Introducing: STARS Advisory

I’m standing up a new business consulting venture expanding beyond analyst relations support. It’s true that I love AR, and have clearly focused on it in the past five years. But I find that these days, the market is saturated with AR talent - some of which jumped on the bandwagon in late 2021 when demand for AR talent was at the highest ever with very low supply.?

So diversification is where it’s at. I observe that a lot of organizations and early-stage businesses don’t even have AR on their radar. In this market economy, AR is a high-price luxury to many executives.?

What they do have on the map are pretty fundamental business problems around technology, funding, growth, marketing, go-to-market, and strategy. All things I’ve been involved with intimately for the past 30 years.?

One popular BHAG (Big Hairy Aggressive Goal) lurking out there is category creation. Which always starts with the fundamental question: should we even do it or not. Answering that question alone can either make or break a business.?

A mass of other nagging problems out there revolve around marketing. No scoop there. Either an early-stage company wondering how to effectively market without significant resources, or the opposite: why is my super expensive marketing team not producing as expected and where’s all this marketing budget going? In either case, an outside-in view can really make a significant difference.?

Questions around growth are abundant as always. Interestingly enough, it always starts with “how/where can we grow” vs. “should we even seek growth and if so how much and when” - which IMHO is just as important a question. Because the pursuit of growth, and not the growth itself, can sometimes tank a business.?

Another common growth question is: how can we capture more market share or (related) how can we penetrate new markets? This is a goal often seen with European (or Asian) companies striving to get a foothold in the US market. The opposite happens more rarely in my experience. It all comes down to strategy really.?

Which is where the rubber meets the road. For one thing, few businesses really have a “strategy” in the formal sense of the term. To me, "formal" means the way Richard Rumelt defines it in Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Many businesses think they have a strategy when in fact they have lofty goals, “mission statements”, or “vision”. The rest don’t have a strategy at all. Which, like undetected cancer, is typically fatal.?

Strategy sometimes has a bad rap in the industry because of what I call the “McKinsey effect”. When most business people think about “strategy consultants”, they think about some expensive suits from Ivy league schools (often with no real street or business experience) who charge a fortune, take a year, and come out with a fancy thick leather bound “report” on what’s wrong with the company and what might be done about it - and then ride off into the sunset.?

Lots of preaching; very little action, zero execution support. To me that’s not strategy consulting. That’s theoretical whiteboarding. Super cool in school or at conferences. Super useless in the real business world.?

Strategy consulting is about driving the client to ask the right questions to get to the right understanding and analysis. Strategy consulting is about creating the “aha moments”. But once you have those, and a plan of action to follow, unless you have the execution chops, you’re up shit creek. Strategy needs a rudder and a paddle.?

Lastly, I know when a lot of people see STARS Advisory - The “no BS” Business Strategy Consultancy, they’re going to rightfully ask what does “no BS” mean?? Here’s my interpretation:

• Simple and flexible pricing models
• Honest, no-nonsense initial assessments
• Execution, execution, execution
• Fractional and traditional delivery models?
• Crawl, walk, run methodology
• Risk-mitigating outcome-aligned milestones
• Access to a large network of skills and competencies
• Clear communications and consensus building

Did I miss anything??