The work runs in three stages, represented by the letters Aleph, Bet and Shin: א Foundation,
ב Building, ש Ignition.
Six focused weeks, and something concrete in your hands every week of them.
What it produces is a single golden thread - the governing thesis that holds in every room. Not messaging, not a positioning statement, but the deeper account: why the world has changed, why this company exists in response, and what winning looks like for everyone it touches. Built once, run through everything.
א Foundation
I get inside the company. Separate, confidential interviews, one by one, with the people who know the company best: you, your leadership, your investors, your board where there is one; because the gap between how each of you explains the company is the diagnosis. Out of it comes your golden thread: the company story, the master narrative in your own words, the message hierarchy, and the proof points that set you apart. Most of the time goes here, because this is the uncovering, where the insight that everything else is built on actually surfaces.
ב Building
Then the thread becomes a working set of tools: the company story in your own words, the message hierarchy, the proof points that set you apart, elevator pitches, a founder script, objection handling, a draft vision and mission - and something a small team can draw on to produce content that sounds like you, not like generic AI output. Built to be used, not filed away.
The story is stress-tested against the rooms that matter next - the investor meeting, the key hire, the journalist - and what breaks goes back to the forge. Then coaching: you and your leaders, delivering the same story under pressure, each for your own room. It ends with the hand-off: the team takes a renewed, shared view of the company and starts building on it - new hires, new decks, new rooms, all drawing from the same source. The narrative was always yours, buried in what you have built. My job was to surface it and hand it back.
ש Ignition
Can’t I just do this with AI?
AI has made the generation of positioning documents free. Any founder can produce a message house and fifty elevator pitches before lunch, and if an adviser wants to charge you for drafting, keep your money.
But generation was never the work. The model builds from your prompt, and your prompt carries your blind spots: it will polish the confusion you hand it and assure you the result is excellent. It produces rival versions of your story endlessly and never chooses between them. And it will never hear what your board member won't say in front of you. Your narrative problem is a candour problem and a decision problem, and neither yields to prompting.
So I work the machines hard at every stage, and only where they are superb. In Foundation, every interview is transcribed and cross-referenced word by word, so the diagnosis rests on what people actually said. In Building, every claim is audited against its proof before it enters your story. In Ignition, the narrative is stress-tested against simulated investors, journalists and buyers calibrated from rooms I have sat in, and your team's alignment is measured before and after, in numbers. The instruments make the evidence harder. Deciding what it means is my work: the ear, the judgement and the standing to force the choice, built over twenty-three years across McKinsey, government and the boardroom.
All of it is governed. I hold enterprise terms: nothing you share trains any model. Recordings are deleted within days, transcripts shortly after the engagement, and no transcript is ever shown to anyone, including you; your people speak candidly because they know it. The policy is a page of plain English, and you see it before we begin.