Real engagements. Honest outcomes.
All engagements are anonymised. The details that matter — the diagnosis, the evidence, and what happened next — are preserved.
When the right recommendation is to stop.
We were engaged to develop a go-to-market strategy. Before a strategy could be built, the commercial fundamentals had to hold. They didn’t.
The Brief
Develop a go-to-market strategy and launch plan for a new consumer product. The client had a defined timeline and a budget ready to deploy.
What We Found
The addressable market was materially smaller than internal projections. Unit economics didn’t support the required price point. Three established competitors held stronger positioning and existing distribution.
The Outcome
We recommended discontinuing the product and redirecting budget toward a higher-margin offering already in the portfolio. The client acted on it.
“Better marketing wasn’t going to fix the fundamentals.”
The diagnostic
The engagement began with a commercial diagnostic — our standard starting point before any strategy work. We quantified the addressable market from first principles, mapping the category, the realistic buyer universe, and the actual purchase behaviour of that universe. The internal projection had conflated total category size with reachable demand.
We assessed the unit economics at the price point the product required to be viable. The margin structure depended on volume assumptions that weren’t reachable given the distribution reality. At a sustainable price point, the product was not commercially viable. At a competitive price point, it wasn’t profitable.
The competitive audit confirmed three existing players with established buyer relationships, stronger brand recognition, and better route-to-market economics. None of these were fatal individually. Together, they produced a clear verdict: the commercial case didn’t hold.
Why this matters
The client had invested time and internal resource in the product. There was institutional momentum. A less honest analysis — or one that started from the brief rather than the evidence — would have produced a launch plan the market wasn’t going to reward.
Our recommendation was to discontinue the product and redirect the earmarked launch budget toward an existing higher-margin line that was underleveraged in the same channels. That recommendation was evidence-led, specific, and came with a clear rationale for why the redirect made more commercial sense than the launch.
The client acted on it. The outcome wasn’t the engagement they had planned for — but it was the one that served their business.
AI readiness before AI investment.
A professional services firm wanted to implement AI to surface answers from their document library. The technology was right. The organisation wasn’t ready. We showed them how to get there.
The Brief
Assess the viability of implementing an AI system to help staff find answers in a large internal document library faster and more reliably.
What We Found
The documents existed but weren’t ready: inconsistent naming, mixed versions, no clear ownership, and no defined workflow for the specific use case the technology needed to serve.
The Outcome
We delivered a readiness roadmap rather than a build plan. Within three months, the client had the foundations in place to proceed with confidence — and a clearly defined use case to build toward.
“The tool was right. The data wasn’t ready. Those are two different problems.”
The diagnostic
The firm had a clear instinct: staff were spending too long searching for information that should have been easy to find. An AI system that could surface answers from their document library was the obvious solution. The instinct was sound. The readiness assessment told a more nuanced story.
We ran our three-question framework: Do you have the data? Is it clean and organised? Do you know the specific workflow you’re solving for? The first answer was yes. The second and third were yellow lights — not stop signs, but real gaps that would undermine any implementation built on top of them.
The document library had accumulated over years without consistent naming conventions, version control, or ownership. Multiple versions of the same document coexisted. The “use case” was loosely defined as “finding things faster” — which isn’t specific enough to build an evaluation framework, let alone a system.
The recommendation
Rather than recommend proceeding with implementation, we delivered a 90-day readiness roadmap: a prioritised programme to rationalise the document library, define a single high-value workflow as the initial use case, and establish the governance needed for the system to remain useful over time.
We also defined what “ready to build” looked like — the specific criteria that would tell them when the foundations were in place. That gave the client a target, not just a to-do list.
Three months later, the client had consolidated their document library, defined the workflow they were optimising, and established ownership over the content. The technology initiative they’d originally envisioned was now genuinely viable — because the work that needed to come first had been done.
Every engagement starts with a conversation.
A 30-minute call is enough to understand what you’re dealing with — and whether we’re the right people to help you address it.
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