Big commercial bets are usually mistakes dressed as conviction. The discipline below is the one trading desks use to size positions to their edge, applied to commercial committees that have not always had access to it.
A documented commercial decision with pre-committed thresholds for revision. Not a framework. Not a model. A decision the buyer can take to the board on Monday and revisit against named triggers afterwards.
LTV-by-cohort that is not understood. A loyalty programme that has accreted features without an underlying model. A retention budget allocated on instinct. We build the cohort view, size the value of the retained customer against the cost of retaining them, and rewrite the programme around that arithmetic.
The question is not “how do we grow”; it is “where does the marginal pound earn its keep?”. We rank the available growth bets — new lines, new markets, new partnerships, new channels — by risk-adjusted return on the capital they consume, and tell you which two to back and which six to defer.
A line, a market, a partnership, a franchise structure, an M&A move. We size the distribution of outcomes, identify the kill criteria the agreement needs to embed, and pressure-test the deal against the scenarios it is most likely to fail in.
The distribution of outcomes, not the single-point plan. Forecasting that earns its place because the outputs are evaluated against pre-committed thresholds, not retrofitted into the conclusion the team wanted.
Probabilistic market sizing. Entry route comparison. Capital-at-risk by scenario.
Joint-venture and franchise value modelling. Earn-out and contingent-consideration design.
Cohort LTV with confidence bands. Sales and cashflow forecasting underpinned by the practice’s proprietary forecasting library.
A £1bn pricing remit where the working assumption was that elasticity was stable across SKU classes. It was not. The Predict-stage diagnostic surfaced three categories where the elasticity assumption was inverted by promotional sequencing, and the resulting price changes added approximately £14m of contribution in the first twelve months.
Translate the prediction into a specific commercial decision. The recommendation lives or dies on whether the decision-maker can take it to the board on Monday morning and defend the kill criteria.
Channel-mix decisions; conflict resolution between own and third-party routes.
Promotional architecture; everyday-price decisions; loyalty discount design.
Contractual frameworks for partnerships and franchise deals; M&A pipeline prioritisation.
Most commercial decisions degrade in the six months after they are taken because nobody owns them and nothing measures them. Embed is the stage that fixes that — governance, tools, reporting, organisation.
Decision-rights design, RACI for commercial committees, training the team that inherits the decision.
LTV dashboards, partnership-value models, channel-economics forecasters — built on existing IP, not as greenfield engineering.
Pre-committed thresholds, review cadence, the named meeting where the decision gets re-tested.
Pricing is held as ranges until the first three engagements set the floor. Buyers typically start at Rung 1 or Rung 2.
The lead-magnet artefact. Sizes the four problems against the bet each one represents. Download the diagnostic →
A bespoke Predict-stage read on the specific decision in front of the buyer. Documented, defensible, and pre-committed to a decision moment.
Predict + Optimise as a single fixed-fee piece, ending in a documented decision with kill criteria.
Governance, reporting, and bespoke tooling. Pricing depends on whether software is built.
Reserved for buyers who have completed at least one Rung 3 or Rung 4 engagement.