A small advisory for commercial leaders inside consumer businesses with complex routes to market. We predict the size of the bet, optimise the call, and embed the governance that holds the call afterwards.
Consumer businesses with complex routes to market keep solving the same four commercial problems. The framework below is the one that everything else on this site routes through.
Topline headwinds, channel cannibalisation, share-of-spend drift in core customer cohorts.
Retention bets mis-sized, loyalty programmes drifting, LTV-by-cohort not understood.
Growth required, but capital is tight; the question is where the marginal pound earns its keep.
A line, a market, a partnership about to be signed where the cost of getting it wrong is large.
Most strategy houses sell frameworks against these problems. Most data consultancies sell models. We do neither. We sit inside the live decision through a three-stage process and hand back a documented commercial decision with pre-committed thresholds for revision.
The distribution of outcomes, not the single-point plan.
Translate predictions into specific commercial decisions.
Governance, tools, reporting, organisation — past the press release.
Anonymised war stories from inside FTSE-250 commercial decisions; the occasional piece of contrarian maths.
A general-merchandise retailer kept losing share to a marketplace. The instinct was to fight on price. The data said the fight had already been lost two channels ago.
ContrarianA trading desk and a strategy committee are solving the same problem: how to size a position to its edge. The desk does it better. Here is why.
Career & leadershipMatrix organisations argue endlessly about decision rights and then ship the answer to the wrong person. The fix is one question, asked in one meeting.