Bain Business Unit Strategy
Business unit strategy work means giving each unit inside a company its own honest diagnosis of market position and capability, instead of running one strategy across the whole portfolio.
Five steps run in sequence, from diagnosing each unit alone through to revisiting the whole portfolio again.
Reach for this when…
- Head office sets one growth target for every division regardless of how different their markets are.
- A struggling unit is being propped up by a strong one and nobody has said so out loud.
- You're deciding where to invest across units and the case for each is more assertion than evidence.
How to run it
- Assess each unit separately: its market growth, competitive position, and distinct capabilities.
- Set a strategic priority per unit: invest, hold, fix or exit.
- Align resourcing and targets to that priority, not to a company-wide average.
- Check for links between units - shared customers, shared costs - before acting alone.
- Revisit the portfolio regularly as units and markets shift.
A worked example
Situation. Kouassi Yao ran Lagune Traders Group in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, a conglomerate with a textiles unit, a food-distribution unit and a packaging unit all working to one company-wide revenue target.
Applied. He assessed each unit separately. Food distribution had real growth and defensible logistics; textiles was shrinking against cheaper imports; packaging was flat but supplied both other units at cost.
Result. He set food distribution to invest, textiles to a managed exit over eighteen months, and kept packaging as a supporting unit rather than judging it on standalone margin.
The catch
Splitting strategy by unit can miss the value that comes from units working together, and a unit that looks weak alone can be propping up a stronger one through shared customers or infrastructure. It's also a heavier exercise than a single group-wide strategy, and it can surface uncomfortable internal comparisons that need careful handling.
Don't score a unit's standalone numbers without checking what it feeds elsewhere in the business - that's the mistake that kills the wrong unit.
Origin: General practice in corporate portfolio strategy (echoes approaches used by Bain, BCG and McKinsey); not a single proprietary model.