Strategy before execution. Clarity before cost.
Most businesses invest in tactics before establishing a strategic foundation. The result: fragmented messaging, misallocated capital, and growth that stalls before it compounds. A structured engagement reverses that sequence — analysis first, execution second.
Engagement formats
What this engagement covers
Business Model Stress-Test
Is the model structurally sound — and at what scale does it break?
Competitive Position
Where do you win, why does that hold, and what threatens it?
Growth Architecture
Acquisition, retention, and compounding loops — not just funnels
Execution Roadmap
Sequenced, prioritised, and tied to measurable 30/90/180-day outcomes
Starting point
A 30-minute diagnostic call to assess whether there is a fit — before any commitment. No pitch. Just a structured conversation.
Six disciplines. One coherent strategy.
Each domain is analysed independently, then synthesised into a unified strategic direction. Fragmented advice — tackling positioning without economics, or growth without retention — is the most expensive kind of consulting.
Business Model Design
Stress-testing how value is created, delivered, and captured. Evaluating revenue architecture, unit economics, and structural viability before committing capital to execution.
- Value Proposition Canvas
- Unit Economics
- Revenue Architecture
Market & Competitive Analysis
Understanding the competitive landscape with Porter's Five Forces, cross-impact SWOT analysis, and positioning maps to identify defensible whitespace before entering or expanding.
- Porter's Five Forces
- Positioning Map
- Strategic SWOT
Growth Architecture
Building sustainable acquisition and retention engines. Mapping growth loops, funnel drop-offs, channel ROI, and conversion leverage points across the full customer lifecycle.
- Growth Loops
- Funnel Optimisation
- Retention Mechanics
Operations & Scaling
Identifying bottlenecks, feedback loops, and process inefficiencies that prevent strategy from translating into results. Designing KPI frameworks that drive decisions rather than document outcomes.
- Systems Thinking
- Process Optimisation
- KPI Architecture
Brand & Market Positioning
Developing a coherent brand identity, messaging hierarchy, and audience segmentation strategy. Designing offers where perceived value aligns with price and stated customer intent.
- Brand Identity
- Messaging Hierarchy
- Offer Design
Digital Strategy & Analytics
Treating the digital presence as a conversion engine. SEO and content strategy, analytics stack design, attribution modelling, and hypothesis-driven experimentation frameworks.
- SEO & Content Strategy
- Analytics Stack
- A/B Experimentation
The models behind the strategy
Every engagement applies proven analytical frameworks — adapted to context, not applied mechanically. The frameworks are tools for generating insight, not evidence of a process.
Business Model Design
Is the model structurally viable — and at what point of scale does it stop working?
Value Proposition Canvas
- Customer jobs: functional (task), social (status), emotional (feeling)
- Pains: obstacles, risks, and bad outcomes customers want to avoid
- Gains: expected, desired, and unexpected outcomes they want more of
- Fit: achieved when your value map matches the customer profile precisely
Are you solving a job customers actually hire something for?
Unit Economics
- CAC: total sales + marketing spend ÷ new customers acquired
- LTV: ARPU × gross margin ÷ monthly churn rate
- LTV:CAC ratio — viable >1×, healthy >3×, strong >5×
- Payback period: months to recover acquisition cost from gross margin
What CAC can the business sustain before the model inverts?
Revenue Architecture
- Subscription: predictable ARR, retention-sensitive, compounding if NRR >100%
- Transactional: volume-driven, margin-compressed, reactivation-dependent
- Hybrid: base subscription + usage, services, or success-based fees
- Marketplace: GMV-dependent, two-sided retention risk, network-effect upside
Does the revenue model create compounding value — or require linear effort to sustain?
Cost Structure & Margin Analysis
- Fixed vs variable cost ratio at current and projected scale
- Economies of scale thresholds and margin expansion profile
- Gross margin sensitivity to volume changes and mix shifts
- Cost-to-serve segmentation: which customers are structurally unprofitable?
Where does the cost structure become the binding strategic constraint?
Market & Competitive Analysis
Where does competitive advantage actually sit — and how durable is it against intelligent incumbents?
Porter's Five Forces
- Competitive rivalry: intensity, differentiation depth, pricing pressure
- Threat of new entrants: capital barriers, regulatory moats, brand loyalty
- Buyer power: customer concentration, switching cost, availability of alternatives
- Supplier power: dependency, uniqueness of inputs, forward integration risk
- Threat of substitutes: adjacent solutions that achieve the same customer outcome
Which force is currently compressing your margin most?
Strategic SWOT Cross-Analysis
- SO strategies: deploy strengths to exploit high-potential opportunities
- WO strategies: address internal weaknesses to unlock specific opportunities
- ST strategies: leverage strengths to neutralise active competitive threats
- WT strategies: minimise exposure where weaknesses meet existential threats
Which cross-impact quadrant contains the highest-leverage strategic move?
Competitive Positioning Map
- Two-axis mapping: price, quality, complexity, or specialisation depth
- Competitor clustering and whitespace identification
- Segment overlap, displacement risk, and ICP conflict zones
- Sustainable differentiation versus temporary or copyable advantage
Is your current market position defensible — or are you in a crowded cluster?
Differentiation Strategy
- Cost leadership: lowest total cost at acceptable quality — requires scale discipline
- Differentiation: premium value at justifiable premium price — requires signal clarity
- Focus / niche: deep specialisation in a defensible segment — requires ICP precision
- Stuck in the middle: the most dangerous strategic position — no advantage is durable
Are you differentiated in a dimension that customers actually value — and pay for?
Growth Architecture
What drives compounding growth — and where is acquisition capital being lost in the funnel?
Growth Loops vs Linear Funnels
- Funnel: linear AARRR — Acquire, Activate, Retain, Refer, Revenue
- Virality loop: user invites → new user activates → invites more users
- Content loop: create content → rank → traffic → leads → revenue → reinvest
- Data loop: more users → better data → better product → more users
Do you have a compounding loop — or a funnel that requires constant refilling?
Acquisition Channel Mix
- Organic: SEO, content marketing, community, word-of-mouth — low CAC, slow build
- Paid: SEM, social, display, retargeting — fast but requires margin to absorb CAC
- Partnerships: channel, affiliates, integrations, co-marketing — leverage without spend
- Product-led: freemium, trial, in-product virality — scales with product quality
Which channel delivers the lowest CAC and highest LTV customer quality simultaneously?
Retention & Expansion Mechanics
- Onboarding: time-to-first-value, activation milestones, habit formation sequence
- Engagement: core loop frequency, feature adoption depth, usage breadth
- Expansion: upsell trigger definition, cross-sell fit, usage-based revenue design
- Churn prevention: early warning signals, segmented intervention playbooks
What is your net revenue retention — and what single change moves it 10 points?
Conversion Funnel Optimisation
- Stage-by-stage drop-off quantification — absolute loss per month by stage
- TOFU: awareness reach versus qualified signal ratio
- MOFU: nurture cadence, trust-building, comparison-reduction content
- BOFU: friction elimination, objection handling, urgency without manipulation
Which funnel stage, improved by 20%, produces the largest revenue impact?
Operations & Scaling
What is the constraint holding throughput back — and what breaks first when volume doubles?
Systems Thinking
- Reinforcing loops: growth engines that amplify their own outputs over time
- Balancing loops: stabilising feedback that resists change and caps growth
- Theory of Constraints: the single bottleneck determines total system output
- Leverage points: positions where small changes produce disproportionate effects
What single constraint, if removed, accelerates every other part of the system?
Process Optimisation (TIMWOOD)
- Transportation: unnecessary movement of information, files, or decisions
- Inventory: work-in-progress backlog, unresolved queues, unacted-on data
- Motion: inefficient workflows, context-switching costs, tool fragmentation
- Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, Defects — each quantifiable
What percentage of operational time directly creates customer value — and what doesn't?
KPI Architecture
- Leading indicators: predict future performance — pipeline volume, NPS, activation rate
- Lagging indicators: confirm past results — revenue, churn, CAC, LTV
- North Star Metric: the one number that best captures core value delivery
- OKR cadence: quarterly objectives, measurable key results, weekly tracking
Do your current KPIs drive decisions — or simply document outcomes after the fact?
Automation & Operational Leverage
- Identify high-volume, low-variance manual tasks — these have the highest ROI
- Calculate ROI: (hours saved × cost per hour) ÷ automation implementation cost
- Sequencing rule: automate stable, validated processes — never unstable ones
- Risk: automation amplifies quality and errors equally — stabilise before automating
Which manual process, if automated, compounds in impact across every growth cycle?
How a strategy engagement runs
Each phase has clear inputs, defined outputs, and specific deliverables. Structured engagements reduce ambiguity and create momentum — the two things most strategy processes fail to deliver.
Discovery & Diagnostic
Structured interviews with founders, operators, and relevant stakeholders. Review of existing data, financials, market position, and operational processes. The objective is a clear-eyed assessment of where the business actually stands — not a polished version of where it wants to be.
Deliverables
- Stakeholder interviews and documented findings
- Market and competitive baseline
- Diagnostic report with gap identification
Framework Application
Apply the relevant models from the methodology stack — not all of them, only the ones with genuine signal for this situation. Value Proposition Canvas, Porter's analysis, unit economics modelling, funnel audit. Frameworks are tools, not procedures.
Deliverables
- Business model stress-test and unit economics model
- Competitive landscape and positioning analysis
- Growth mechanics audit and funnel map
Strategic Synthesis
Connect diagnostic findings and framework outputs into a coherent strategic narrative. Identify the highest-leverage moves, sequence them correctly, and explain the trade-offs. A good strategy document makes the 'no' decisions as clear as the 'yes' decisions.
Deliverables
- Positioning and differentiation strategy
- Growth priorities with trade-off analysis
- Strategic narrative document (executive-ready)
Execution Roadmap
Translate strategy into an initiative roadmap with clear ownership, KPIs, and accountability structures. Define what success looks like at 30, 90, and 180 days. The goal is a plan built for implementation — not one that collects dust on a slide deck.
Deliverables
- Prioritised initiative roadmap with owners
- OKR framework and KPI dashboard design
- 30/90/180-day milestone and accountability plan
What a strategy engagement actually changes
A representative engagement outcome. Sector: B2B SaaS, supply chain visibility software. Stage: Series A, €2.3M ARR. Duration: 5-week strategic blueprint engagement. All figures are representative and anonymised.
−34%
CAC reduction
ICP tightening and channel concentration without increasing spend
4.2×
LTV:CAC ratio
Up from 2.1× — now fundable and scalable
−51%
Early churn
90-day churn eliminated through onboarding redesign
31%
YoY growth
Up from 8% — without increasing marketing budget
Before Engagement
Positioning
"All-in-one supply chain software" — targeting everyone, winning consistently with no one
ICP clarity
Undefined — sales pitching simultaneously to logistics coordinators, ops directors, and CFOs with the same message
CAC
€4,200 per customer (segment benchmark: €1,900) — paid acquisition masking a positioning problem
Annual churn
18% — primarily within 90 days of contract start, driven by onboarding expectation mismatch
LTV:CAC ratio
2.1× — viable but not investable, no headroom for scale
Growth rate
8% YoY — well below segment average of 22%, no clear diagnosis of the cause
Sales cycle
94-day average with no qualification framework — time and cost distributed across poor-fit prospects
Root diagnosis
Onboarding friction creating expectation mismatch — clients churning before reaching first measurable value
After Engagement
Positioning
"Real-time dispatch visibility for European 3PLs with 20–200 fleet vehicles" — one segment, one clear outcome
ICP definition
Head of Operations at mid-market 3PL, 20–200 vehicles, existing ERP in place, pain: blind spots in live dispatch
CAC
€2,780 per customer — 34% reduction through channel concentration on ICP-specific sources
Annual churn
9% — onboarding restructured around a 6-day time-to-first-value milestone, with activation gating
LTV:CAC ratio
4.2× — fundable, investable, and structurally scalable
Growth rate
31% YoY — following ICP tightening and message-market fit realignment
Sales cycle
47-day average — qualification framework filters prospects before proposal stage
Core repositioning
Shifted from feature-led to outcome-led: "See every delivery move. Before your clients do."
Strategic lever summary
The primary intervention was not marketing spend or product investment — it was precision of target. By defining the ICP with firmographic and behavioral specificity, every downstream system (messaging, channel, onboarding, sales) could be optimised against a single, coherent customer model. The growth that followed was a structural outcome of that clarity, not a tactic applied on top of an unclear foundation.
Start a Strategy Engagement
Most strategic problems have a known solution.
The gap is clarity on which solution applies to your specific situation — and the discipline to sequence it correctly. A 30-minute diagnostic call is enough to establish whether there is a genuine fit worth pursuing.
Strategy Audit
Fixed-fee · 2 weeks
A structured diagnostic covering business model, competitive position, growth mechanics, and key operations. Delivers a gap map, opportunity inventory, and a prioritised quick-win list.
- Diagnostic report and findings brief
- Gap map and opportunity inventory
- Prioritised quick-win recommendations
- 60-minute debrief and Q&A call
Best fit: founders who need a clear-eyed outside perspective before a major decision — fundraise, pivot, market entry, or team expansion.
Strategic Blueprint
Project-based · 4–6 weeks
Full framework-driven analysis across all relevant domains, synthesised into a coherent strategic narrative, execution roadmap, and 90-day plan with OKR framework.
- Full business model and unit economics analysis
- Competitive landscape and positioning strategy
- Growth and retention architecture roadmap
- OKR framework and KPI dashboard design
- Executive strategy document (board-ready)
Best fit: businesses entering a new growth phase, preparing for capital raise, entering a new market, or experiencing stalled growth without a clear diagnosis.
Execution Support
Monthly retainer · Ongoing
Ongoing strategic guidance through implementation. Weekly check-ins, decision support, initiative tracking, and iteration management as strategy meets operational reality.
- Weekly strategic check-in (60 minutes)
- Decision support and trade-off analysis
- Initiative tracking and accountability review
- Monthly strategic retrospective and adjustment
Best fit: founders who want a structured thinking partner through execution — not just a plan that ends at the slide deck.
Pricing is scoped per engagement based on business complexity, stakeholder count, and depth of analysis required. All engagements begin with a no-commitment diagnostic call.