01Strategic Diagnosis
Understand what is real
A disciplined read of the business: its constraints, contradictions, opportunities, and the causes beneath the reported symptoms.
Services
03
Three capabilities. One way of working.
We do not arrive with a methodology to sell. We work in three modes — diagnosis, partnership, and project architecture — depending on where the business is and what is actually needed.
Capabilities
Diagnosis, partnership, and the architecture of action.
02Strategic Partnership
Clarify the next move
Working alongside the founder and leadership team to challenge assumptions, test thinking, and make decisions that hold up over time.
03Creative Project Architecture
Structure the action
Once the direction is clear, we help structure the projects, priorities, and initiatives that turn strategy into measurable results, with a clear step-by-step action path and guidance throughout.
Disciplines
Strategy. Growth. Creative.
Strategy, growth and creative thinking are not separate disciplines applied to separate problems. They are ways of working across the whole — understanding the relationships between direction, commercial reality, market, proposition, brand, operations, people and culture, and what those relationships mean for the business.
Strategy
Make sense of the whole and give it direction.
Growth
Understand what is constraining progress and what must change for the business to move forward.
Creative
Give new meaning and possibility to what the business can become, how it is positioned and how it is experienced.
— The disciplines follow the reality of the business. The work is shaped by what we find.
Engagement formats
Three ways the capabilities show up in practice.
Formats differ in duration and depth, not in the discipline of starting with what is true.
ASix weeks · fixed scope
Diagnostic
A focused read of the business, closing with a written map and a ranked set of moves.
- Founder and leadership interviews
- Commercial and customer evidence review
- A written map of the business as it stands
- The binding constraint, named
- A ranked, sequenced set of moves
Suited to — Founders who sense the answer is not where they have been looking.
BA quarter · embedded
Strategy partnership
We sit with the founder through the quarter, shaping decisions as they arise and keeping the picture current.
- Everything in the Diagnostic
- Fortnightly working sessions with the founder
- Decision support between sessions
- Quarterly recalibration of the strategy
- One measure of progress, held honestly
Suited to — Businesses in motion, where the decisions are arriving faster than the thinking.
CAnnual · standing
Embedded review
A standing partnership for scheduled recalibration: direction, narrative and the year's measure reviewed together.
- Two full re-reads of the business each year
- Board and investor narrative support
- Standing counsel on material decisions
- Annual strategy note in writing
Suited to — Founders who want a durable outside mind rather than an intervention.
Terms
How we hold the work
Fixed scope, fixed fee
Priced on the work, not the hours. You know the cost before we start.
One partner, throughout
The person in the first conversation is the person doing the thinking. No handover to a team you have not met.
Written, not presented
Our output is prose you can argue with, not slides you cannot. Decks are a summary, never the thinking.
A small number of clients
We hold a limited book so that attention is real. Engagements begin when one closes.
Enquiry
Which format fits is usually clear after one conversation.
Describe the situation in a few lines and we will tell you plainly whether we are the right people for it.
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