Advisory & Strategy

You have been through this before. A consulting firm sends a senior partner for the pitch, then staffs the engagement with analysts who graduated last spring. Three months later you have a 90-page strategy deck with a maturity matrix, a roadmap nobody follows, and an invoice that makes the CFO question the entire initiative.

We do not sell strategy decks. We sell clarity — and it starts with who shows up.

Senior-led means something specific

At Clarivant, the person who scopes the engagement is the person who delivers it. No handoff to a delivery team. No "senior oversight" that means a 30-minute weekly check-in. The founder has 15+ years across P&G, eBay, and Adevinta — supply chain at Walmart, marketing analytics across five emerging markets, M&A due diligence for two multi-billion-dollar acquisitions. That experience is in the room from the first working session.

This matters because advisory work fails at the translation layer. A junior consultant can document your current state. They cannot look at your Oracle EBS setup, your team's skill gaps, and your board's timeline and tell you which of the twelve possible next steps actually makes sense for your specific situation.

What advisory engagements produce

The format depends on what you need. Common patterns:

Data Strategy Roadmaps — a prioritized, sequenced plan for your data and analytics investments. Not a wish list. Each initiative has a defined scope, estimated effort, dependencies, and the business metric it moves. For a 100+ location restaurant franchise, the advisory phase mapped the path from "no warehouse" to "governed analytics platform with AI-ready architecture" — an engagement we detail in Unified Data Foundations. The advisory contribution was sequencing: which of the twelve possible initiatives should come first given the team's SQL proficiency, Oracle EBS constraints, and a board that wanted results within a quarter? The roadmap prioritized the operational KPIs that franchise operators checked daily over the financial consolidation that corporate wanted but could wait 60 days.

KPI Frameworks — defining the 15-25 metrics that actually matter for your business, how they are calculated, who owns each one, and where they are surfaced. Most companies track too many metrics and act on too few. The framework cuts the noise.

Pilot Design — when you want to test an initiative (AI, new BI tool, data governance program) before committing full budget. We design the pilot scope, success criteria, and kill conditions so you get a clear yes/no in 6-8 weeks, not a "more research needed" at month four.

Executive Workshops — half-day or full-day sessions with your leadership team. We present findings, facilitate alignment on priorities, and walk out with decisions made — not "follow-up items."

M&A and due diligence

A less obvious advisory use case: data-driven due diligence. At eBay, that meant building the analytics backbone for two multi-market acquisitions — combining Semrush, SimilarWeb, INEGI, Google Trends, GA, and internal data into pitch decks and negotiation materials that powered buyer decisions. At P&G, it meant convincing Walmart buyers to pilot a counterintuitive replenishment strategy by presenting custom algorithm results with a commitment specific enough to close: "If this does not work, we will rent a U-Haul and buy back the inventory ourselves."

Advisory is not about having the answer. It is about having enough experience to know which question to ask first.

What this is not

We do not do staff augmentation. If you need an extra analyst for six months, we are not the right fit. We also do not do vendor selection beauty pageants — if you already know you need Snowflake or Databricks, we can validate or challenge that choice in a focused session, not a three-month evaluation.

Is advisory the right starting point for you?

Are you spending more time debating which analytics initiatives to fund than actually building them? Has your company invested in data tools but struggled to connect them to business outcomes? When your board asks "what is our data strategy," can you answer in two sentences?