Strategy Stress-Test

Stress-test your strategy
before you ship it.

Adversarial strategy review for mid-market brands. We find the holes in your launch, repositioning, or go-to-market plan before the market, your competitors, or your quarterly numbers do - in days, not months, at a fraction of the cost of traditional consulting, powered by our AI-accelerated review engine and human judgment.

The Pulse How We Work FAQ
Engagement
5 business days
Fixed fee
$3,500
Built for
Mid-Market brands
Method
AI-accelerated, human-led

Most mid-market strategies fail in rooms where nobody wants to disagree with the CMO.

The deck gets polished

Hard questions get deferred to “phase two.” The strategy ships with three or four latent failure modes nobody wanted to raise.

Nobody wants to be “that person”

At $50M-$500M, you’re big enough that a bad launch costs a year, and small enough that nobody internal is paid to kill it.

The real risks stay private

Your team already suspects what’s wrong. They just have no safe room to say it before launch - and no incentive to be right.

One format. One price. One verdict.

We run a single, focused engagement: the 5-Day Pulse. Fixed scope, fixed fee, fixed timeline - ending with a live readout and a ranked list of what to fix before you ship.

5-Day Pulse

For one high-stakes decision.

$3.5K · 5 business days · fixed fee

A focused adversarial review of one launch, positioning bet, or strategic decision. Two principals. Our AI review engine does the research sweep in hours. We do the judgment. You get a written verdict and a live readout in a week.

See how we work

What you get

  • Two-principal adversarial review
  • Ranked risk register (top 5-7 risks)
  • Competitive-response sketch
  • Rewritten positioning where warranted
  • One live playback session
  • Written brief - operator-ready
  • 7-day async follow-up window

Best for

  • Pre-launch gut-check on a major release
  • Naming & positioning pressure test
  • Pricing or packaging change you’re about to announce
  • Category-entry or repositioning thesis review
  • Single high-stakes decision stuck in committee

Fixed fee. Scope agreed in writing before kickoff. Travel billed at cost when required. Larger or multi-decision engagements available on request.

Four steps. No 80-page deck.

01

Intake

Send us the strategy, deck, or GTM plan. NDA signed. Kickoff is a single 60-minute call.

02

Adversarial Review

Two principals pull it apart with an AI-accelerated engine: assumptions, market structure, competitive response, pricing, channel economics, execution risk - synthesized across thousands of analogs in hours, not weeks.

03

Findings

Ranked risk register. Quantified competitive-response model. Rewritten positioning where warranted. Every AI-surfaced finding is pressure-tested by a human principal before it reaches you.

04

Playback

Live readout with your leadership team. We defend every finding and leave you with a brief operators can act on Monday.

AI does the breadth. Humans do the verdict.

Traditional stress-tests take 6-12 weeks and cost $100K+ because analysts are doing what AI can now do in hours - reading every competitor deck, every earnings call, every analog launch. We let AI do that work, then spend our time on the part it can’t do: judgment, accountability, and telling you the thing nobody in the room wants to say.

AI Engine

What AI accelerates

  • Competitor intel across earnings calls, pricing pages, and product launches
  • Analog-pattern matching: finds the 12 brands that tried your play and what happened
  • Message-testing against 40+ buyer personas before a single interview
  • Financial sensitivity modeling on pricing, mix, and channel economics
  • Draft risk register: 60-80 candidate risks surfaced for human triage
10×faster than traditional consulting
3%of the cost of a Big 3 engagement
$1.5Min AI-driven operational savings, proven

Mid-market operators making bet-the-year decisions.

We work with CMOs, Chief Strategy Officers, and founder-CEOs at brands between $50M and $500M in revenue - the band where the decisions are material, the optionality is real, and a six-week strategy debate is a luxury you don’t have.

The questions people ask before they book.

What exactly is a Strategy Stress-Test?

A structured, fixed-fee adversarial review of a strategy you’ve already built. We pressure-test the thinking, model the competitive response, and hand you a ranked list of what to fix before you ship. Think red team, not McKinsey.

How is this different from a traditional strategy consultant?

Traditional consultants build strategy with you on a retainer. We break the strategy you already have, on a fixed fee, in days or weeks. No 80-page deck, no embedded team, no follow-on upsell.

Who should not hire us?

Teams without a draft strategy to test yet - we’re a pressure test, not a greenfield strategy shop. Also: anyone who wants to pay us to validate a decision. We don’t do validation.

How quickly can we start?

Most engagements kick off within 7-10 business days of an inbound. Urgent pre-launch reviews can compress further - ask.

How long does an engagement take?

A Pulse runs 5 business days from kickoff to final readout. It ends with a live playback session and a written brief your team can act on immediately.

What deliverables will I actually receive?

A ranked risk register (top 5-7 risks), a competitive-response sketch, rewritten positioning where warranted, a prioritized action list, a written operator-ready brief, one live playback session, and a 7-day async follow-up window.

Do you sign NDAs?

Always. We’ll sign yours or send ours before any materials change hands.

Ship a stronger strategy. Or don’t ship the weak one.

Tell us what you’re about to launch. We’ll reply within one business day with scope, timing, and a fixed fee.

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