Two operators, four industries, no permission to wait

The founders had launched the consultancy with the kind of credentials that should have made go-to-market easy. Decades of combined experience across four industries, deep networks in each, and a reputation that travelled. The temptation, understandable and almost universal among experienced operators, was to address all four industries at once and let the market sort out which one would carry the firm. The reality, almost equally universal, was that addressing four industries meant addressing none of them well, especially without a brand or reputation that would coast on its own.

The founders did not have years of runway to wait for the market to decide. They had a window measured in months — long enough to land first engagements that would compound, short enough that wasting a quarter on the wrong wedge would cost them the next year. The first job of the engagement was not to write a brand strategy. It was to pick the wedge, and to pick it on evidence the founders would trust six months later when the work got hard.

A three-week selection sprint, designed to be uncomfortable

We ran a three-week selection sprint. Each of the four industries was scored on access to buyers, urgency of the problem, the founders’ personal advantage in that market, and — the axis that did the real work — willingness of a known buyer to take a real meeting within seven days. The last axis was deliberately operational. Theoretical buyer access is a story; a meeting on the calendar is evidence. We forced ourselves to test the story against the evidence in every market, and one of the four industries dropped out within the first week because the meetings simply did not materialise.

By the end of the sprint, one sector had won decisively, and it was not the largest of the four. It won because the founders could reach buyers within a week, speak the buyer’s language without translation, and describe the buyer’s problem in a sentence the buyer would recognise as their own. The other three industries were not abandoned — they were parked, with a defined revisit date and a written description of what would need to change for them to come back on the roadmap.

Designing a wedge offer narrow enough to say yes to

The wedge offer was deliberately narrow: a fixed-scope, fixed-price diagnostic that delivered real value in three weeks. Narrow enough that buyers could approve it without a procurement process. Useful enough on its own that the buyer would feel they had gotten the engagement’s worth even if no follow-on work occurred. We resisted the standard consulting impulse to design the wedge as a loss-leader for a larger engagement. Loss-leaders signal weakness to experienced buyers, and the founders’ credibility depended on offering work that stood on its own merits.

The pricing of the wedge mattered as much as the scope. We set it at a level that felt slightly uncomfortable to the founders — high enough that buyers would treat the engagement seriously, low enough that the buyer’s decision did not require board-level approval. The discomfort was the point. Wedge pricing that feels easy to the seller almost always reads as cheap to the buyer, and a buyer who has paid attention to the price will pay attention to the work.

First ten engagements, and the things we deliberately delayed

The outreach plan we built matched how the founders actually worked rather than how a marketing function would have wanted them to work. Warm introductions through the existing network, small live sessions for ten to fifteen buyers at a time, two short essays a month in the founders’ own voice. No cold outbound, no paid acquisition, no founder pretending to be a marketer in a channel they did not believe in. The plan was boring on paper and effective in practice, because it was sustainable.

The first ten engagements landed in under five months. Seven of them led to follow-on work within the year, and three of the follow-ons were larger than the original engagement — exactly the compounding pattern the wedge was designed to produce. We deliberately delayed the things a less disciplined plan would have started with: the new brand, the long website, the manifesto. Those will come, paid for by the engagements the wedge produced, written from the perspective of a firm that has already done the work, rather than from the perspective of a firm that hopes to.