What actually happens in a Strategy Day
Most people assume a paid strategy day is a sales meeting with a nicer name. Fair assumption. Here is the whole thing, start to finish, including the part where you can walk away.
Most people assume a paid strategy day is a sales meeting with a nicer name.
Fair assumption. A lot of them are.
So here is the whole thing, start to finish, including the part where you can walk away.
It starts a week before we meet
I ask for two things. A list of every tool you pay for, with what it costs. And thirty minutes with whoever actually does the work in your two messiest departments. Not the department head. The person who touches the thing every day.
The tool list tells me what you are renting. The thirty minutes tells me why. Those are almost never the same story.
Then we spend the day on one question
Where does work stop moving?
Not "what software do you need". Not "what should we automate". Just: where does a thing sit and wait for a human to carry it somewhere else.
An order comes in. Somebody types it into a second system. A driver finishes a job. Somebody copies the proof of delivery into a folder, then types the same details into an invoice. Payroll runs and three people cross-check a spreadsheet against a portal.
Each one of those looks small. Ten minutes here, twenty there. Nobody flags it because nobody owns the gap. The gap sits between two departments, and departments are how businesses accidentally hide their worst problems.
We walk the whole business in a day and write those gaps down. All of them, including the ones you already know about, because the point is to see them in one list rather than one at a time.
By the afternoon it usually gets uncomfortable
That is the useful part.
Somewhere around hour four, the list stops looking like a software problem and starts looking like a map of who is doing work that a system should be doing. That is the moment worth the fee, and it happens whether or not you ever hire me.
What you leave with
- A map of how work actually flows through your business, which is almost never how the org chart says it does.
- A list of what your tools cost you a year, and which ones are paying for features nobody has opened.
- A roadmap with fixed quotes. Not estimates. Numbers you can approve or ignore.
You keep all of it. It is written for your business, so it is useless to anybody else, which is exactly why I am comfortable handing it over with no strings.
And the honest bit
Sometimes the answer is that you do not need me.
I have looked at operations where the real problem was that two people did not talk on a Tuesday, and no software on earth fixes that. Saying so costs me a project and saves you a year.
If you do decide to build, the Strategy Day fee comes off your first month. So the day is either a roadmap you keep, or it is a deposit. There is no third outcome where you spent money and got nothing.
I have done this once at real scale, on one business of around 200 people across 16 departments. We replaced 21 subscriptions with systems they own, and there is no monthly license bill at the end of it. That is one company, not a pattern, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend it is a track record.
The day works the same either way.