Strategy
Why strategies stall in the second quarter
The offsite went well. The plan is clear. Then the first budget review arrives — and the old priorities come back.
7 min read
Strategy and transformation advisory
Strategy that survivescontact withMonday morning.
Consultancy is an independent strategy and transformation advisory. We work alongside leadership teams to turn hard decisions into plans people can run — and we stay until the change holds.
- Senior-led teamsThe partner who scopes your work leads it day to day.
- Tested on the groundPlans are tried with the managers who will run them.
- An exit date on day oneWe build your capability, then hand over on schedule.
01Point of view
Most strategies don’t fail in the boardroom. They fail in the eighteen months after it — in budget rounds, handovers and meetings nobody planned for.
We started Consultancy to work on that second half. The analysis still matters, but it is rarely what is missing. What goes missing is the follow-through: decisions written down, owners who know they own them, and a budget that moves when the priorities do.
So we keep our teams small and senior, test our recommendations with the managers who will run them, and agree on day one when we will leave. It is a less theatrical way to consult. Our clients tell us it is a more useful one.
About the firm02Challenges we help solve
Four situations leadership teams most often bring to us.
The strategy is agreed, but nothing has moved.
Six months after the offsite the priorities are still on a slide, the budget hasn't changed and the same people are running the same meetings.
Transformation deliveryGrowth has outpaced the way the business is run.
What worked at 200 people strains at 900. Decisions bottleneck at the top, handoffs multiply and good people spend their days chasing approvals.
Organisation & changeMargins are thinning and the cost conversation keeps stalling.
Previous programmes cut what was easy to cut. The remaining cost sits in how work flows across functions — and nobody owns the whole of it.
Operations & performanceA new chief executive, a merger or a new market — and no shared plan.
The leadership team needs a common fact base and a small number of explicit choices before momentum turns into drift.
Strategy & growth
03Signature approach
Diagnose. Decide. Design. Deliver.
Four stages, one team, no hand-offs between the people who diagnose and the people who deliver. The method is simple on purpose — it has to survive contact with your organisation.
Weeks 1–3
Diagnose
We spend more time with the people doing the work than with the slide deck: interviews, site visits and the numbers, read together.
You leave with
A shared fact base and a one-page problem statement the leadership team signs.
Weeks 3–5
Decide
Options with their real costs. We facilitate the hard trade-offs in the room and write down what you are choosing not to do.
You leave with
A decision record: choices, owners and the signals that would make you revisit them.
Weeks 5–10
Design
Choices become an operating model, budget, roles and a sequenced roadmap — tested with the teams who will run it.
You leave with
A plan people can run on Monday: milestones, measures and governance.
Months 3–12
Deliver
We work alongside your teams in a lean transformation office, then step back on a schedule agreed at the start.
You leave with
Capability left in-house and a handover date that actually happens.
04Featured engagement
Fictional client · illustrative figures
Fig. 2A regional food and grocery distributor, around 1,400 people.
Logistics Operations 12-week design, 9-month delivery
Rewiring a regional distributor around two hubs
- Challenge
- Three ageing depots, a growing share of small, frequent orders and a cost-to-serve nobody could explain by customer. Two previous network studies had produced recommendations and no decisions.
- Approach
- Built cost-to-serve by customer and route with the finance and transport teams, using their own data rather than a model only we understood.
- Tested three network options against service, cost and risk with depot managers in the room — including the option to do nothing.
- Ran a transformation office through the transition, with weekly service tracking and a clear trigger for pausing each phase.
- Outcome
- The leadership team chose a two-hub network with a protected service promise for the top customer segments. The transition ran in three phases and the third depot closed on the planned date.
−11%
Cost-to-serve per case
96.4%
On-time, in-full during transition
3 → 2
Primary distribution hubs
Figures are illustrative demo values for a fictional engagement.
05Where we work
Seven sectors, one common thread.
Businesses where the plan has to survive contact with physical operations, regulation — or both. We go deep in a few sectors rather than wide in many.
Industries and contexts
06Leadership perspective
Nobody needs another strategy document. What leadership teams need is the nerve to choose, and someone in the room on the Tuesday afternoon when the choice gets difficult.
07Selected insights
Field notes
Organisation
Decision rights are an operating model, not an org chart
Moving boxes rarely changes how a business works. Changing who decides what almost always does.
6 min read
Operations
The cost programme nobody believes in
When the savings are reported but never felt, the problem is usually how the programme was designed, not how hard people worked.
8 min read
Transformation
What a good transformation office actually does all week
It is not a reporting function. At its best, it is the place where problems arrive early enough to fix.
9 min read
Bring us the problem you keep postponing.
A first conversation is 45 minutes with a partner — no pitch deck, no obligation. We’ll tell you honestly whether we are the right people to help.