For Investors and Boards

The pattern you already recognize

The product is fine. That is what makes it confusing. What you are seeing is some combination of these:

• Sales cycles are lengthening and nobody can point to a product reason.
• Discounting has crept in, and the team describes it as market conditions.
• A competitor with a visibly worse product is winning deals on story.
• The company description in the board deck changes every quarter.
• Two people from the company give you two different answers about what it does, and neither of them is wrong.

When a company’s own people describe it differently, buyers hear it too, and a buyer who cannot tell what a company is falls back on the one axis that is always legible: price. The margin pressure in your board pack usually starts there. The signals, and what to do when you hear them

Your playbook already asks for this

Every fund has a version of this: KKR has Capstone, others have a digital framework, or maybe a playbook. It works. And all of it starts after somebody has decided what the company actually is.

Macquarie, for example, didn’t just enter infrastructure and compete on returns. They named their approach core plus and defined it: the “adjacency layer” of infrastructure. What matters is not the name but that they chose one, and that their teams can act on it. Naming a category is what makes a fund the obvious home for a certain kind of asset, and it works the same way one level down.

But a portfolio company cannot buy a multi-year transformation program, and would not benefit from one if it could. Between an agency that will give it a logo and a consultancy that will give it a two-year program, there is very little on offer. Portfolio positioning problems live in that gap. What a North Star document actually is

What fits a portfolio company

Flat prices, all in. No hourly billing, no expenses on top, no scope creep.

• Positioning Stress Test ($8,000, 10 business days). Small enough to run on a company you are still looking at, or inside the first hundred days. It comes back with the three places positioning is costing deals, ranked by damage. It turns a board-level hunch into something a management team can argue with.
• Compass ($75,000, 3–4 weeks). The full North Star document, produced remotely, with six months of coaching for the chief executive after it lands.
• Beacon ($150,000, 4–6 weeks). Full scope, including a week on site with the leadership team, and nine months of guidance so the document reaches the work.

The whole Stress Test fee credits toward a larger engagement booked within 90 days. A cheap way to find out whether the problem is worth the larger number. The full roster and prices

Why this works across more than one company

The output is the same artifact every time. Run the work at two portfolio companies and you can read the two North Star documents side by side, which is not true of two agency engagements or two strategy decks.

The Stress Test is small enough to run at several companies at once, when you want to know where the problem is real rather than assumed. And the work is principal-led: the person who ran the interviews writes the document and presents it to your board. Nothing is sold by one team and delivered by another. How we staff the work

What we are not

We are not a cost program. No headcount work, no margin by subtraction. The premise here is that a company wins by becoming the obvious answer to a question it defined, which is the opposite instinct.

We are not an interim management firm either, with one exception we only extend by invitation after a full engagement. Residency, if it comes to that