Practice — Strategic consulting
Strategy work here is board-facing. The options are set out plainly, the trade-offs are named, and there is a recommendation you can put your name to.
Strategy, financial advisory, technology and talent — one defined question at a time, answered in a document short enough that a board will actually read it and detailed enough that it can be argued with.
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enquiries@novus-point.co.uk — every enquiry is answered at principal level.
One of three practices — strategic consulting
Definition
It is one question, scoped in writing, answered in a document a board can vote on.
Not a workshop series. Not a deck of frameworks with your logo on the cover. Not a research report that assembles the evidence and then declines to draw the conclusion. The engagement is finished when there is a recommendation on the page, the reasoning behind it is visible, and the people who have to approve it can interrogate both.
Most of the decisions we are called into are not short of information. They are short of a shape. There is a plan somebody believes in, a set of numbers that does not quite support it, two or three options nobody has written down side by side, and a board meeting in five weeks. The work is to turn that into something that can be decided: what is actually being chosen, what the real alternatives are, what each one costs, and which one the firm would choose if it were its own money.
That last part is the obligation the engagement takes on. An adviser who lays out three options and leaves the choice to the client has done half the job and taken none of the risk. We say which one, and why, and what would have to be true for us to be wrong. If the evidence genuinely does not support a recommendation, the document says that too — and says what would settle it, and what that would cost to find out.
The judgement behind it comes from having run an operating business rather than from only advising on them: eleven years in the UK market — payroll, working capital, contracts that go wrong, and decisions taken with incomplete information because the alternative was taking none. Alongside that, the obligations of chairing the supervisory board of a listed company — which is the same question from the other side of the table: what does a board need in front of it before it can responsibly approve anything.
We do not sell a proprietary method with a name and a trademark. There is nothing to license and nothing to be certified in. What there is, is a discipline about what a recommendation has to contain before it is worth putting to a board.
The frame
Every engagement runs through the same four. A recommendation that has not cleared all of them is an opinion.
They are deliberately ordinary. The value is not in the questions but in refusing to move past any of them until it has an answer that survives being read aloud to the person whose budget it is.
01 — Position
Not where the plan says, and not where the org chart implies. Which customers, which products, at what margin, under which contracts, and how much of it depends on a handful of relationships or one route to market. Boards are routinely surprised here, and everything downstream inherits the error if it is not settled first.
02 — Options
Doing nothing is always available and is usually the unstated default, so it goes on the list and gets costed like everything else. The test of an option set is whether a reasonable person could pick a different one from the same page. If only one option is specified properly, the exercise has already decided itself.
03 — Trade-offs
Cash, management attention, and the options it closes off — the third is the one that goes unwritten. A commitment that consumes the next eighteen months of senior time has a price that never appears on a budget line. Named, not gestured at: what you give up, and when the door shuts.
04 — Recommendation
One recommendation, argued, with the conditions that would overturn it written next to it. That last clause is what makes the document usable a year later: when a condition changes, the board can see immediately whether the decision still holds, instead of relitigating it from the beginning.
The engagement
Four steps, and you can stop after any one of them and still be further ahead than when you started.
Step one is free and often ends there, because a fair proportion of the questions we are asked turn out not to be the question that actually needs answering. Step two puts a number and a scope in writing before anything is committed. Steps three and four are the work.
01
The same half hour that opens every engagement at this firm, pointed at a strategic question rather than an AI exposure. We ask what decision is actually being taken, who has to approve it, what has already been committed in contracts and board minutes, and what would happen if nothing were decided for six months.
You leave the call with a straight answer about whether this is worth taking further — including, often enough, that it is not, or that the question you arrived with is a symptom of a different one. Nothing follows unless you ask for it.
Outputa straight answer on whether the question is worth taking further
02
The question the engagement will answer, written in one paragraph; what is in scope and what is explicitly out; who we need access to; what you receive at the end; and when. A fixed fee against that named scope, priced before the work starts. If the scope changes, we re-price in writing and you agree it before the work continues — no variation arrives on an invoice.
Where the work is genuinely open-ended, we say so and price it as a retained arrangement rather than dressing an indefinite commitment up as a project.
Outputa written scope, and a fixed fee agreed against it
03
The evidence base comes from your own records first — the ledger, the contracts, the pipeline, the customer concentration, the actual cost of serving each segment — and from the people who run the work day to day, whatever their titles. Published market material is used to test what we find, not to substitute for it. Where a number cannot be established, the document says so rather than estimating quietly.
Only then are the options built, each specified far enough to be costed and compared on the same page, with doing nothing among them. You see the options and the working before the recommendation exists, so that you are arguing with the analysis rather than with a conclusion presented as a fait accompli.
Outputcosted options on one page, with doing nothing among them
04
One recommendation, with the reasoning shown, the conditions that would overturn it, and a sequenced order of work: what to do first, what can wait, what needs a board decision and what needs only an owner and a date. Costed where costing is possible, flagged where it is not.
We put it to the board or the decision-maker in person and answer questions on it. The document is then yours — take it to your general counsel, your auditor, your investors or another firm. It is written to survive that.
Outputone recommendation, the reasoning behind it, and a sequenced order of work
We take a limited number of engagements each quarter, because senior-led means what it says: the principal who runs your diagnostic runs your engagement. That constraint is the reason we tell people at step one when we are not the right firm.
Deliverables
One document, in five parts, written to be read rather than presented.
Slides are produced when a board wants slides, but they are a summary of the document and never a substitute for it. A decision that exists only in a deck cannot be examined a year later by someone who was not in the room.
The five parts
House stance: We will not write a recommendation we would not defend in the room, and we will not soften one because it is unwelcome. If the honest answer is that the plan on the table is the right one and no engagement is needed, that is the answer you get — on the diagnostic call, before anyone has been invoiced.
Practice — how strategy connects
The sequence is the whole argument, and it is why this practice sits first of three.
Most firms will sell you strategy or sell you technology. A technology commitment taken before the strategic question is settled is a bet on a tool, and it is usually justified by a business case written by the people who want to build the thing. We work across both, which means the governance question gets asked before the build starts, not after a regulator does.
A strategy engagement often ends by naming AI work as the next step. When it does, that work is scoped separately, priced separately, and you are free to take the document elsewhere.
Where the recommendation involves deploying, buying or building AI, the first question is which of those systems Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 actually touches, and what role you hold in law for each. That is a classification exercise before it is a compliance exercise, and it changes what an option costs.
Read the practice — EU AI Act complianceA board decision to adopt AI creates an operating question the strategy document should already have anticipated: who owns each system, who may approve a new one, what is logged, what is reviewed, and what authorises a person to stop the thing. Governance is what still works the week after the deadline.
Read the practice — AI governanceWe build our own AI products, Hadar (a CRM for Dubai real-estate brokerages) and Operark, and test our methods on them before we advise you. So when the strategy document estimates what an AI option costs and how long it takes, that estimate rests on methods we have already tried on our own products.
Read the practice — AI automationFour situations
Four situations we are called into. If one of them reads like your quarter, the diagnostic is the right next half hour.
01 — Chief executive or owner-manager
Revenue is up and it is harder to run than it was two years ago. New lines were added because customers asked, not because anyone decided, and the ones that consume the most senior time are not obviously the ones that pay. You want to know what this business actually is now, before you commit the next year of it to anything.
02 — Board or supervisory board member
The papers arrived late, the case rests on assumptions that are not stated, and the alternatives were never written down. You are not looking to run the company — you are looking for a second reading you can put next to the executive's, so that your approval means something and the minute records a decision rather than an acquiescence.
03 — Founder or CEO facing a technology commitment
There is a substantial AI or systems decision on the table, an internal champion, a vendor with a compelling demonstration, and no independent view of what it is worth or what it forecloses. You need the strategic question answered before the procurement one — and an estimate of cost and duration from someone who has actually shipped a system.
04 — Finance director or CFO
You can see it in the margin by segment, in the customer concentration, or in the working-capital profile, and it does not match the story the strategy tells. What you want is not another model. It is an independent reading of the same evidence, written in terms a board will engage with rather than defend against.
In the diagnostic
Sometimes it should be the large firm, and we will say so on the diagnostic call. If what you need is scale — a global market study, several hundred interviews, workstreams running in five countries at once — a large firm is built for that and we are not.
Where we are different in kind rather than in price: the principal who takes your first call does the analysis and defends the recommendation to your board. There is no pitch team, no handover to a junior after signature, and no research function between you and the person forming the view. Where an engagement needs legal, security or data expertise, the firm brings in advisers who have it, under its direction and on its responsibility, and you are told who is on your matter before they start.
The second difference is where the judgement comes from. Eleven years running an operating business in the UK market — construction and fit-out consulting — and the obligations of a Chairman of a Supervisory Board in a listed company are a different vantage point from a career spent entirely inside advisory. It is not the better vantage point in every case. It is the better one when the decision belongs to an operating business and has to be lived with afterwards.
A fixed fee against a named scope, priced before the work starts. The number on the proposal is the number on the invoice for that scope. If the scope changes, we re-price in writing and you agree it before the work continues — no variation arrives on an invoice.
We do not publish a range, and that is a considered position rather than an evasion: a fee quoted before the question is known is either a guess or an anchor, and neither is useful to you. The diagnostic that establishes the question and the scope is thirty minutes and costs nothing, and you have a written number before you commit to anything at all.
Where the work is genuinely open-ended — a decision that has to be revisited each quarter as conditions move — we say so and price it as a retained arrangement rather than dressing an indefinite commitment up as a project. Day rates are the mechanism we avoid, because a day rate pays us for duration and you are buying a conclusion.
Then say so, in the room, while the reasoning is still on the table. A recommendation you can argue with is the point of writing one down.
The document states what would have to be true for the recommendation to be wrong, and that clause exists precisely so a disagreement can be about evidence rather than about who is more senior. If you show us the condition we got wrong, we change the recommendation and say in writing that we changed it and why. If the board simply prefers another option, the work is not wasted: the options and the trade-offs are on the page, so the choice becomes a documented decision with reasons attached rather than a preference — which is what a board minute is supposed to record.
What will not happen is a recommendation being rewritten to match the answer the room wanted. If we do not hold it, we do not sign it.
Both, but never as a condition of the advice. Plenty of recommendations end at the board decision and are executed by your own people, which is the cheapest outcome available to you and we will say so when it applies.
Where the work that follows is AI — establishing governance, or building and running systems — that is the firm's other two practices, and it is scoped and priced separately after the strategy document exists, not bundled into it. The order of work in the document names what needs doing; it does not assume we are the ones doing it. You can take the document to another firm, and it is written to survive that.
Less than you expect, and more of it early. The numbers as they actually are rather than as they are presented to the board; the contracts and commitments that genuinely constrain the options; and time with the two or three people who know how the business really runs, whatever their titles say.
And one decision from you at the outset: what question this engagement is answering, and who has to approve the answer. That is step two, and it is written down and agreed before anything else happens. Engagements go wrong when it is left implicit — not because the analysis was poor, but because two people at the table were quietly commissioning different pieces of work.
Next step
A strategy engagement — four steps
Request a 30-minute diagnostic The other two practices
enquiries@novus-point.co.uk — every enquiry is answered at principal level.