Problems › Corporate Strategy Consulting
Corporate strategy is the question of which businesses to be in and how to allocate capital between them. Business-unit strategy is the question of how to win in one of them. They are routinely confused, and the confusion is expensive: a portfolio answer applied to a single business tells you to divest something you should be fixing, and a competitive answer applied to a portfolio tells you to fight harder in a unit you should be selling. If you run one business, you almost certainly want business-unit strategy. Corporate Strategy & Transformation handles the portfolio question — where capital goes and what the centre is for.
Corporate strategy is the question of which businesses to be in and how to allocate capital between them. Business-unit strategy is the question of how to win in one of them. They are routinely confused, and the confusion is expensive: a portfolio answer applied to a single business tells you to divest something you should be fixing, and a competitive answer applied to a portfolio tells you to fight harder in a unit you should be selling. If you run one business, you almost certainly want business-unit strategy. Corporate Strategy & Transformation handles the portfolio question — where capital goes and what the centre is for.
The distinction is not academic. Corporate strategy asks where to play: which markets and businesses to hold, what to buy, what to sell, how capital moves between units, and what the corporate centre does that justifies its cost. Business-unit strategy asks how to win: positioning, pricing, segment, cost structure, the specific competitor taking the specific customer. Both are legitimate; they use different evidence and produce different decisions.
The reason they get confused is that the symptom is often identical. Flat consolidated revenue looks the same whether the cause is one underperforming unit or a portfolio that has drifted into three businesses with no relationship to each other. The test is what happens when you disaggregate: if performance is uniform across units, you have a competitive problem in a single market and the portfolio view will not find it. If the average is being made by one unit carrying two, you have a portfolio problem and no amount of competitive analysis inside the weak units will fix it.
The second thing corporate strategy is for, and the one most often skipped, is the parenting question — what the centre adds. A corporate centre earns its cost either by allocating capital better than the market would, by supplying a capability the units could not buy alone, or by imposing a discipline the units would not impose on themselves. If it does none of those, it is a tax on the units, and the honest strategic answer may be to shrink it rather than to redirect it.
Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) runs the portfolio arithmetic — return on capital by unit, contribution against capital consumed, the overhead each unit actually carries — and produces the allocation view. Where the answer turns out to be a single-market competitive question, it will say so and point at the narrower analysis rather than dressing a positioning problem in portfolio language.
These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.
✓ The group result is flat and the units inside it are not moving together
✓ Nobody can state what the corporate centre does that a unit could not buy
✓ Capital is allocated roughly in proportion to last year rather than to return
The move that usually makes it worse. Running a portfolio review on a company that is really one business, which produces a recommendation to divest the part that was about to become the answer.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
The diagnosis changes with the shape of the business. Each of these works the same question through one industry's actual economics, with an excerpt from a real analysis run on a company of that type.
It routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5), one of 29 engagements. The output is a sequence with a stopping rule — which move first, what it funds next, and the observation that would say it is not working — rather than a list of things you could consider.
Read a complete report before deciding whether it is worth your time.
Corporate strategy decides which businesses to be in and how capital moves between them. Business strategy decides how to win inside one of them. A single-market company has no corporate strategy question worth paying for — it has a competitive one. A group with three units and one balance sheet has both, and answering them in the wrong order is the common failure.
A portfolio review from a large firm is commonly £150k–£500k for eight to twelve weeks; boutiques and independents do narrower versions for £40k–£120k. The variance is driven almost entirely by how much primary data collection is in scope. If your own finance system can already produce contribution and capital by unit, most of that cost is buying analysis of numbers you already hold.
As a summary, yes; as a decision rule, no. Growth and share are two of the variables that matter and they are the easiest two to obtain, which is why the matrix persists. It becomes misleading when a unit with modest share is the one generating the cash that funds everything else, and the grid says to divest it. Use it to organise the conversation, then decide on return against capital consumed.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
Describe the situation in your own words and we will tell you which analysis answers it — before you sign up for anything.
Describe my situation →Prefer to skip ahead? Go straight to the free diagnostic.