Strategy Consulting Editing and Proofreading Services

Strategy is mostly a set of decisions about what not to do, and strategy documents are mostly lists of things to do. A client receives five priorities, each supported, each sensible, each requiring the same scarce people who are already fully committed to the twelve things the organisation was doing before the consultants arrived. Nothing is stopped. Eighteen months later everything is behind, and the strategy is remembered as a document rather than a change.

We edit what strategy consultancies and corporate strategy teams produce — strategy documents and board papers, market entry and expansion cases, portfolio and capital allocation reviews, competitive and industry analyses, growth strategy and adjacency assessments, corporate development and partnership rationales, scenario planning documentation, strategic option papers with recommendations, transformation programme rationales, investor and market-facing strategy narratives, internal strategy communications for staff, and annual planning and objective-setting documentation. Our editors work on the part of a strategy that makes it a strategy.

The recommendation that names what to stop is the hardest paragraph to write and the one that decides whether anything happens. A strategy that adds five priorities to an organisation at capacity has not allocated anything; it has published a wish list and left the actual allocation to be made by whoever is busiest, arbitrarily, in the following quarter. We write these so each recommendation is paired with what it displaces, named specifically — the product line, the market, the initiative, the customer segment, the team's current commitment; so the resource being contested is identified as the real constraint, which in most organisations is a small number of people rather than money; so the cost of stopping is stated honestly, including the revenue that goes and the people affected, because a stop recommendation without its consequences will be reversed the first time somebody quantifies them in a meeting; so the sequence is explicit about what must be true before the next thing starts, given that concurrent priorities are how organisations discover they had none; and so the paper says what the organisation is choosing not to be good at. Boards that receive this argue properly in the room, which is where the decision is worth having.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client strategy, financial information and internal papers. We are editors rather than strategists, and we offer no view on strategic choices, analysis or recommendations. What we can do is make the paper state the trade-off it is actually asking a board to make.