There's no business like your business.

We help you grow it that way.

Who We Are

A NEW KIND OF STRATEGY SHOP

When three true professionals with uniquely complementary talents decided to join forces after over thirty years of pursuing separate but related paths, sparks flew. A new and different kind of hybrid strategy studio was born.

Introducing Stratechia.

Matthew May

FOUNDING PARTNER

Deirdre Borrego

FOUNDING PARTNER

John Humphrey

FOUNDING PARTNER

Purpose

We exist to help our clients profitably grow to market leadership by catalyzing and coaching the internal creativity and capabilities that often lie dormant, hidden, or even locked away.

Focus

We aim our blend of strategic and creative services toward our passion: technology-oriented businesses, including the automotive, advertising, biologic, digital, financial, medical, and mobile technology spaces.

Differentiation

Unlike other firms, we believe that the best solutions reside inside your company, not in generic advice or analysis from outsiders. There’s no business like your business, so we fit our approach to your culture, using our proprietary Framestorm™ method to channel performance.

Capabilities

Gone are the halcyon days of in-depth analysis and three-year plans. The pace of change today renders traditional approaches to strategy and innovation irrelevant. Our nearly century of combined experience in traditional advisory spaces gives rise to a unique hybrid blend of strategic, creative, and information expertise.

Our clients benefit from the best of several worlds.

Principles

elegance rules
maximum effect with minimum means
choices, not plans
strategy is about making choices, especially what not to do
frame first
difficult challenges demand intelligent framing
test everything
every great idea is but a hypothesis when first conceived

Strategy is an integrated cascade of choices that uniquely positions a player in its market to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

ROGER MARTIN

coauthor, Playing to Win

What We Offer

SOLUTIONS FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Stratechia helps your team work from the inside out to balance and blend the right dose of existing, emerging and experimental approaches to create the best paths forward. All of our services share a common element:

Unique engagements custom-tailored to fit your culture and challenge.

Strategy

Strategy is about making winning choices. We use the Playing to Win strategic framework to help you develop unique answers to the two key questions at the heart of any winning strategy: where to play and how to win. We then help you test your assumptions, increasing your odds of success.

Alignment

Getting a winning strategy to cascade throughout the entire organization is no easy feat. Successful deployment rests on the ability to achieve cross-company alignment. We believe the best mechanism for doing that is Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), made popular by Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, and adopted by the likes of Google and Amazon.

Journeys

In today’s hypercompetitive world, business success is increasingly dependent on your ability to deliver a unique and compelling customer experience. We help you map the customer’s journey through all of their interactions with your company, a critical step in understanding how to choreograph experiences and build enduring relationships.

Experiments

Profitable growth requires a continuously flowing innovation pipeline, which in turn demands an ethos of lab-like curiosity supported by a simple, fast and frugal experimentation method. We use the “lean” approach to rapid prototyping and testing new ideas and business models.

Operations

After nearly a decade of working with Toyota, we have mastered the authentic operating principles behind the vaunted Toyota Production System. Our approach centers on making more room for what truly matters by eliminating what doesn’t. It’s a lean and subtractive approach to kaizen — continuously improving and simplifying even your most complicated workflows.

Go-to-Market

Winning ideas remain just that until they are brought to market. Whether you’re launching a new product, a new business, or entering a new market, a solid go-to-market strategy can be the difference between winning and losing. We work closely and confidentially with you to ensure that your business concepts take flight.

Training

We offer a variety of training courses to build competitive capability inside your organization. While our engagements often have training built in, you may wish to offer standalone skills training in our various frameworks:

Playing to Win
Customer Journey Mapping
Design Thinking
Lean Thinking

Events

Break is the important part of breakthrough. When a well-worn pattern is broken, creativity emerges. It is the broken pattern that makes us sit up, take notice, and pay attention. We think differently, more freely, more resourcefully, when a break occurs.

Enter Stratechia events. Whatever the format — summits, sprints, hackathons, offsites — we design purposeful breaks that produce the kind of creative breakthroughs that lead to growth.

Insights

Inspiration for elegant solutions doesn’t come from locked-room brainstorming sessions. It comes from simply getting out more.

While we appreciate arms-length quantitative research, we know that unmet customer needs often lie beneath the surface. There is no substitute for deep customer empathy and understanding, so we employ the best discovery techniques to reveal those insights, guiding your teams through up-close field observation and engaging interviews with real people.