The Founder's Strategy Playbook
Elite strategy method, translated for a company that does not have a strategy department. The 4D arc, the disciplines beneath it, and the working templates — written so a ten-person company can run them without a consultant in the room.
A ten-person company can run this method better than a Fortune 500, because nothing gets lost in translation between the strategy floor and the people doing the work.
Most strategy books are written for people who already have a strategy function. They assume an analyst to build the model, a planning cycle to slot into, and a budget for the consulting engagement that follows. Founders have none of those, which is why the advice reads as true and useless simultaneously.
This one is written the other way round: the method first, the artefact you produce at each step, and the specific way it breaks when a company of thirty people tries it. The frameworks are attributed to the people who published them, because pretending otherwise is both dishonest and a missed opportunity to point at better sources.
If the book works, a reader finishes it with a one-page strategy, a ninety-day roadmap and a list of things they have stopped doing — and no need to hire anyone.
What is inside
Part I — Diagnose
Finding the binding constraint. Driver trees, unit economics, cohort reading, and how to tell a symptom from a cause when everyone in the room is confident.
Part II — Decide
Generating real options, scoring on expected value, and running the decision session that turns analysis into commitment. Including the choices that subtract.
Part III — Design
The one-page strategy, the 90-day roadmap, capacity honesty, and kill criteria written while judgment is still cheap.
Part IV — Drive
The operating cadence, the KPI set with counterweights, and how to notice drift before it becomes a missed quarter.
About the book
When is it available?
Publication is in progress. Until it is live, the three free tools on this site are drawn directly from the book's working templates and are usable today with no email required.
Do I still need a consultant after reading it?
Ideally not, and that is a serious answer rather than false modesty. The method is not secret and the templates are in the book. What an outside advisor adds is pattern recognition across many companies, the capacity to run the analysis while you run the business, and the willingness to say the unwelcome thing to a founder who signs the invoice. If none of those are what you need, the book is the cheaper purchase.
Who is it for?
Founders, CEOs and operating leaders at companies small enough that the person setting strategy also executes it. It assumes commercial literacy and no consulting background.
Or skip ahead.
Thirty minutes of structured problem framing on your actual situation, free.
Three reasons to skip it.
You already run this method. If your leadership team can each state the binding constraint and give the same answer, and you have a kill list with quantified freed capacity, the book will tell you things you know.
You want tactics. There is nothing here about ad copy, hiring funnels or sales scripts. It is about which choices to make and which to refuse, which is upstream of all of those and considerably less immediately actionable.
You want a framework collection. The frameworks are attributed to the people who published them and used sparingly. If the appeal is a catalogue of models, the primary sources are better and are named throughout.