Immersion in the field.
I look at the real numbers rather than the presented ones, I run interviews with the teams and with a few customers, and I spend a day inside the business. What is seen at this stage steers everything that follows.
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Strategy
A trajectory written, costed, and achievable.
Strategy consulting exists to decide where the company is going and why the market should follow. It is only worth something if it ends in decisions that someone then executes.
Strategy consulting means clarifying where a company is heading and how it will get there: positioning, business model, margin structure, competitive ground and go-to-market plan. It most often takes the form of a strategy audit, a short engagement that ends in a costed trajectory and an order of priorities.
A useful audit is judged on one thing only: the number of decisions it makes possible. A document that triggers none has cost money without changing anything.
01 / Scope
What a strategy audit examines.
Five areas, five questions every company director already asks without always having the time to answer them with numbers. The audit answers them once and for all, with the documents to back it up.
| Area | The question asked | What comes out of it |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning | Why does a customer choose us rather than someone else, and does that reason still hold? | A promise you can keep, stated in one sentence, set against what customers actually say, and the list of what makes it credible today. |
| Business model and margins | Where do we really make money, and what is eating the margin without anyone seeing it? | The real margin by offer, by channel and by customer type, and the leaks identified line by line. |
| Competitive ground | Who are we actually competing against, and what decides the purchase? | The map of genuinely comparable players, the ground already taken, and the ground still free and within reach. |
| Acquisition channels | Where do the customers come from, and is that flow steered or simply endured? | The real weight of each channel, its cost, the dependency it creates, and the levers that deserve investment before the others. |
| Priorities and sequencing | What do we start with on Monday, and what can safely wait? | An order of battle over twelve months: what starts straight away, what follows, and what stops. |
02 / Method
How an engagement runs.
Four stages, in this order. The diagnosis comes out of the field and the real numbers, never out of a framework applied from the outside.
Analysis and testing of the assumptions.
Every starting assumption is tested against the data: the margin claimed, the typical customer assumed, the channel judged to be the priority. The ones that do not hold are set aside, and we know why.
Debrief and decisions taken together.
The debrief is not a presentation to sit through. It is a working session where the decisions are made during the meeting, with the costed consequences of each option laid on the table.
Implementation or handover.
Either the team executes on its own, with a document precise enough for that, or I stay on the implementation, as fractional operations leadership or on one identified workstream. The choice is yours.
No slide decks. Action and results.
The debrief comes down to a written, costed trajectory with an order of battle over twelve months: what starts, in what order, with what resources and what effect expected on the margin. If you want it, the support then continues into execution, until the decisions taken show up in the business.
03 / Deliverables
What you receive.
Three documents, designed to be used rather than filed. Each one answers a precise question you are already asking yourself.
Deliverable 01
The costed diagnosis
The real state of the company, read in its numbers and in its market.
- Margin by offer, by channel and by customer type
- Position held against comparable players
- Real dependency on each acquisition channel
- Gaps between the sales story and what the accounts show
What it is for
To get everyone to agree on the starting point. Without a shared set of numbers, a management committee debates impressions and the same decisions are replayed at every meeting.
Deliverable 02
The twelve month trajectory
Where the company is going, through which stages, with what resources and what expected effect.
- Positioning chosen and promise stated
- Offers to develop, to change or to drop from the catalogue
- Go-to-market plan and priority channels
- Dated milestones and tracking indicators
What it is for
To execute without coming back to ask what it means. The document is written to be picked up as it is by the team, including by those who were not in the room.
Deliverable 03
The decision plan
What has to be started, and above all what has to stop.
- Workstreams launched, in order and with an owner
- Activities and channels to abandon, with the reason in numbers
- Spending that produces nothing measurable
- What is deliberately postponed, and until when
What it is for
To free up time and cash. A plan that only adds workstreams cannot hold: a company does not gain extra resources because it has written a strategy. Saying what stops is the most useful part of the work, and the rarest.
04 / Who for
The three situations where I get the call.
In all three, the common point is the same: an important decision has been pending for too long, for want of what it takes to settle it.
Situation 01
The founder torn between several directions
Three credible options on the table, no objective way to separate them.
The symptom
The decision slides from one meeting to the next. Each option has its champion, the arguments go round in circles, and meanwhile the team works on all three at once, so on none of them.
What the audit settles
It puts numbers on each direction: achievable margin, investment required, competitive ground and the delay before the first effects. The discussion stops being a matter of opinion.
Situation 02
The director whose model is running out of steam
The business still runs, but every euro of revenue costs more to win than it used to.
The symptom
The margin erodes with no obvious cause, the historic channel delivers less, and the answers given so far have been patches: a discount, a hire, one more campaign.
What the audit settles
It separates what belongs to execution from what belongs to the model itself, then says what to protect, what to repair and what to stop, in that order.
Situation 03
The brand that wants to enter the Portuguese market
An offer that works in France, and a neighbouring market the team barely knows.
The symptom
The project has been discussed for months without ever starting, because nobody in the team really knows how you sell, hire and build a name there.
What the audit settles
It sets the offer against local habits, assesses the competitive ground on the spot and lays out a realistic entry plan. I work on the 2 markets directly, from Paris and from Lisbon.
05 / Case
An example of an engagement.
An audit at the start of an engagement on a portfolio of brands, followed by the implementation of the decisions taken.
Monlisbonne group
Strategy audit of a portfolio of 14 sites
The group runs a portfolio of 14 tourism and events websites, in French and in English. The audit came at the start of the engagement, before any technical work.
It covered three questions: how consistent the positionings were across the sites, the duplicates that had two addresses competing on the same demand, and the decision on what to keep, to merge or to launch. The audiences are French speaking consumers on one side and the B2B market for corporate offsites on the other, two audiences that do not expect the same promise.
The implementation followed the decisions taken.
- Technical rebuild of the sites kept
- Editorial structure built around search intent
- Structured data across the whole portfolio
- Position tracking site by site
- Citability work in AI generated answers
Scope
14 sites, two languages, two distinct audiences: French speaking consumers and B2B corporate offsites.
06 / Questions
Questions.
The five questions asked before launching a strategy audit.
How long does a strategy audit take?
It is a short engagement, a few weeks, whose length depends above all on the number of activities to look at.
A single activity company is diagnosed quickly. A portfolio of brands, of websites or of outlets takes longer, because the positionings have to be compared with each other before anything can be settled. The schedule and the debrief date are fixed before we start, and they are met.
What is the difference with a consultant from a large firm?
The person in front of you is the person doing the work, and that person ran companies before advising them.
A large firm brings a proven method and resources, often with a junior team in the field and a partner at the debrief. Here, the diagnosis is written by someone with 15 years of experience, 6 companies founded or co-founded, 4 restaurants opened and a 1 500 m² venue operated behind him. That changes one thing above all: the recommendations are filtered by what can realistically be executed with the teams in place.
Do I have to keep you on after the audit?
No, the audit stands on its own and ends with a document your team can execute without me.
What comes next is a choice, not a condition. Some clients take over at the debrief, and that is perfectly fine. Others prefer that I stay on the implementation, as fractional operations leadership or on one specific workstream. The proposal is modular so that stopping after the diagnosis is a normal option and not a rupture.
Do you work with companies in difficulty?
Yes, provided there is still cash and time to act.
A company under strain does not need an ambitious plan, it needs to know what to stop, what to protect and in what order. The work then bears first on the margin structure and on the spending that produces nothing measurable. If the situation calls for insolvency proceedings rather than strategy, I say so in the first conversation.
How do we start?
With a thirty minute conversation, no commitment, to check that the question really is a strategic one.
You set out the situation, I tell you honestly what I would do in your place. If there is something there, I send you a proposal that starts with the audit, with a written scope, a schedule and a debrief date. That first conversation also serves to rule out the cases where an audit would add nothing, because the problem lies elsewhere.
07 / Recommendation
What the people who worked with me say.
Armel is a great professional, and I have had the pleasure of working with him many times. Excellent at challenging ideas and highly effective when it comes to implementation, he has always been a valuable asset when launching new products and services.
Get in touch
Let us talk about your project.
Thirty minutes, no commitment. You set out the situation, I tell you honestly whether I am the right person and what I would do in your place.
- Format
- Engagement or fractional
- Experience
- 15 years
- Markets
- France, Portugal
- armel@aj-conseil.com
- Phone
- +33 6 10 64 02 88
Availability
Paris / Lisbon