Strategy Consultants near you

Start by writing the decision as a question with at least two real options. Should we expand into Western Australia or double down in Victoria is a strategy question. How do we grow is not, because it has no losing option and therefore no decision.

The middle is evidence: customer economics, segment profitability, competitor position, capacity and the honest constraints of capital and people. Most of this comes from your own systems. A strategy consultant who spends the engagement on secondary market research and produces no analysis of your own customer profitability has not looked at the thing that determines the answer.

The end is a recommendation with the case against it stated. Ask for the strongest argument for the option not chosen, and for the specific indicator that would mean the decision was wrong. A strategy you cannot falsify is a preference.

The usual cause is that no decision was ever framed. A brief asking for a five-year growth strategy invites a description of the market, because there is no question to close. The consultant produces a competent document, everyone agrees it is thorough, and nothing changes.

The second cause is a strategy that ignores capital. An Australian mid-sized firm with limited access to growth funding cannot execute a plan that assumes three simultaneous investments. Ask early what the plan costs and where the money comes from, and make the consultant size it against your actual balance sheet.

The third is that the people who have to execute were never in the room. A strategy set by the owner and a consultant, handed to an operations team that was not consulted, usually surfaces reasons it cannot work in the first quarter, and those reasons are often right.

Some strategy conversations are legally dangerous in Australia. The Competition and Consumer Act prohibits cartel conduct, including agreements between competitors to fix prices, restrict supply, allocate customers or territories, or rig bids. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission enforces those provisions and the penalties are serious.

That matters for consulting because consultants work across an industry. If a consultant offers to tell you what a competitor intends to price at, or proposes coordinating with a competitor on territory, that is not a clever commercial idea. Benchmarking using aggregated, historical and de-identified industry data is a different thing from exchanging current or forward-looking competitively sensitive information.

The practical rule is that market-entry and pricing work should be built from your own data, published sources and customer research, not from another client's confidential numbers. Ask the consultant directly how they wall off competitor work, and get the answer in the engagement letter.

A strategy consultant frames and tests choices. A corporate finance adviser prices and executes a transaction once the choice is made. An industry specialist brings deep sector knowledge but may be better at describing the terrain than at structuring a decision.

For market-entry work, an industry specialist plus a small strategy engagement often beats a generalist alone, because Australian sector structures are idiosyncratic and a generalist can spend weeks learning what a specialist knows.

If the decision is to sell or acquire, the strategy work should come first and stop where the transaction begins. Advising on the acquisition itself moves into territory where an Australian financial services licence may be required, which is a separate engagement with a separate adviser.