Monday morning, 8:47 AM. The portfolio review email hits the inbox. Four bullets. One is yours. It says 'marketing is the bottleneck.'
Six channels are running. The CMO is in the seat. The agencies are billed. The pipeline is acceptable but not compounding.
By 9:11 the partner pings. What is the strategy document the marketing motion is executing against.
There is a brand book. There is a campaign calendar. There is a quarterly plan.
There is no strategy document the partner can read in one sitting and understand the bet.
Marketing channels are not the strategy. The strategy is what every channel is supposed to prove.
PE-backed and fund-driven Menlo Park companies hit this wall around the second portfolio review. The ops are running. The reporting is in place. The strategic spine is missing or scattered across six docs none of which is canonical.
A Strategy Diagnostic produces the canonical document. 20 to 30 pages. One sitting. The fund reads it. The team executes against it. The next portfolio review is a different conversation.
$5,000 flat. 10 business days. Output is the document, the 90-minute executive session, and the 90-day priority list.
Yes. Fixed-scope, fixed-price, document-as-output is the format funds prefer. The diagnostic is structured the way a fund expects deliverables to be structured.
It starts with what each channel is supposed to prove. Many channels survive review. Some get retired. The number after the diagnostic is usually three to four, not six.
Operating altitude matters. Geography is the bonus, not the ceiling. Menlo Park signals Sand Hill Road sophistication. New York buyers read it correctly.
$2,500 flat for 5 business days. Query-level visibility audit across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, plus citation-gap analysis, schema readiness check, and a 30-day priority list. For B2B companies missing from AI-assisted buyer research.
The strategic spine document. What every channel is supposed to prove.
Read the service →Category narrative, product narrative, and ICP architecture.
Read the service →Go-to-market architecture for AI-native and applied-AI companies.
Read the service →Anonymized case template. Industry, stage, scope, 90-day result framing. To be filled in Bite 5.
Anonymized case template. Industry, stage, scope, 90-day result framing. To be filled in Bite 5.
Anonymized case template. Industry, stage, scope, 90-day result framing. To be filled in Bite 5.
Build the document the fund reads in one sitting.
Start with the Strategy Diagnostic · $5,000 → Read the diagnostic page first