🤝Work with Mike
Your Strategy Is One Prompt Away From Being Replaced
If your strategic deliverables can be summarized in an AI prompt, you’re holding a melting ice cube.
In the next 24 months, the market is going to aggressively sort out the strategists whose work is a prompt from the strategists whose work is a methodology.
Most traditional consulting engagements are designed to produce slide decks. But a 60-slide narrative is now exactly one prompt away from being generated by a junior staffer with an LLM. That is the “Strategy Squeeze”—and almost every corporate innovation team is feeling it right now.
The work that survives this squeeze isn’t about what your team knows. It is about what your team produces.
The 14-Week Slide: Billed vs. Opportunity Cost
When you hire a traditional firm for, say, a $200K strategy project, the number on the invoice isn’t your real cost.
Your real cost is the cost of drag—the $14K-per-week opportunity cost paid in the critical decisions your company cannot make while your team waits for a deck to be formatted.
At Practical JTBD, I’ve built an interactive calculator (actually, I’ve built orders of magnitude more) that plots this exact curve. If a falsifiable methodology can find the economic floor of your problem in two hours of operator time, why are you waiting fourteen weeks to act?
The Four Artifacts That Survive the Prompt
I don’t deliver narrative slide decks. My engagements produce four falsifiable strategic assets that your board, your CFO, or your auditors can stress-test and re-run themselves on Monday morning:
The Physics Gap Report: I calculate the current cost of delivering your customer’s desired outcome and divide it by the “physics-floor cost” (the raw compute, energy, or material limits). If your gap is close to 1.0x, the math kills the initiative immediately—saving you millions in wasted R&D.
The Inversion Plan: I evaluate your highest-friction process steps across four structural levers—Labor, CapEx, Demand, and Network. This isn’t generic advice; it’s a domain-specific moat blueprint scored on a rigorous 1-to-5 feasibility rubric.
The Adversarial Tribunal: We run your strategy through a deterministic, 5-layer, 13-agent simulation. Five AI Prosecutors file charges, five Defenders protect the thesis using your pinned evidence, and an automated Judge rules. If it doesn’t score above 80, we rewrite it before a line of code is touched.
The Kill Threshold Certificate: A signed, pre-flight contract with a single, clear number. “If we don’t hit metric X by Week 3, we kill the project.” This turns a sprawling, open-ended experiment into a highly controlled 3-week business decision.
The 12-Stage Assembly Line
Every strategic problem—whether in Enterprise SaaS, Physical Manufacturing, or Healthcare—goes through the same 12-stage assembly line. The inputs change, but the rigorous first-principles engine remains exactly the same.
On my main site, I’ve mapped out the entire interactive grid. You can click through every single phase—from Socratic Interrogation and Friction Scoring to the final Concierge Pilot Playbook—to see exactly how the gears turn.
👉 Explore the Interactive 12-Stage Grid
My Half-Rate Challenge
If you can show me an audited “physics gap” in your company’s last strategic recommendation, I will work with you for half of my normal advisory rate.
If you can’t, we should talk.
Every month, I build a custom Physics Gap Report completely free of charge for the first 10 VP-level decision-makers facing a confounding product or market direction.
If you have a critical decision that needs to be made in the next 90 days, don’t wait 14 weeks for a PowerPoint deck. Run it through the first-principles engine now.