This answers the questions CEOs ask before committing a leadership team to a week, and covers our methodology in detail. How discovery works, how the workshop is shaped to your business, what you leave with, and what happens afterwards.
If something is not answered here, please reach out and ask.
The workshop is built for companies at the two hardest transitions, zero to one and one to ten. You have built something that works, but you are not growing at the rate you need.
The workshop does two jobs, and the second is the one most strategy work skips.
First, it settles the big questions, and it does that across the whole company. What does the business genuinely differentiate on? What are you building, who is it for, and why would they come to you for it at all? How does it acquire and retain customers, how does it drive growth, and how does it maximise your revenue and profit? What does the roadmap to deliver it look like? Then every stream that has to carry it. Product. Architecture. Sales and business development. Marketing, ecosystem and growth. Operations and compliance. Financial management and forecasting. Tokenomics and utility, or a share plan, built to maximise whichever applies. Then fundraising. Settled as decisions your team has made and can defend, not as a document.
The second job is what decides whether any of it happens. It investigates whether you can execute it, since your roadmap has to match what you can actually do. Does the team hold the capability the strategy demands, and where it does not, is that a hire, a training problem or a redesign of who does what? Do the processes exist? Does your SaaS tooling support the plan or work against it, and is AI being used as well as it could be? The gaps go into the roadmap with owners against them, for immediate action, rather than being discovered later as the reason nothing moved.
A strategy nobody can execute is not a strategy. Most of the value of the week is in refusing to separate those two jobs.
A preliminary analysis. An hour with your leadership team, at no cost. An NDA first.
The hour gives us the inputs to form a headline view of where your leadership team, your metrics and your customers are pulling against each other, and to what degree. We come back to you with what we found and a straight answer on whether we can deliver what we promise. You use it to decide whether you want us in a room for a week.
Nothing else is required. No data, no questionnaires, no preparation.
Less than you would expect.
Across thirty years as a founder, a CEO, and an early stage advisor or director to other companies' leadership teams, the sectors worked have been employment, recruitment and gig work; fintech and payments; marketplaces, covering liquidated goods, e-commerce, ticketing and vacation rentals; video sharing, social media and crowdsourced research; and in crypto, lending protocols and privacy.
"You have not seen a business like mine" is usually not true.
The reason is that what caps growth is almost never sectoral. It is the gap between what your leadership team believes, what your metrics show and what your customers say, and that gap behaves the same way in a lending protocol as it does in a vacation home marketplace.
The larger point is that we do not tell you what to do. We bring the breadth of the patterns that repeat across all the companies we work with. You bring depth, the detailed understanding of your own market and business that nobody outside it has. The path that drives growth gets built where those two meet. What we need of your depth, we get in discovery, which is one of the reasons it is as comprehensive as it is.
Five days with your leadership team together, plus a sixth day held in reserve. We confront the business as it really is, get clear on its real differentiators, how that truly drives growth, lock down the strategy, then map it and the roadmap to make it happen. Every session runs on your business, your metrics and your decisions. Underneath all of it sits one question, whether you are giving your customers what they actually want and the best version of it you can build.
It is not an offsite, and it is not a consultant reciting concepts. By the time the week starts we will have spent weeks deep diving your data, your metrics and your team's own perspectives, and doing so with scar-tissued, highly experienced eyes. We will know your product, we will know your customers, and we will know what they actually want and why. The week is then spent making high impact decisions you can execute on rather than establishing facts.
Neither. The distinction matters. Training gives you knowledge and no decisions. Consulting gives you recommendations you did not make and will not defend a few months later.
Most of the week is your team working, not listening. Each session opens with the theory and discovery data it needs and then turns immediately into structured exercises run by the whole room, built on the methods the world's leading technology companies use. The exercises are the engine. They are designed to surface things about your business that none of you could reach individually and that no outsider could hand you. They do because the answers only exist in the collision between what each of you knows.
The genius is in the process rather than in any one person, including us.
That is deliberate. It means the conclusions are yours, arrived at by your team, understood rather than accepted. What you walk out with survives contact on Monday because everyone who has to execute it helped build it.
Five days, Monday to Friday, with Saturday held.
Days normally run from 10am to 6pm, with short breaks throughout, and a stop for lunch. If the day needs longer, we use it.
Expect evenings to be included. Most nights there is something to finish for the following day. It is also when discussion continues, and it is what naturally happens when a leadership team is in one place with the big questions open.
Sometimes what you need will not fit in five days, and we know that before the week starts. Sometimes we do not know until later in the week. If the work fits comfortably into the week, Saturday remains free. If it is needed to finish the work properly it is available, and if not, the day is yours. If you are with us in Phuket, you have a day on the island.
If your team is twelve or fewer, everyone. Beyond that, every member of the leadership team, for every day. The week produces decisions that are owned. A decision made without the person who owns it is a decision that unravels the moment the week ends.
It is worth thinking past the org chart as well. The most useful person may not be on the leadership team. It could be the designer who watches users struggle, whoever runs user research, the engineer who knows where the product actually breaks, or the customer support lead who everyday sees what your customers really think. The exercises work on what people know, not what their title is. Leave them out and the decisions get made without the people closest to the problems they are meant to fix.
Some material is not for the wider room and financials or specific team member capability may be a case. That is expected rather than a complication, and we allow for it.
Sessions carrying restricted material are scheduled at the end of the day. The wider room contributes where their knowledge matters and finishes before such material comes up. Nobody is asked to leave mid-discussion and nothing has to be talked around.
Tell us during discovery what is sensitive and to whom, and we will build the timetable around it.
Before we confirm dates we will ask you for a named list of everyone who will be there, with their function. We will send each a calendar invite. We ask each person to accept it themselves rather than you accepting on their behalf. That sounds bureaucratic but it is the single most common way a week goes wrong. A founder confirms the team will be there, and on Tuesday the CTO has scheduled an important podcast nobody knew about.
Tell us early and we will place the sessions they most need to be present for accordingly. Partial attendance is workable. Unannounced partial attendance is not, because we will have built the week assuming they are in it.
Yes. Both are available, in person is what we recommend, and the choice is yours.
Here is the case we will make for coming to us.
Remote is run properly rather than as a lesser version. The same discovery, the same modules, the same exercises, the same outputs. It runs in your own Miro board and on your own video tool, so the week's material stays inside your environment rather than accumulating in ours. The days are shaped differently to protect attention, and we ask you for the commitment to being present and undistracted that a room would otherwise give us for free.
Where travel is what stands between you and the week, take the remote option. It is a better week than not having one.
Not the leadership team, whichever way the week runs. For other roles it can work, where someone has something specific to contribute to particular sessions or particular value to take from them. Where the week is in person, those people can join by video for the sessions that need them. Raise it before we schedule so we can place those sessions deliberately.
A useful test. If it would be valuable for someone to join parts of several days, it is valuable enough for them to be there for the week.
No, and this is an important part worth understanding.
The week runs as a series of modules, each one taking a body of practice that the best technology companies use, and putting your business through it. The modules are not a syllabus. Which ones run, how deep each one goes, and what the exercises inside them work on, are all built for your company off the back of discovery. Some weeks run eight to ten. Some run five, but deeply. No two weeks are ever the same.
What gets run in the week gets decided by discovery, not by a brochure. It is why discovery happens first and why it is as comprehensive as it is.
It is not a framework assembled for a consulting practice. It came out of running the process on real companies. Josh has led technology businesses for 30 years and for more than a decade has put every one of them through a version of this every six months, refining what worked and cutting what did not across each one.
What survives is what kept producing high impact decisions that held, judged by the person who had to live with the outcome rather than by what presents well.
Discovery is how we arrive knowing more about your business than your team has ever put in one place, with the contradictions already mapped.
We ask for a lot, and it is worth saying why. Without it we cannot deliver what the week promises. The more we hold, the further we can get into the root cause, which is usually what the team has been hunting for and cannot find from the inside.
It runs in three layers, and the findings live in the gaps between them.
An example. Your project management tooling holds what you planned. Your deploy history holds what you shipped and when. Read together they give your real velocity, which is a different number from the one anybody quotes.
Layer one. What you tell us. A written confidential questionnaire for every attendee, about an hour, with a second confidential one for your leadership team as well. Plus one ninety minute Q&A session led by us with the leadership team together. We hold separate sessions with the CEO in the weeks beforehand, where we agree what we are looking for and make sure your team knows you are behind it. Throughout discovery we work from a private channel in your Slack or Roam, so we can clarify whatever is needed as we find it.
Layer two. What your systems say. It will be comprehensive and will include more than your analytics, your internal documentation, your tooling inventory, your investor updates, and any user research you have already run. The full request is confidential to us both.
The specific list reaches you as a written request, with a reason stated against every item. Where the built version of something does not exist, where we can, we take the data underneath it and build it ourselves.
Layer three. What your customers and your market say. Interviews with your customers across four segments: active users, power users, and the two groups nobody ever talks to, activated and then churned, and signed up and never activated. The last two are the hardest to reach and the ones worth the most, because they can show where your product does not work for the people it should have. Plus recorded sessions of real people attempting your core task cold and a walkthrough of your product. It is rounded out with comprehensive competitor research, including their products and business models. There will likely be more, discovery leads the way, but there will not be less.
User research is a specialised craft and is not one thing, and the method has to match the questions we want answers to. Run the wrong method and you get a confident answer to a question you were not asking, and false data to match. Discovery's layers one and two decide the method and who we use to run it.
Because the answer to a question changes with where you sit, and the difference is the finding.
Everyone who will be in the week answers the same core confidential questionnaire, about an hour. The same questions going to everyone is deliberate. Where the company is going, what is genuinely in the way, what would have to be true for the plan to work. When the person building the thing and the person selling it describe the same company differently, that gap is worth more than either answer on its own.
Additionally, your leadership team answers a second confidential questionnaire, about their own area of accountability. The decisions taken there, the reasoning behind them, and the options that were considered and rejected. Those are questions only the people who made the call can answer.
Nobody is asked to comment on a colleague's performance, in either one.
Yes, and this is worth reading twice. Individual answers are never seen by anyone in your company. Not the CEO, not any colleagues, not in the written findings and not out loud in the room. What comes back to the team is aggregated, and nothing is ever attributed to a person. Nobody is asked to assess a colleague, in either questionnaire. Where something one person said has to be raised, it is raised as a pattern rather than as a position anyone held. The questionnaire only works because that holds, so it holds.
Because every fact established before Monday is an hour of the week spent on judgement instead of fact-finding. Teams that complete discovery properly get a fundamentally different week from teams that do not, and we would rather state that plainly up front than you discover it on day two.
Say so, and mean it. "We do not track that" and "I do not know" are useful answers rather than failures. We deliberately include questions companies often cannot answer, and the list of what you could not answer comes back to you as a finding. It can be the most valuable single page in the pack. We are not marking you. What a company cannot answer tells us as much as what it can.
Extensively, and it is worth explaining it.
AI runs across the discovery synthesis, the systems and market analysis, and the preparation of the week's material. It is the reason we can process more about your business in weeks than a large consulting firm manages in months. AI however does not make the judgements, and it is not in the room.
Worth answering in detail.
Our strongest controls are that we do not hold your data any longer than the work requires and do so with rules that are followed rather than delegated.
Our controls, and the providers relevant to your engagement, are set out in full in a security pack sent on request. If your security team wants a data processing agreement or a completed security questionnaire, please forward them to us.
Further information on how we handle your material is set out in our privacy notice.
Everything below is produced with you and your team, in a form your team can start executing against the following Monday.
Taken together they do one thing. Your leadership team, your metrics and your customers stop telling three different stories about the same company.
Gate one: does it compound? A growth activity either feeds the loop that brings the next user, or it produces a one-off spike and stops. Both can look identical in a month of data. Only one of them is growth.
Gate two: does it pay? What it costs to acquire a user through that activity, against what that user is actually worth to you. Not against revenue, and not against a channel benchmark.
The gates are a scaling test, and your stage decides when to apply them. Early on, growth you hack by hand is often exactly the right thing to do, even though it will never scale, because it is how you find out what actually works. The mistake is not doing it. The mistake is staying on it past the point it should have been replaced.
So the gates do not tell you to stop everything that fails them. They tell you which of your activities are hand-worked and which will carry you, and when the switch has to happen.
Where you are scaling, both gates bite. Something that compounds but does not pay burns the runway faster the better it works. Something that pays but does not compound is a job not an engine, and it stops the day you stop fuelling it. Most companies never score their activities against either, which is why the list of what to stop can be longer than the list to start.
The operating systems a company at your stage rarely has time to build. We build out the ones you want, and skip the ones you do not.
A financial model built for your business. A three-way model so your accounts reflect reality and forecasting becomes real, linked to a cap table for future rounds. Where you operate on-chain, a wallet and counterparty registry, with revenue and operating expense wallets modelled against those flows and a reconciled transaction ledger. Invoices run from arrival to booked by AI rather than a bookkeeper, with payment and reconciliation rules and a team reimbursement process. A tracker, instructions and an AI prompt pack make the whole thing runnable by a small team.
A hiring and onboarding process. Hiring and onboarding decide more about how a new hire performs, well into their first year, than almost anything else. We give you an interviewing and onboarding process strengthened over more than a decade, built to identify outstanding talent, win them, and have them at their best once they arrive.
Proforma contracts covering the business, ready for your lawyers to review rather than bill you to draft. They derive from contracts drawn for us by a leading US firm and have been operationally tested and hardened over subsequent years. A strong starting point rather than a substitute for your own counsel.
A suite of admin prompts. The recurring administrative work that makes your company more efficient and effective gets tasked to AI rather than consuming personnel.
The following week.
The decisions themselves are yours the moment they are made, which is what the wall or board is for. The pack is assembled from the week's own material as it runs rather than written afterwards, so what reaches you is the record of what your team decided rather than our write-up of it.
Each decision, what it rules out, who owns it and what has to be true for it to hold. The exercise outputs as your team built them, so the reasoning is visible rather than summarised. The Now, Next, Later plan with owners and sequence. And the discovery findings in full.
It is built to be worked from rather than filed. A new engineering hire can read it and know why the architecture is what it is, and your next public update can be written out of it.
The full fee table, what is included, the payment terms and the two independence rules that decide what we will not take money for are all on the fees page.
Possibly, and it costs more.
The fee is built around the week running in Phuket or remotely. Coming to you adds travel, time in transit, and time on the ground either side, and that lands in the price rather than being absorbed. The difference is not small.
If having us in your building matters, tell us early and we will price it.
The strategy goes back under the same process around six months on. The same questionnaires to the same people, the same systems data, and a straight comparison against where you started. How far the funnel improved, what shipped, how much the metrics moved, and what unlocks the next phase of growth.
Shorter than the workshop, usually two and a half days, and it runs remotely as a matter of course, because by then your team shares the strategy and its language. Building that alignment in the first place is the harder job, which is why we recommend the first week in person.
No. Not during your engagement and not for six months after it. The rule, and what it means in practice, is set out in full on the fees page.
Start with a no cost preliminary analysis.