Problems › Hiring a Strategic Planning Consultant
A strategic planning consultant is usually hired to run a process — offsites, interviews, a document, a set of initiatives with owners and dates. That is worth having when the organisation is aligned on what to do and needs it written down and sequenced. It is worth very little when the real problem is that nobody has decided. The tell is the output: a plan lists initiatives, a decision names what you will stop doing and what the trade-off costs. If your last plan contained no trade-off, the process is producing documents rather than choices.
A strategic planning consultant is usually hired to run a process — offsites, interviews, a document, a set of initiatives with owners and dates. That is worth having when the organisation is aligned on what to do and needs it written down and sequenced. It is worth very little when the real problem is that nobody has decided. The tell is the output: a plan lists initiatives, a decision names what you will stop doing and what the trade-off costs. If your last plan contained no trade-off, the process is producing documents rather than choices.
Annual planning has a shape almost everywhere. Each function proposes what it would do with more resource, the numbers are added, the total is unaffordable, everything is scaled back proportionally, and the result is published as a strategy. Nothing in that process requires anyone to choose between two things they both want, which is what strategy is. It requires them to accept a haircut, which is what budgeting is. Both are necessary; only one of them is being bought.
The consultant is often hired to break that pattern and frequently cannot, because the constraint is not facilitation. The constraint is that the trade-off is politically expensive and the process is designed to avoid making anyone lose. An outside facilitator makes the conversation better organised without changing who has to lose, and the output reverts to a list.
The second common reason to hire one is legitimate and different: nobody internally has the time or the neutrality to assemble the evidence. Somebody has to pull five years of numbers, disaggregate them, and build the cases. That is real work, it is genuinely hard to do while running the business, and it is the part where an outsider adds obvious value — though it is also the part that is now largely automatable.
Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) does the second job: it assembles the evidence, builds the options with their arithmetic, and states what each one costs and what would have to be true for it to be right. It does not run your offsite and cannot make anyone accept a loss. Where the blocker is genuinely political rather than analytical, a good facilitator is the correct purchase and no software substitutes for one.
These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.
✓ The last plan contained no decision to stop doing something
✓ Initiative lists carry forward year to year with the same items unstarted
✓ The plan is written after the budget rather than deciding it
The move that usually makes it worse. Hiring a facilitator to fix a problem of authority, which produces a better-run meeting that reaches the same non-decision.
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.
An independent facilitator running an offsite and producing a plan is commonly £8k–£30k. A firm running a full planning cycle with analysis is £60k–£200k. The range is wide because the two jobs are different: one is facilitation, one is evidence. Decide which you are short of before you compare quotes, because the cheap version of the wrong one is still wasted.
Short enough that the trade-offs are visible. A useful plan states where you will win, what you will stop, and the two or three things that must be true. Most of the length in a typical planning document is evidence supporting decisions that were already made, which belongs in an appendix nobody needs to read twice.
Set direction over three and commit resource over one. Three-year financial detail is invented precision in almost every business, and treating it as a commitment makes the plan brittle. The parts that genuinely need a three-year view are capacity, capital and capability, because those are the ones that cannot be changed inside a year.
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.
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