RCG's Strategic Vision

By Cheryl A. Einsele
Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer
Retirement Capital Group, Inc.

Strategic planning, simply stated, helps a company focus to identify its vision and goals, both short-term and long-term, its differentiators and a detailed plan of action for execution.

RCG recently completed a strategic planning session with Bill Bean from Strategia. We are happy to share the results with our clients and partners. While management and staff were already aware of RCG's strengths, the strategic planning session further highlighted the real value of RCG's approach and expertise, and the opportunities afforded RCG clients as a result.

First RCG identified its vision statement: Based upon a foundation of core values, RCG is the thought leader to innovate unbundled executive benefit solutions to enhance individual wealth and shareholder value .

The identified core values include, in order, Integrity, Thought-Leader/Innovation, Quality for Excellence, Respect, and Inspiration . There was unanimous consent that RCG is and will continue to be a values-based company, with integrity at its core.

We at RCG have an overriding passion regarding what we offer our clients. We see ourselves as thought-leaders and innovators in our marketplace. Experts with experience in compensation and nonqualified executive benefit plans have joined at RCG to do it right -- to deliver the finest and most creative solutions to our nation's business community.

RCG's Best Practices incorporates years of experience to help companies examine every detail of their executive benefit plans to determine where they are vulnerable, what they can do better for their teams, and more. In addition, RCG's process includes cross-references to pertinent laws and accounting rules that impact these types of plans.

RCG's "unbundled approach" is also innovative. Traditionally, most executive benefit firms have a narrow focus which limits access to the best thinking and ideas necessary to optimize customized solutions. In contrast, RCG has an open architecture that allows us to deliver exceptional strategies and solutions in the area of plan design, benefit security, funding and plan administration.

Being a thought-leader, however, is only the beginning. RCG's value, Quality for Excellence, takes our innovation and ideas and executes them. Quality in all phases of our company is nonnegotiable. During our strategic planning session, we made a commitment to each other to continue to build our teams not with quantity in mind, but with quality.

As important to our success is respect -- to each other, our clients, partners, and everyone we encounter. We discussed and agreed that we must respect each other for our differences as well as for our similarities, the underlying theme being we came together for a larger purpose and we need to use our strengths to deliver the best to our clients.

Lastly, we agreed that we are inspired. While inspiration alone may not be included among other companies' top values, at RCG, we are inspired and motivated to "make a difference." Some of the comments shared at strategic planning were "committed to serving clients and the community," "perpetuate a strong organization providing the best solutions," "solution-driven, not product-driven," and "make a difference in people's lives."

Of course RCG has a comprehensively defined plan specifying how we intend to continue to deliver the best in nonqualified executive benefit consulting. In the end, any company can identify their values and their differentiators -- they are just words. It is up to the people to make them happen. On behalf of all of us at RCG, we intend to deliver our values to our clients and partners on all levels, and we encourage you to hold us to that commitment.