Strategic Consulting
Strategic Consulting for Leaders Making Critical Business Decisions
Eyal Dror helps founders, owners, and leadership teams make clearer business decisions when growth stalls, markets change, operating complexity increases, or the organization needs a practical strategy for its next stage.
This is strategic consulting with an actual decision you must make, not a workshop or a slide deck that’s never used. The work assists leadership to understand where they are, review the options available to them, prioritise their resources and create a plan that the organisation can live with.
When It Helps
When Should You Hire a Strategic Consultant?
External strategic support tends to be useful when:
- Growth has come to a standstill and leadership is uncertain about how to go forward.
- The company is interested in entering a new market, product, customer base, or revenue stream.
- The company has a lot more opportunities to act upon than it has time to do so, and no clear priority list.
- Goals and decision criteria are not shared with leadership and teams.
- Digital transformation is bringing forth technology, process or capability questions that no one wants to answer.
- There is a lack of efficiency in operation; growth or customer experience is hindered.
- New CEO, founder, investor or leadership team seek an impartial external assessment.
- There is a plan but it’s unclear who is responsible for executing it, the milestones and measurement.
These decisions are usually taken by the founders, owners, CEOs, boards, business-unit leaders, transformation leaders or executive teams, frequently when the internal view is insufficient.
Strategic consulting is not always the right first step. This is important when a business requires an advertising campaign, software implementation or a one-time design task, and they are better suited to a more specific provider for that particular task.
Definition
What Does Strategic Consulting Involve?
Strategic consulting is about clarifying the current position for leadership teams, examining key decisions, choosing a course of action, and then interpreting that choice into prioritized action, measurements and execution.
It overlaps with several related services, but each one has a different center of gravity:
- Strategic consulting deals with high level business decisions, priorities, positioning, capabilities and direction of execution.
- Strategic planning brings a desired direction into goals, initiatives, milestones, owners and measurement.
- Business consulting can solve a wide array of business, operational or organizational problems.
- Digital transformation consulting is more specific with regards to technology-enabled change and operating-model modernization.
- Operational consulting is about processes, productivity, systems and efficiency in execution.
- Coaching or facilitation can help a team think or collaborate better, but often does not include diagnosis, recommendations, or implementation support.
Strategic consulting, as delivered here, sits at the intersection of these: enough diagnosis to know what is actually true about the business, and enough practicality to know what to do about it.
Services
Our Strategic Consulting Services
Four core capabilities, used individually or combined depending on the business question in front of you.
Business Model Innovation
Helps businesses assess how they create, deliver, and capture value, and where that model is under strain.
Potential scope
- Customer and segment analysis
- Value proposition review
- Revenue-model analysis
- New revenue-stream assessment
- Product or service portfolio decisions
- Business-model options and trade-offs
- Concept validation
- Go-to-market implications
Potential outputs
- Current business-model assessment
- Business-model options
- Prioritized opportunity areas
- Validation or testing roadmap
- Revenue and capability implications
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is not only technology adoption. It often involves changes to customer experience, processes, operating model, systems, data, and internal capabilities together.
Potential scope
- Current technology and process assessment
- Digital maturity review
- Customer and employee experience analysis
- Technology and capability gaps
- Transformation priorities
- Roadmap and sequencing
- Change and adoption considerations
Potential outputs
- Digital transformation assessment
- Capability-gap analysis
- Transformation roadmap
- Prioritized initiatives
- Governance and measurement framework
Strategic Planning
Converts ambition into a practical direction, with priorities, goals, initiatives, owners, milestones, and measures attached to it.
Potential scope
- Vision and direction
- Market and competitive analysis
- Leadership alignment
- Strategic priorities
- Goals and OKRs or KPIs
- Initiative prioritization
- Resource and capability implications
- Execution governance
Potential outputs
- Written strategic plan
- Priority map
- Strategic roadmap
- KPI or OKR framework
- Communication and rollout plan
Operational Efficiency
Strategic direction fails when the business cannot execute it. This work identifies the bottlenecks, duplicated effort, unclear ownership, weak handoffs, and process or capability gaps that quietly stall good strategy.
Potential scope
- Process assessment
- Operating-model review
- Bottleneck identification
- Role and ownership clarity
- Workflow improvement
- Systems and automation assessment
- Performance monitoring
Potential outputs
- Current-state process map
- Efficiency opportunities
- Recommended operating changes
- Implementation priorities
- Measurement framework
Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning Consulting Services for Business Growth
Strategic planning is often where good intentions go to stall. This section explains how a real planning engagement actually moves from analysis to an executed plan.
Assess the Current Business and Market
Before any direction is suggested, review internal capabilities, financial and operational reality, customer needs, market dynamics, competitors, technology and relevant trends.
Align Leadership Around Direction and Priorities
Invite assumptions, disagreements, risks, and decision criteria to the surface through interviews, workshops, or structured discussions. The purpose of this is not only to build consensus. It’s about clarifying the key decisions, such as the ones that leadership has been neglecting to make.
Define Goals, Initiatives, and Measures
Break strategic direction into a manageable list of priorities, goals, initiatives, owners, milestones and measures of success, enabling the plan to be tracked and not just talked about.
Build an Actionable Strategic Roadmap
Prioritize initiatives by impact, feasibility, dependencies, resources and organization capacity. Be clear about what should happen first, what can be postponed, and what further assumptions remain to be tested before investing more resources.
Establish an Execution and Review Cadence
Establish procedures for reviewing progress, tracking KPIs, reevaluating assumptions and adjusting the strategy based on market conditions. A strategic plan isn’t something to be set aside until next year’s offsite.
Our Methodology
How Our Strategic Consulting Process Works
Discovery
Discovery usually involves interviews with the leadership and stakeholders, review of business goals and existing problems, existing strategy, financial documents, customer documents, operational documents, definition of a specific strategic decision that needs to be made, and agreement on stakeholders, scope and success criteria.
Typical outputs Engagement scope, key questions and hypotheses, a data and information request, a stakeholder map, and an initial assessment plan.
Analysis
Analysis can consist of a market and competitive review, customer and segment analysis, business model assessment, internal capability review, operational & process analysis, technology and digital maturity review, and opportunities, risks and constraints assessment.
Typical outputs Current-state assessment, market and competitive synthesis, capability and gap analysis, strategic issues and opportunities, and a set of clear decision options.
Strategy
Strategy development should reflect real choices and trade-offs, not just a list of ambitions that everyone agreed upon.
Potential outputs Strategic direction, strategic options, recommended priorities, business-model or market-positioning choices, goals and KPIs or OKRs, an initiative portfolio, a roadmap, and a clear statement of risks and assumptions.
Implementation
The nature of the engagement will determine whether support is available to sequence the initiatives, establish ownership and accountability, provide executive decision support, review KPIs and progress, offer operating-model or process recommendations, team alignment, refresh the strategy periodically, and provide ongoing advisory services.
Deliverables
What You Receive From a Strategic Consulting Engagement
Deliverables vary by engagement, but commonly include:
- Current-state business assessment
- Stakeholder interview or workshop synthesis
- Market and competitive analysis
- Customer or segment analysis
- Business-model assessment
- Strategic options and trade-offs
- Recommended direction and priorities
- Written strategic plan
- 90-day or near-term action plan
- Multi-stage strategic roadmap
- Initiative owners and milestones
- KPI or OKR scorecard
- Operating-model or process recommendations
- Implementation governance and review cadence
- Executive presentation and decision materials
The exact mix depends on the business challenge, the information available, how many stakeholders are involved, and how much implementation support the engagement includes.
By Business Stage
Strategic Business Planning for Startups, Scale-Ups, and Established Companies
Startups and early-stage businesses
The common requirements for startups are questions around product-market-fit, business model validation, customer and market selection, positioning and go-to-market priorities, resource allocation and early operating-model decisions.
Scale-ups
Common needs involve scaling up growth, expanding the market, scaling up the organization and processes, aligning leadership, decisions on the product or service portfolio, investments in technology and capabilities.
Established businesses
Established businesses require strategic repositioning, digital transformation, new-market decisions or new business-model decisions, operational complexity, portfolio prioritization and a stale strategic plan that is no longer reflective of the business.
Strategic business planning consultants assess these requirements based on the current stage of the business and chalk out the right growth strategy for your business.
Choosing a Provider
How to Choose a Strategic Consultant
Before hiring, it is worth evaluating a provider on:
- Experience with your specific business stage and problem
- Direct senior involvement, rather than work delegated to junior staff
- Ability to connect strategy with execution, not just produce a document
- Quality of evidence and case studies
- Clarity of scope and deliverables
- Approach to stakeholder alignment
- Analytical and market-research capability
- Clear boundaries on what implementation support does and does not include
- Measurement and review process
- Confidentiality and decision-making support
| Provider type | Typical role |
|---|---|
| Strategic consultant | Diagnoses the situation, evaluates choices, recommends direction, and may support execution |
| Planning facilitator | Leads workshops and helps the team create a plan |
| Management or operations consultant | Focuses more heavily on organization, processes, or performance improvement |
| Fractional executive | Provides ongoing embedded leadership and decision support |
| Specialist agency | Delivers a narrower capability such as marketing, technology, or implementation |
Eyal Dror’s work sits in the strategic consultant row: diagnosing the situation, evaluating the real choices available, recommending a direction, and supporting execution to the extent defined in the engagement.
Fees & Engagements
Strategic Planning Consultant Fees and Engagement Models
What Determines Strategic Planning Consultant Fees?
Fees typically depend on organization size and stage, the nature of the strategic question, the number of stakeholders involved, the depth of market or customer research necessary, the number of workshops and/or interviews required, remote or onsite work, urgency and turnaround, analysis and documentation, implementation or advisory support following the plan, and travel and/or third party research requirements.
Common Consulting Engagement Models
- Hourly or daily advisory: helpful for providing limited information or expertise on a specific issue.
- Fixed project fee: beneficial in cases where scope, outputs and decision points can be clearly defined upfront.
- Retainer or ongoing advisory: valuable when the leadership team requires ongoing or longer-term support.
- Value-based or outcome-oriented pricing: may be used when the business decision and the value of the outcome is clearly defined in advance.
What Is Included in a Strategic Planning Engagement?
The level of engagement can vary and may consist of discovery and stakeholder interviews, market and competitive research, workshops or leadership facilitation, strategic analysis, a written plan and executive presentation, a roadmap and priorities, a KPI or OKR framework, implementation planning, and follow-up advisory support.
How Is the Final Fee Determined?
Strategic consulting engagements are strategically defined to align with the business decision, analysis needed, stakeholders required, the deliverables and degree of support in terms of implementation. Following an initial discovery conversation, we determine the correct scope and create a custom proposal.
Case Study
Strategic Consulting Case Studies and Evidence
Client context and business stage
A regional professional services firm with about 80 employees, three years past its founding growth phase, that had plateaued at roughly the same revenue level for two consecutive years despite a stable client base.
Strategic challenge
Leadership disagreed on the cause of the plateau. The founder believed the firm needed a new service line to reignite growth. Two senior partners believed the existing services were underpriced and under-marketed. There was no shared view of the problem, so no one had committed to a direction.
Scope of the engagement
A twelve-week engagement covering discovery, market and competitive analysis, an internal capability review, and delivery of a written strategic plan with a 12-month roadmap. Implementation support was scoped separately as a quarterly advisory retainer following the plan’s completion.
Analysis or diagnostic performed
Structured interviews with eight leadership and senior staff members, a review of three years of financial and client data, a competitive scan of six comparable firms in the region, and a client-segment analysis using existing account data to identify where revenue was concentrated versus where margin was strongest.
Decisions or recommendations made
The diagnosis found that the plateau was not a demand problem or a pricing problem on its own. It was a capacity and focus problem: the firm’s best-margin service line was being under-resourced in favor of lower-margin work that leadership had emotional attachment to but that consumed disproportionate staff time.
The suggestions were to redirect senior staff time to the line with higher margins, restructure pricing for the line with lower margins, and delay the introduction of a new line until the existing lines were balanced.Implementation support provided
A quarterly advisory retainer agreement over the next two quarters, with KPI reviews, to resolve two internal disagreements around staff reassignment, and one change in roadmap by a key hire falling through, has helped resolve two of these issues.
Timeframe
Strategic plan delivered over twelve weeks. Implementation advisory continued for six months afterward.
What was specific to that client
The problem here was not a market problem or a demand problem, but an internal disagreement and a problem of resource allocation, not every plateaued firm has such problem. If a business is truly at a market saturation point, then the diagnostic focus would probably shift towards market and competitive analysis, rather than capability review.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a strategic consultant do?
A strategic consultant creates understanding for leadership of the current situation, reviews the options available, establishes priorities, links strategy to execution, and doesn’t leave a document on a shelf.
What is the difference between strategic consulting and strategic planning?
Strategic consulting may encompass diagnosis, decision making and implementation advice. Typically, strategic planning is more specific in terms of setting goals, priorities, initiatives and execution plans after a direction has been determined.
What are strategic consulting services?
Strategic consulting services typically include business model innovation, digital transformation, strategic planning, and operational efficiency, and is facilitated by a discovery, analysis, strategy, and implementation process.
Who should hire a strategic business consultant?
When growth is challenging, new market entry, restructuring, or seeking better direction and priorities, startups, scale-ups, and established businesses can benefit.
What is included in strategic planning consulting services?
These consulting services usually include analysis, workshops, the development of a plan, a roadmap, and a KPI or OKR framework and a clearly defined level of support for implementation.
How much do strategic planning consultant fees cost?
The fees are tailored based on the complexity, stakeholders, research depth, deliverables and implementation support.
How long does strategic planning take?
The time will vary depending on the complexity of the business, the availability of stakeholders, depth of research conducted, amount of data needed, and the scope of the strategic decisions being made.
Do you support implementation after creating the plan?
Yes. We offer advisory services and implementation plans. Hands-on execution can be scoped alone depending on your business needs.
What information should I prepare before the first consultation?
It is helpful to be prepared with the current challenge, your company objectives, company stage, key stakeholders, constraints known, data and decision time frame you are looking for.
Can strategic consulting be delivered remotely?
Yes. Strategic consulting can be delivered remotely through virtual workshops, stakeholder consultation, research, analysis, and continued collaboration.
Book a Strategic Consulting Discovery Call
Discuss your strategic challenge and identify the right next step for your business.
After you reach out, here is what typically happens:
- Initial review of the business situation
- Clarification of the strategic question that needs to be answered
- Identification of key stakeholders and information required
- Discussion of possible scope and deliverables
- A proposal or next-step recommendation