Business Strategy Consultant

Provide strategic business advice using frameworks like SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces, and Blue Ocean Strategy.

The Prompt

Act as a senior business strategy consultant with experience in corporate strategy, market analysis, and organizational transformation. Your approach should:

1. Analyze business challenges using proven frameworks
2. Identify competitive advantages and market opportunities
3. Develop actionable strategic recommendations
4. Consider financial implications and ROI
5. Address implementation challenges and change management

For strategic analysis, include:
- **Situation Assessment**: Current state analysis using relevant frameworks
- **Market Analysis**: Competition, trends, and opportunities
- **Strategic Options**: Multiple pathways with pros/cons
- **Recommended Strategy**: Detailed action plan with milestones
- **Risk Assessment**: Potential challenges and mitigation strategies
- **Success Metrics**: KPIs to measure strategy effectiveness

Provide insights that are both theoretically sound and practically implementable.

When This Prompt Is Most Useful

Use this prompt when you need a structured business decision memo, not a motivational strategy brainstorm. It works best when there is a real decision to make: enter a market, change pricing, prioritize a product bet, fix churn, choose a channel, or decide what not to do.

The prompt is strongest when you provide constraints. A strategy answer without numbers, customer segment, current traction, and tradeoffs will usually sound impressive but stay vague.

Inputs to Prepare

Bring the facts a consultant would ask for in the first meeting:

• Business model and current stage
• Target customer and current traction
• Main constraint: demand, conversion, retention, margin, team, distribution, or execution
• Options already considered
• Time horizon and decision deadline
• Metrics that define success
• Risks you already know about

Example Input

Company: B2B SaaS at $35k MRR
Problem: trial users sign up but do not invite teammates
Current activation rate: 21%
Customer: small agencies with 5-30 employees
Options: improve onboarding, add templates, narrow ICP, or change pricing
Goal: choose two experiments for the next 30 days

Useful Variations

• Diagnosis mode: Ask whether the real bottleneck is positioning, activation, pricing, retention, or distribution.
• Options mode: Ask for three paths with upside, cost, risk, and evidence needed.
• Execution mode: Ask for a 30-day plan with owner, metric, checkpoint, and kill criteria.

How to Review the Output

A useful strategy answer should:

• define the decision before recommending actions
• compare options instead of forcing one answer
• separate known facts from assumptions
• name what evidence would change the recommendation
• convert strategy into next actions and metrics

Follow-Up Prompts

• “What assumption would make this strategy fail?”
• “Rewrite this as a one-page decision memo for a founder.”
• “Give me the cheapest experiment that would validate or reject this direction.”

Example Workflow

A practical strategy session with this prompt can run in three passes. First, ask for diagnosis only: what is the real constraint and what evidence supports that diagnosis? Second, ask for options: what are the plausible moves and what would each cost? Third, ask for execution: what should happen in the next 30 days, who owns it, and what metric decides whether to continue.

This matters because strategy prompts often jump straight to recommendations. The better workflow forces the model to show its reasoning before it recommends a plan. That gives you something closer to a working decision memo instead of a list of generic growth ideas.

When Not to Use It

Do not use this prompt when you only need a slogan, a one-line idea, or a generic SWOT table. It is more useful when there is a concrete business decision and enough context to compare tradeoffs. If the model asks for missing data, that is usually a good sign: the strategy problem may not be clear enough yet.