Questions people ask before hiring us

Seven to ten business days for a Loan-Ready Plan, ten to fifteen for a Complete Business Plan, two to three weeks for a business review and three weeks for a validation sprint. The clock starts when you send us your information, not when you pay. Rush delivery in five business days is available for $600 extra.

About three hours in total. A 20-minute call at the start, a questionnaire that takes most people around an hour, and a review of the draft. The first week is the busiest. We work from documents you already have — statements, quotes, leases — instead of asking you to retype things.

Less than you'd think. Whatever financials exist, any supplier or equipment quotes, your lease or the site you're looking at, and a sense of what you charge and what it costs you to deliver. If you're starting from nothing, that's fine — a lot of our clients are.

Yes, and please send it. If your lender has given you a format, a checklist or a list of questions, we'll write to it exactly. It's the fastest route to an approval.

Two rounds with the Loan-Ready Plan and three with the Complete Business Plan. In practice most clients use one. Extra rounds are $250 if you want them.

$950 for a forecast, $1,950 for a Loan-Ready Plan, $3,450 for a Complete Business Plan, $2,450 for a validation sprint, $2,850 for a business review $5,500 for growth strategy and $12,500 for complete strategy development — before applicable taxes. Add-ons are listed openly on the pricing page. You get a written quote before anything starts.

Because you need to know what this costs before you commit, and because an hourly rate rewards us for being slow. If the work turns out bigger than we estimated, that's our problem.

Half when we start, half when you approve the final draft. E-transfer, credit card or cheque.

No. We don't broker loans, we don't take success fees, and we don't accept referral fees from lenders. You pay us for the plan and that's the whole relationship.

No one can promise that, and be careful of anyone who does. Approval depends on your credit history, the security you can offer, your numbers and the individual lender. What a well-built plan does is make sure the plan isn't the reason you get declined — and give you clear answers when the credit officer starts asking questions.

That's normal for a start-up and it's a large part of what we do. We build the forecast from the ground up — your real costs, actual supplier quotes, local wage rates and industry benchmarks — and we show where each number came from so you can defend it.

Yes, completely. You get the editable Word document and the Excel forecast, unlocked. No licence, no subscription, no need to come back to us to change an assumption. We also send a short video walking you through the model.

Yes. We'll sign your NDA before the first real conversation if you'd prefer, or send you ours. We don't publish client names without written permission.

One of our six people, all based in . The person on your first call is the person who writes your plan. We don't offshore drafting and we don't use subcontractors.

We use software to speed up research and formatting, but a person does the thinking, the interviews and the writing, and a second person checks every forecast. Lenders and investors read a lot of these. Generic writing and unsourced numbers are noticed immediately.

Three weeks of finding out whether your idea holds up before you spend real money on it. We write down what has to be true for it to work, then test the riskiest of those assumptions: 10–15 structured interviews with people who'd actually buy, bottom-up market sizing, a competitor and pricing scan, and where it fits, a demand test that measures whether people will part with money. You get a go, adjust or stop recommendation with the reasoning shown.

Then it's done its job. About one sprint in four ends that way. It's a few thousand dollars instead of two years and your savings, and more often than not the honest answer is "adjust" rather than "stop" — the market is real but the customer, the price or the model needs to change.

If you don't have paying customers yet, usually yes. A plan built on untested assumptions just makes guesses look official, and experienced lenders and investors notice. The sprint fee comes off the plan in full if you order one within 90 days, so it rarely costs you anything to do it in the right order.

Your accountant tells you what happened and keeps you compliant. A business review asks why, and what to do about it. We look at margin by product and by customer, what it really costs to serve each one, your pricing, your cash cycle, your capacity and where you sit against competitors — then rank the fixes by what each is worth. The two work well together, and we're happy to talk to your accountant.

A written review, a scorecard across eight areas of the business, your top five actions with a rough estimate of what each is worth, and a 90-minute debrief to go through it. Most owners already suspect two or three of the findings — the value is knowing which to do first and what the rest are costing meanwhile.

The hundred-slide version is. For a business your size, strategy is a short set of decisions: which customers you're going after, what you charge, how you reach them, and what you're deliberately not doing this year. We do the research behind those choices and write them as a one-page plan with a twelve-month roadmap — quarterly priorities, each with a name against it and a number that says whether it worked.

Growth strategy answers one question — usually "where do we expand next?" — in four to six weeks. Complete strategy development works all six moves of the Strategos Loop across the whole business over eight to twelve weeks: it starts by assessing the strategy you're already running (often unwritten), rebuilds it on evidence, and includes the execution and measurement side. If you're unsure, the free consultation will sort it out in twenty minutes.

We run complete strategy development on the Strategos Loop, a six-move system: AIM (know your why), OBSERVE (look around and in the mirror), ORIENT (find your edge), CHOOSE (pick your battle), DESIGN (make the money work) and ACT (make it happen) — wrapped in a RENEW ring that keeps it turning. Each move has to clear a gate before the next starts, and what you learn in execution feeds back to the beginning. You can read about the method itself at strategosloop.com.

We will — but not in week one. The single most common way strategy work fails is jumping straight to the answer (CHOOSE) before doing the honest diagnostic work (OBSERVE and ORIENT). That's why the loop has gates: we don't pick a direction until there's an evidence-based picture of your situation and a written diagnosis of the real problem. Clients who've been sold a strategy deck in a fortnight elsewhere usually recognise why it didn't stick.

Only if you want us to. We set up the rhythm before we leave — a weekly glance at leading indicators, a monthly operating review, and a quarterly RENEW session where you scale, persevere or kill each bet and reset OKRs. Plenty of clients run that themselves. If you'd rather we facilitated the quarterly review, it's $850 a quarter.