Strategy Consulting Editing and Proofreading Services

Five priorities arrive in the board pack, each supported by analysis, each sensible on its own. All of them require the same eleven people, who are already committed to the twelve things the company was doing before the engagement began. Nothing in the pack is stopped. Eighteen months later the five priorities are all behind schedule, and the strategy is remembered as a document rather than as a change.

The documents we edit for Strategy Consulting

Strategy documents and board papers make up most of what we edit for these teams, and market entry and expansion cases arrive with them. Portfolio and capital allocation reviews come to us as well, along with competitive and industry analysis, growth and adjacency assessments, and corporate development and partnership rationales. The work also covers scenario planning documentation, option papers with recommendations, transformation program rationales, investor-facing strategy narratives, internal communications to staff, and annual planning material. Our editors work on the paragraph that names what stops.

What the editing involves

The paragraph naming what stops is the hardest one to write and the one that decides whether anything happens. A paper adding five priorities to an organization already at capacity has not allocated anything; it has published a list and left the allocation to whoever is busiest, in the following quarter, by default. We work through each recommendation until it is paired with what it displaces, named specifically: the product line, the market, the initiative, the customer segment, or the current commitment of a named team. "Rebalance toward enterprise accounts" and "move the four solutions engineers off mid-market renewals in Q3" ask a board for very different decisions.

The contested resource needs naming as well, and in most of these papers it is a small number of people rather than money. A recommendation written as "requires investment of $2.4 million" reads as a budget question, while the same recommendation written as "requires the two architects currently assigned to the platform migration" reads as the choice it actually is. The cost of stopping belongs in the same place: the revenue that goes and the people affected. A stop recommendation without its consequences gets reversed the first time somebody quantifies them in a meeting.

Sequence is the other thing these papers tend to leave implicit. A recommendation reading "the Denver pilot must clear its 90-day review before the rollout begins" can be tested against a calendar, and a list of concurrent priorities cannot. The paper should also say what the organization is choosing not to be good at, and a board given that sentence argues the question in the room, which is where the decision is worth having. We do not judge whether the strategy is right. The partners, the client's executives, and the board decide that, and the recommendation reaches us already made.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including client strategy, financial information, and internal papers. We are editors, not strategists, and we offer no opinion on strategic choices, analysis, or recommendations. What we can do is make the paper state the trade-off it is asking a board to accept.