"We have a value creation plan. It has become a list of initiatives nobody can roll up, and the board asks a different question every quarter."
Read what actually exists. In a plan of any age this is typically a few dozen initiatives with a few hundred workstreams underneath. The first job is establishing which are live, which are paused but have never been marked as such, and which no longer reflect where the strategy has moved to.
Most plans describe activity. A board needs outcomes. Every initiative gets rewritten as a business outcome statement, then rolled up from workstream level through to a C-suite dashboard, with proximity ratings and RAG applied so status reflects reality rather than optimism.
Line the plan up against the medium-term plan and the budget cycle so it drives capital allocation rather than sitting beside it. Set the governance: the plan sits above Steerco and Opco and feeds them, rather than competing with them for the same conversation.
A plan the exec team can run and the board can track, in the same document. The dashboard rolls up cleanly, which means quarterly reporting stops being a rebuild each time.
Handover matters more here than on a shorter engagement. The structure has to survive without me, so the last fortnight is spent making sure someone internal owns it.
The hard part is not the structure. It is that an honest reset surfaces which initiatives were never real, and which value has already been quietly written off. That is the point, and it needs an executive sponsor who genuinely wants to know. Without that, the exercise produces a tidier version of the same problem.
Fixed price, not a day rate. The scope is agreed up front and the price does not move with it. If the work takes longer than expected, that is my problem rather than yours, which is the right way round.
Quoted after a short call. Invoiced in line with the phases below rather than in one commitment at the start.
Most engagements end at delivery. Some clients keep me on a light retainer afterwards to keep the model current and to be available when the board asks something new. That is agreed at the end, not the start.
Where AI does part of the work, I say which part. Some of the analysis and model building uses AI tooling. The judgement, the method and the conclusions are mine, and I will tell you which is which if you ask.
You can stop after the inventory phase and pay only that portion. The inventory is worth having on its own: an honest picture of which initiatives are live, which are paused without being marked as such, and which no longer match the strategy. Continue only if that is useful.
It rarely fits exactly, and that is normal. Worth a conversation rather than a form.
martin@scalepointpartners.com