How we work
Three layers, one direction. Each one designed to make the next one stronger.
The retainer is the trunk
Most engagements start here. A monthly strategic partnership where we work alongside your leadership to make better decisions, faster, with more of the picture in view.
A typical month includes a working session with your leadership team, a written strategic memo that captures what we've decided and why, hands-on work on whichever priority is most urgent that month, and access to whatever internal tools and frameworks the work calls for. Not slide decks. Not status meetings. Working strategy, delivered in writing, that you can act on the same week.
The retainer is intentionally not a fixed scope. The scope adjusts as we learn what your business actually needs — which is almost never what the original brief assumed.
Best fit for: Founders and MDs who need a strategic thinking partner without hiring a full-time CMO or COO. Companies in the €2M–€20M range where one person can't see everything but the budget for a full strategy team isn't there yet.
Layer one — internal tools
The instruments we've built for ourselves to deliver sharper, faster, more thorough work than anyone running on spreadsheets and gut feel.
You won't see these directly. They run in the background, every time we work on your business. AEO and SEO monitoring systems that track how your brand appears across the answer engines now reshaping search. Competitive intelligence systems that watch your category continuously rather than in quarterly bursts. Diagnostic frameworks that take what would be a six-week audit elsewhere and turn it into a structured, repeatable, two-week process.
The promise: when you work with us, the consulting comes from somewhere ten years ahead of the market — because the tools we use to think about your business are ten years ahead of the market.
Layer two — client-facing tools
The machinery we build inside your engagement that you get to use and keep.
Some retainer engagements need a custom dashboard that pulls together the four or five numbers that actually matter for your business — the ones that live in different systems today and never get looked at together. Some need a bespoke diagnostic the leadership team can re-run quarterly. Some need an automated reporting layer that plugs into your HubSpot or Salesforce stack and removes the weekly hour-and-a-half someone currently spends pulling reports by hand.
These tools live inside the retainer. They're built when the work calls for them, scoped to fit the engagement, and yours to keep when it ends. The work compounds instead of evaporating.
Best fit for: Retainer clients who want the strategy to leave behind working machinery, not just decisions.
Layer three — productised offerings
The rare tool that proves itself across multiple engagements and earns its way to becoming a standalone product.
Layer three doesn't exist yet — and that's deliberate. We don't build products speculatively. We build them when the same need has shown up in three or four real engagements and clients are asking us for a version they can use without us in the room. When that happens, we'll productise it. Until then, we won't.
If you're curious what we're paying attention to, start a conversation and we'll tell you what we're seeing.
What we don't do
A short, honest list. The work is sharper when the boundaries are clear.
We don't run paid media campaigns. We help you decide what your media strategy should be and we'll happily review the work of the agency or specialist running it, but the execution sits with someone closer to the buttons than us.
We don't build websites. We'll help you decide what your website needs to do and how to measure whether it's doing it, and we'll work alongside whichever developer or platform you've chosen, but we're not a web shop.
We don't write content at scale. We'll help you decide what to say, who to say it to, and what good looks like. The writing itself is best done by people inside your business, with our editorial support.
We don't do higher education. A non-compete keeps us out of the sector our founder works in by day. If you're an OPM, a university, or a pathway provider, we're not the right partner.
How to start
The first step is always a conversation. No pitch deck. No discovery call disguised as a sales call. Thirty minutes on a video call where you tell us what's actually happening in your business and we tell you whether we think we can help. If we can, we'll write you a short proposal within a week. If we can't, we'll tell you who we'd recommend instead.