encouraged us to prioritize. Then, they efficiently executed on creating product marketing assets in partnership with our internal subject matter experts. In performing this work, Fluvio organically surfaced additional opportunities, gaps, and complexities in our go to market, and helped guide us through to resolution.
What does Fluvio offer that is unique compared to other consulting firms you may have worked with in the past?
We appreciated that Fluvio was committed to ensuring the impact of their work across the organization. They shared their findings on our solution and market trends at our all-company meeting, ran effective cross-functional meetings and workshops, and incorporated quick-reaction feedback to make collateral more effective. Fluvio’s approach resulted in tighter alignment across our entire organization.