FAQ -

What does a Connected Strategy Advisor do?

Let’s clear something up right away: most “strategy help” isn’t really strategy help.

You get a slick offsite, a slide deck full of big ideas, maybe a new scorecard…and three months later everyone is back to fighting fires, priorities are colliding, and your leadership team is quietly ignoring the plan.

It is not that you lack ideas. It is that you lack connection.

That is the gap a Connected Strategy Advisor is built to close.

The myth: “We just need a clearer plan and better dashboards.”

Here is the story a lot of growing organizations tell themselves:

• “If we tighten up our strategic plan, we’ll get alignment.”

• “If we revamp our KPIs, people will focus on the right things.”

• “If we build a dashboard, we’ll finally be data-driven.”

You hire a consultant, they interview a few people, disappear into PowerPoint, and come back with:

• A long list of initiatives,

• A wall of KPIs no one can remember,

• A glossy report that lives in a folder and never changes how decisions are made.

On paper, it looks strategic. In practice, nothing fundamental shifts.

You do not need more plans.
You need a connected system: vision → strategy → metrics → decisions → behaviors → results.

That is where a Connected Strategy Advisor is different.

The reality: A Connected Strategy Advisor plugs the gaps between vision, metrics, and behavior

A Connected Strategy Advisor is not there to impress your board. They are there to make it easier for your leaders and teams to:

• Agree on what “success” actually means,

• See clearly where you are and where you are drifting,

• Make better, faster decisions with the data you already have,

• Turn strategy into repeatable leadership and team habits.

Instead of dropping in with a finished answer, they work alongside you to design a simple, honest definition of success, then build the connections that keep your whole organization moving in that direction.

Think of it as upgrading from “strategic offsite” to an operating system for clarity, accountability, and momentum.

So what does a Connected Strategy Advisor actually do?

Let’s get specific. Here is what working with a Connected Strategy Advisor typically looks like.

1. Clarifies what success really is for your organization

Most teams carry around six different versions of “success,” none of them written down. A Connected Strategy Advisor helps you:

• Name your non-negotiable strategic outcomes (profit and cash, growth, compliance, people, relevance, risk — translated into your language),

• Separate “nice to have” from “must win,”

• Define how success looks for the organization, for leadership, and for key teams, so everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Instead of vague goals like “grow,” you get precise, shared outcomes like:

• “Increase recurring revenue to X% of total,”

• “Reduce dependency on the founder in daily operations,”

• “Become the employer of choice in our market.”

Clarity here is what makes everything else possible.

2. Connects strategy to a small set of meaningful measures

Most organizations are drowning in data and starving for insight.

A Connected Strategy Advisor helps you:

• Identify the few metrics that actually move the needle for your version of success, not a generic KPI shopping list,

• Differentiate between leading indicators (the early signals you can act on) and lagging ones (the history lesson),

• Map how metrics connect across the business, so leaders see cause-and-effect instead of isolated numbers.

The result is not a 47-tab spreadsheet. It is a concise, visual view of:

• “Are we creating the results we said we wanted?”

• “What’s driving those results?”

• “Where is friction building up?”

You should be able to glance at your measures and know, in under a minute, whether you are on track or need to intervene.

3. Builds decision rhythms so strategy is used, not shelved

Strategy dies in the calendar.

A Connected Strategy Advisor works with you to design simple, sustainable leadership rhythms, such as:

• Monthly strategy review sessions that tie directly to your core metrics,

• Quarterly reset conversations where you re-prioritize based on reality instead of wishful thinking,

• Clear decision rights: who decides, who gives input, and what happens after a decision is made.

Instead of endless meetings where you re-hash the same issues, these rhythms create:

• A predictable place to surface friction,

• A structured way to choose trade-offs,

• A habit of turning insight into action.

Strategy becomes something you use every month, not something you revisit once a year.

4. Surfaces and resolves the hidden disconnections slowing you down

Your biggest constraints usually are not in the numbers. They are in the gaps between people, priorities, and processes.

A Connected Strategy Advisor facilitates the tough conversations most teams avoid:

• Where work is getting stuck between departments,

• Where metrics are incentivizing the wrong behavior,

• Where the founder or senior leaders are still a bottleneck,

• Where “how we actually do things” and “what we say we do” have drifted apart.

Crucially, they do this with your leadership team, not to them.

Instead of prescribing answers, they use structured facilitation to pull out the frontline wisdom your organization already has, then connect that to the strategy so people see themselves in the solution.

5. Translates strategy into Team Activation

This is where the “Team Activation” piece comes in.

Great strategy with unengaged teams is just a nicely worded wish. A Connected Strategy Advisor helps you activate your teams by:

• Translating enterprise-level goals into clear outcomes for each team,

• Co-creating simple team scorecards that make sense to the people doing the work,

• Helping managers set expectations, feedback loops, and accountability that feel fair and doable,

• Equipping teams to track their own progress and bring insights back up, instead of waiting to be told what to do.

Instead of strategy being something that lives in the C-suite, it becomes something every team can see, influence, and own.

6. Designs targets and incentives that drive the right behavior

Targets and incentives can be powerful, but they can also quietly wreck your culture when they are poorly designed.

A Connected Strategy Advisor helps you:

• Stress-test your targets for unintended consequences (“How could we hit this in the dumbest possible way?”),

• Balance outcomes: so you do not improve one metric at the expense of something critical somewhere else,

• Align incentives with the behavior you actually want, not just the numbers you think you want.

This is where you avoid the classic traps—gaming the numbers, sandbagging goals, short-term wins that damage long-term health—and build an environment where measurement supports better work instead of punishing it.

7. Coaches you and your leaders as you implement

A connected strategy is not a static artifact. It lives or dies in the way your leaders show up.

A Connected Strategy Advisor often provides:

• 1:1 coaching for the CEO or founder around decision-making, delegation, and staying in their genius zone,

• Coaching for key leaders on how to lead in a more data-literate, people-centric way,

• Support as you reorganize roles, adjust priorities, and experiment with new ways of working.

In other words, they walk with you through the messy middle between “great idea” and “new normal.”

What a Connected Strategy Advisor does NOT do

Just as important as what they do is what they do not do.

A Connected Strategy Advisor is not:

• An outsourced COO. They will help you design and refine your operating system, but they are not there to run your day-to-day.

• A generic facilitator with sticky notes. Workshops are tools, not the end product. If all you get is a feel-good offsite, you are not getting connected strategy.

• A pure financial technician. They care about the numbers, but they care just as much about people, purpose, and execution. The point is better decisions and healthier organizations, not prettier reports.

• A solo hero. They are not there to replace leadership. They are there to build your internal capacity so you are less dependent on them over time, not more.

And they are definitely not there to give you a 100-page strategy document you will never read.

Do you actually need a Connected Strategy Advisor?

You might, if any of these sound uncomfortably familiar:

• Revenue and headcount have grown, but decision-making has gotten heavier, not easier.

• You have “too many priorities” and no shared filter for what to say yes and no to.

• You are tracking numbers, but they are not really informing decisions.

• Your leadership team is busy and committed, but each person is pulling in a slightly different direction.

• You feel stuck in the middle: too big to wing it, too stretched to build a new system from scratch.

Conversely, if what you really need is:

• Basic bookkeeping cleanup,

• A traditional annual strategic plan to satisfy a board requirement,

• One-time training with no follow-through,

…then a Connected Strategy Advisor is probably more horsepower than you need right now.

The bottom line

A Connected Strategy Advisor helps you move from:

• Disconnected plans, metrics, and meetings,
  to a simple, honest definition of success that everyone can see and act on.

• Strategy as a document,
  to strategy as an operating system shaping everyday decisions.

• Leadership teams that work hard in parallel,
  to leadership teams that work together on the same few, critical outcomes.

If you are ready to stop treating strategy as an annual event and start using it as a living, breathing tool for momentum, a Connected Strategy Advisor is not a luxury. It is the bridge between the organization you have and the one you keep saying you want.