[XX] years in [sector]. Previously [role] at [company] and [role] at [company].
[X] engagements a year, one at a time. No associates, no offshore team.
Next availability: [Month YYYY]
Most of what a company calls a strategy problem is a decision nobody has been allowed to make.
I am brought in when the analysis has already been done twice and the organisation is still circling. My job is to put the trade-off on one page, name who owns it, and leave before I become part of the furniture.
[Replace this with the sentence you would actually say to a CEO in the first ten minutes. It should make some readers stop reading — that is the point of it.]
Start a conversationFour situations. If yours is not one of them, I am probably the wrong call — and I will say so on the first phone call rather than the third.
[A market to exit, a product to kill, a business to stop subsidising. The analysis exists. What is missing is someone with no stake in the outcome to say it out loud.]
[If the top forty people give four different answers to "what are we betting on", execution problems are downstream of that, not separate from it.]
[You know the recommendation. You need the case, the counter-case and the numbers to hold up under a hostile read.]
[A large firm has delivered. Something in it does not sit right. I read it and tell you where it is sound and where it is generic.]
Six to eight weeks, fixed fee, agreed before I start. No change orders.
I read, I interview, I argue with you, and then I write one document.
Weeks one and two — reading. [Board papers, the last three plans, management accounts, and whatever the previous adviser left behind. Most of what I need is already written down.]
Weeks three and four — interviews. [[15–25] conversations, confidential, including people two levels below the room where this is usually discussed. They know where it breaks.]
Week five — the argument. [A working session where I put the uncomfortable version on the table and you take it apart. If it survives, it goes in the document. If not, we find the better one here rather than in the boardroom.]
Weeks six to eight — the document. [Twenty pages at most: the decision, the case against it, what it costs, who owns it, and the first ninety days. Written to be read by people who were not in the room.]
Clients are not named, under standing confidentiality. Every figure above is a placeholder and must be replaced with verified, permitted detail before publishing. Outcomes reflect the client's own execution, not advice alone.
“[A quote about the moment the adviser said something the client did not want to hear — and what happened next. A compliment about professionalism is worth nothing here.]”
Written plainly because the alternative is a discovery call that wastes an hour of your week.
Implementation. [I write the decision. I do not staff the programme that follows, and I will introduce you to people who do it better than I would.]
Cover for a decision already made. [If the answer is fixed and the work is a paper trail, I am expensive and you will not enjoy the draft.]
Anything under [six] weeks. [Below that I cannot read enough or talk to enough people to be worth the fee. A two-hour paid conversation may serve you better.]
Retainers. [Standing arrangements make advisers agreeable. I would rather be useful for eight weeks than employed for two years.]
Sectors I do not know. [I work in [list your two or three]. Outside them I would be learning on your budget.]
Published because asking is awkward and the awkwardness costs us both a meeting. GST extra.
[Two hours, on a specific question. You leave with a view, not a proposal.]
[Your strategy, board paper or an adviser's deliverable, marked up and discussed. [1–2] weeks.]
[[6–8] weeks as described above. Fixed at the start, invoiced in three parts.]
[If you want me in the room when it is presented. Optional, and often unnecessary.]
Tell me the decision you are circling and roughly when it has to be made. I reply personally within [two working days], and I will tell you if this is not my problem to solve.
— [No discovery call, no qualification script, no junior calling first.]
— [NDA before you send anything, on request.]
— [I take [X] engagements a year and will tell you honestly if I am full.]
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