Notes from a first conversation in 2024. Anonymised.
A founder got on a call with me in May 2024. He was building two companies at once: a cold-chain logistics platform serving B2B and B2C customers, and a wellness tea brand built on his own blends. Thirty minutes, booked as a strategy chat.
Two days later he sent both decks and a brief. Pitch deck, financial model, valuation, fundraising across equity, debt and government schemes, market research, business plan, go-to-market, coaching, tech builds, digital marketing, collateral, accounting, compliance.
A reasonable brief. Both businesses would need most of that eventually, and it's how advisory work gets sold: by deliverable.
A week later a proposal went back in the same format. It went no further. Looking at the thread two years on, the outcome had very little to do with either person. It was built into the way briefs and proposals pass between founders and advisors.
Why a founder sends a list like this
Running two companies at once means every week has a dozen things that feel urgent. Fundraising needs a deck. The deck needs a model. The model needs numbers from a go-to-market plan that doesn't exist yet. Each item leans on another, and from the inside it's hard to see where the chain starts.
That confusion is usually why a founder reaches out to an advisor in the first place. The list is the overwhelm, written down. Underneath it sits a simpler ask: help me work out where to start.
One: the market sells deliverables, so briefs arrive as deliverables
Advisory firms list their services as deck, model, valuation, GTM plan. A founder looking for help writes his brief in that vocabulary.
The brief is accurate. It carries no ranking because nothing in the format asks for one. For an overwhelmed founder, that means even more to choose from.
Two: proposals mirror the brief
The standard proposal answers the brief line by line and opens with a vision. This one did exactly that.
For the tea brand, a three-year target of ₹10 crore in annual sales and 500+ retail outlets, built on premium positioning, e-commerce, high-end retail and a subscription. For the logistics platform, 30 to 40 new contracts and 15% monthly revenue growth within 12 months. Strategy from me, execution by his team, hourly or on a retainer.
The format asks for ambition on page one, before anyone has shared current revenue, outlet counts or pipeline. So the targets had no baseline under them, the budget read "to be determined," and the plan covered four marketing levers for each company.
The confusion went back to the founder in a cleaner layout, at the same length.
Three: a plan for everything is hard to say yes to
From the founder's side, the proposal asked him to commit to strategy for two businesses at once, against targets set before the baseline was on the table.
For someone already carrying two businesses, that adds weight. It's a big decision to make off one document, and going quiet is the most common answer to it. A fair one.
The missing step
Between the brief and the proposal sits a step the standard process doesn't have: ranking. Which of these two businesses has to move in the next 90 days, and what's in its way?
That's the help a founder in this position actually came for: someone to sit with the confusion long enough to pick a first move. The answer has to come from the founder and the advisor together, before anyone writes a target or prices anything.
What changed
That step is now where every engagement of mine starts. The One Fix is a fixed-fee look at one business: find the bottleneck, name it in language the founder can repeat to the team without it landing as an accusation, then price the fix. The second business keeps running and gets its turn next.
A brief that lists everything is a normal place to start. What it needs next is a ranking, built together, before anyone prices anything.