Strategy Consultants near you

A strategy engagement should start by writing the question down in one sentence and getting the leadership team to agree that answering it would change what they do. Questions that would not change behavior are interesting, not strategic, and they consume the same budget.

Evidence gathering follows: interviews with customers who chose you, customers who chose someone else, and customers who chose nothing; internal data cut by segment and by deal; and a market estimate built from counts of real buyers rather than from a percentage of a large number. Where the consultant cannot get evidence, the memo should say so rather than fill the gap with an assumption presented as a finding.

The engagement ends with options and a recommendation. Each option carries what it costs, what it forecloses, what would have to be true for it to succeed, and an early indicator that would tell you within a quarter whether the bet is working. Then a person's name and a date.

Strategy work involves looking hard at competitors, and there is a line. The Federal Trade Commission's guidance on dealings with competitors explains that antitrust risk arises when competitors interact to the point that they are no longer acting independently, and it treats price fixing, bid rigging and market division as so inherently harmful to consumers that they are always illegal.

That matters in practice because benchmarking and trade association work can drift. Exchanging current or forward-looking price, wage or output information directly with a competitor is a different activity from buying market research, even when it feels like the same activity. The FTC's framework for less obvious conduct is fact-intensive, weighing purpose and effect, which is precisely why the safe habit is to route competitively sensitive data through an independent third party who aggregates it, and to keep the topic off the agenda when competitors are in the room.

Strategy chooses the game. Operations wins the game you already chose. If your problem is that orders take eleven days to ship and competitors take four, you have an operations problem and a strategy project will produce a well-reasoned document about a symptom.

A marketing plan sits one level below strategy: it executes positioning that has already been decided. Hiring a marketing agency to fix a segmentation problem usually produces better campaigns aimed at the same unprofitable customers. The order matters, and paying for the wrong layer is the most common way strategy budgets get wasted.