LinkedIn Post Ideas for Strategy Consultants

Six weeks of work. A 47-page market sizing model. A board recommending we enter a new vertical. The vertical didn't exist. Not in the sense that nobody had built it. In the sense that the buyer we'd modeled — "head of digital procurement at mid-market manufacturers" — wasn't a real role in 80% of the companies we counted. We had built the TAM by extrapolating LinkedIn job titles. The actual decisions were being made by COOs as a side responsibility. The customer interviews that broke it took eleven calls. What I learned: — Bottoms-up sizing is only as good as the role you anchor on. Validate the role with primary research before you multiply. — Beautiful models hide their assumptions. A page-one sensitivity table on the key role assumption would have caught this in week two. — The strategy team's most underused skill is the willingness to say "I'm not sure this is real." It doesn't sound senior. It is. We walked the board through the corrected analysis. They thanked us. We probably saved the company $40M and 18 months. The model wasn't the work. Catching the model was.

Most strategy decks die in the appendix. A hundred slides. Eight executives. Forty minutes. The first ten slides get attention. The next eighty get clicked through. I tried something different last year. Instead of a final-readout deck, I wrote a two-page memo. Page one: the recommendation, three reasons it works, the one reason it might not. Page two: what we'd ask the executive team to commit to by Friday. The meeting was supposed to be 90 minutes. We finished in 35. What changed: — Everyone had read it before the meeting. The deck format trains executives to expect to be walked through it. The memo trains them to expect a real conversation. — Disagreement surfaced in the meeting, not after it. The slide deck lets people nod and then text each other afterward. The memo doesn't. — The follow-up doc wrote itself. The memo became the artifact. Not every engagement is a memo engagement. M&A reviews, big organizational change recommendations, anything that touches 50+ people — those still get the deck. But routine strategy reviews? Memo every time. If you've been clicking through eighty slides while the partner reads them aloud, you already know. Try a memo next time. The pushback will be quieter than you fear.

How I structure a week-one hypothesis tree for any engagement. The version I actually use, not the textbook one. Disguised example: client is losing customers in their largest segment. The CEO believes it's price. Root question: Why is our largest segment churning? Level 1 hypotheses (MECE-ish, not perfect): H1: Price/value perception has shifted (CEO's hypothesis) H2: A competitor offering changed in a way we didn't notice H3: Our product changed in a way customers noticed before we did H4: The buyer profile in this segment is shifting (the segment is becoming a different segment) Level 2 under H1: Has list price moved? Has discounting changed? Has total cost of ownership changed for the customer? Are renewals showing the price objection or is it post-implementation? Level 2 under H4 (the one nobody wanted to look at): Are new customers in this segment different in size/industry/buyer role than two years ago? If yes, the segment is fragmenting. The answer was H4. The CEO's hypothesis was wrong. The segment had drifted, our positioning hadn't. The rigor isn't building the tree. It's being willing to spend time on the branch nobody asked you to look at.

Three numbers we pulled from public filings predicted our client's margin problem before we had access to a single internal report. 1. Revenue per employee, four-year trend. Down 19%. Either headcount was growing faster than productivity, or the mix was shifting to lower-yield work. Both bad. 2. Cost of revenue as % of total, three-year trend. Up 6 points. Either input costs were rising faster than they'd repriced, or they were absorbing margin to win. 3. Days sales outstanding, two-year trend. Up 11 days. Either a customer concentration problem, or they were granting payment terms to keep top accounts. Three numbers. Maybe two hours of work. Pre-LOI, no access. What the data room confirmed three weeks later: — Headcount had grown 31% to chase enterprise. Productivity hadn't. — Pricing power had eroded against a specific competitor. — Their top three customers were 41% of revenue and were demanding net-90 terms. The public numbers told the whole story. The data room added detail. The speed of strategy work isn't about answering faster. It's about knowing what to look at first. What's your three-number diagnostic for a margin problem?

Halfway through an engagement, the two executive sponsors wanted opposite answers from the analysis. The CEO wanted us to recommend consolidation. The COO wanted us to recommend continued expansion. The analysis pointed in neither direction cleanly. The wrong move would have been to pick one and hope the other folded. Strategy consultants are not arbiters of internal politics. We're also not invisible to them. What we did: Reframed the question. Instead of "should we consolidate or expand," we asked "what's the staging logic across the next 24 months that lets us hold either option open?" Four milestones. Three of them favored a consolidation decision if a specific market signal showed up. Two favored expansion if a different signal showed up. Neither sponsor got their preferred answer. Both got a framework that let them stop arguing about the destination and start arguing about the signals. The board approved it in one session. The technical lesson: when a binary question is forcing politics, change the question to staging. The political lesson: your job isn't to be neutral. It's to be useful to the room. The craft we never get taught is the half that decides whether the recommendation lands.

I presented to a board at 28. I froze on slide 7. A director asked a question that wasn't in any of the materials. It was perfectly reasonable. I didn't have a clean answer. I said "let me come back to you on that," and then proceeded to be wooden for the next twenty minutes because I was still thinking about it. The partner sitting next to me was kind. The director was patient. The engagement closed fine. I went home and didn't sleep that night. What I built after: 1. Pre-read every board member. LinkedIn, prior boards, recent interviews if public. I now go in knowing who's likely to ask what. 2. The anticipated-objections list. For every recommendation, I prepare the three sharpest objections and a two-sentence response for each. I never use most of them. They're insurance against freezing. 3. The two-minute answer drill. With my team the day before, we run through ten possible questions. I have to answer each in under two minutes, on the spot, without notes. The drill, not the answers, is the prep. 4. A graceful "I don't know." The phrase I use now: "Good question. I don't have the answer in this room, but I can have it for you by [specific time]." Then I deliver before that time. Nothing replaces showing up prepared. But preparation is a system, not a feeling. If you froze in a room recently, you're not alone. Build the system this week.

Seven questions I use to kill a bad strategy in under an hour. 1. "What would have to be true for this to work?" — Forces the assumptions onto the table. Most strategies die on the first three. 2. "Who would we have to fire? Which customers? Which products?" — A strategy that has nothing to subtract is not a strategy. 3. "What does the competitor do the day after we announce this?" — Most plans assume the competitor stays asleep. They don't. 4. "If this works, what breaks?" — Capacity, talent, supply, brand. Successful strategies have predictable second-order problems. Surface them now. 5. "Who's the smartest person who would disagree, and what would they say?" — If the team can't name them, the work isn't done. 6. "How would we know this is going wrong in three months?" — Every strategy needs leading indicators. If you can't name them, you can't course-correct. 7. "What's the cheapest way to test the riskiest assumption before we commit?" — If the answer is "we can't," that's a different conversation than "the strategy is approved." A strategy that survives all seven is rare. That's the point. The job isn't to like the strategy. The job is to stress it before reality does.

Every junior in my firm is asking the same thing. "Is AI going to commoditize what we do?" The honest answer: part of it, yes. Not the part you're worried about. What AI is already eating: — Data pulls. Public filings, industry reports, comp benchmarks. The hours my team used to spend assembling source decks are gone. — First-draft frameworks. SWOT, Porter, 2x2s. AI generates the structure. The team starts at iteration two, not iteration zero. — Slide formatting. The midnight before a readout used to be slide cleanup. Now it's content. What AI does not touch: — Picking the right question to ask in the first place. Models don't know which assumption is load-bearing. — Reading a room. The board member whose silence means something. The COO whose enthusiasm is performative. — Having the courage to recommend. AI will give you ten options. The job is to point at one and stake your judgment on it. — Client trust. Earned in moments AI was nowhere near. If your value was "I can make a clean model," yes, that's commoditizing. If your value was "I can frame the question and stand behind the recommendation," you're more valuable, not less. The craft isn't the spreadsheet. It never was.

The 48 hours before a final readout. The unglamorous version. T-48h: Final review with the team. Three slides die. The recommendation tightens from seven paragraphs to four sentences. The story arc gets rebuilt twice. T-36h: Pre-wire call with the CEO. Walk through the recommendation. Watch their face. If they're surprised, you've done the pre-work wrong. They should be agreeing in this call, not learning. T-30h: Side conversation with the dissenting board member. Not to convert them. To understand what would make them comfortable saying "I disagree but I can live with it." T-24h: Slide triage. Anything that's there because we couldn't decide to cut it gets cut. The deck shrinks from 38 slides to 22. T-12h: Rehearsal. Out loud. With the team listening. The partner times the opening. It runs three minutes long. We re-cut. T-2h: Phone is silenced. Coffee. Three deep breaths. Walk in. T+0: The recommendation lands. The questions are sharp but expected. The dissenting board member says "I disagree but I can live with it." T+24h: Follow-up doc to the client. Three commitments by Friday. The final readout is the part everyone sees. The 48 hours before are the work that earns the room.

Strategy consultants, a debate. Which classic strategy framework would you retire, and what would you replace it with? I'll start. SWOT. It feels rigorous because it has four quadrants. It is not rigorous. "Threats" and "Weaknesses" overlap 70% of the time. "Opportunities" devolves into a wish list. "Strengths" becomes a marketing exercise. Three hours of workshop time, no decision. What I use instead: a one-page "what would have to be true" doc. Three columns: the recommendation, the conditions required for it to work, the cheapest test for each condition. It forces a recommendation. It forces assumptions. It forces a test plan. Two hours of work, a real decision. Your turn. What sacred framework needs to go, and what replaces it? Reading the answers will be a better tour of the field than any McKinsey publication this year.