Octopus Investments

Octopus Investments is a venture capital and private equity firm specializing in early stage, emerging growth, growth capital, and buyouts. It turned to IconicShift when it decided to diversify into new sectors.

Rapid growth

Octopus was founded in 2000 with the aim to change the investment sector for the better. For the last 16 years it has been one of the fastest growing companies in the UK and it is now trusted with more than £6 billion on behalf of 60,000 companies.

The company started working with IconicShift in 2015 as it began to diversify away from its traditional core business areas, into new sectors like healthcare and energy. Octopus wanted to fix what was broken in those industries and decided to work with IconicShift to create the right Game and supporting business architecture for that move. At the same time, it was also the perfect opportunity to look at the entire business.

Refocus

Through a series of IconicShift workshops, Octopus worked on a Dream, Game and Brand Experience. The workshops also gave the senior team the chance to assess their market opportunities and threats, to plan their next steps. This created a 12-month Road Map listing their goals, actions and responsibilities.

Octopus Chief Executive Simon Rogerson said: "From the workshops, we created an aim to deliver the Octopus experience direct to consumers in their homes. We wanted to be known for smart, simple solutions to important problems that leave people feeling totally taken care of."

Investing more than £1 billion

So far, it's working. Octopus has invested more than £1 billion in helping to build new, state of the art healthcare infrastructure across the UK and has also set up a hugely successful digital energy supply business, powered by renewable energy.

"What I value most about IconicShift is its ability to radically simplify apparently complex things like strategy, brand, products and value propositions without losing any of the power of more complex approaches. When it's simple and powerful it means it's easy to get people all moving in the same direction singing from the same hymn sheet.

"Our energy business and Octopus labs, which were both at the very early stage when we did the IconicShift work, are now making great progress. The energy business in particular, which only had 1,000 customers then, is now powering ahead towards its one million target which is a great result."