Consultants: start with your own business in StratNav

Learning a new strategy tool during a live client engagement adds another demand to work that already requires your full attention. Your own consulting practice gives you a more familiar place to start: you can learn StratNav while working out how to make your business more effective.

You know your clients, services, ambitions and frustrations. Start by capturing what you know, then use the AI to explore what you might be missing.

Why start with your own consulting practice?

Learn in a lower-pressure environment

Before introducing a tool into a client engagement, you want to understand how it works and how it fits your approach.

Working on your own business gives you room to experiment. You can try different ways of expressing a goal, explore a framework, assess an AI suggestion and change your mind without disrupting a client workshop or creating expectations around unfinished work.

Your own strategy still deserves care. But you can learn at your own pace, without the added pressure of a client deadline, a roomful of stakeholders or a deliverable someone is waiting to approve.

That experience also helps you judge where StratNav could be useful in your engagements. You can introduce it with a clearer understanding of how you intend to use it. For a broader view of how a structured approach can support consulting delivery, see Scaling Your Consulting Practice with StratNav.

Work with a business you already understand

Nobody knows more about your consulting practice than you do.

You know which engagements play to your strengths, which prospects are a good fit and which services are difficult to sell or deliver. You also know what you want from the business, whether that is growth, more predictable income, more interesting work or greater control over your time.

That familiarity makes it easier to assess what the AI suggests. Does an idea reflect your situation? Does it overlook a constraint? Is it worth exploring?

You will still have assumptions to test. Knowing your business well gives you a strong starting point; it does not mean every belief about it is supported by evidence.

Give your own business some strategic attention

Consultants spend much of their time helping other organisations think about their future. Their own business can receive whatever attention is left over.

Using your consultancy as your first StratNav project gives you a reason to address questions you may have been putting off:

• Which clients do you most want to work with?
• Which services should you develop?
• What makes your offer distinctive?
• Where are you spreading your effort too thinly?
• What needs to change for the business to support your ambitions?

The work has value beyond learning the software. It can help you make decisions about your own practice.

Start with whatever you are most confident about

You do not need to begin with a blank page and produce a complete strategy. Nor do you need to work through the frameworks in a prescribed order.

Create a project for your consultancy and capture something you already know. Any of the following could be a useful starting point.

Your vision or mission

You may already have a clear sense of the business you want to build or the contribution you want to make.

Write it down in language that means something to you. If it could describe almost any consultancy, make it more specific: who do you help, with what problems, and towards what outcome?

It does not need to be polished before you capture it.

Some goals

Perhaps you want more suitable clients, a stronger recurring revenue stream or less dependence on one large account.

Capture those ambitions. Add any detail you already know about the desired outcome, timescale or constraints.

“Grow the business” is a starting thought. “Build a recurring strategy review service for clients who need support after the initial engagement” gives you more to work with.

For help distinguishing goals from the objectives, KPIs, targets and initiatives that support them, see Goals, objectives, KPIs, targets, initiatives and actions.

Threats or opportunities using PESTLE

PESTLE helps you consider political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental changes outside your business.

Start with a change you already believe matters to your practice. What is happening, and how could it affect demand for your services, your costs or the way you deliver work?

You do not need an entry in every category. A specific, relevant observation is more useful than filling a box for completeness.

Strengths or weaknesses using SWOT

You may find it easiest to begin with what your consultancy does well and where it struggles.

Consider your expertise, relationships, reputation, delivery methods, capacity or commercial skills. Explain how each strength or weakness affects the business.

Avoid stopping at labels such as “experience”, “marketing” or “AI skills”. Those labels leave too much unexplained.

Your business model canvas

If you are clearest about whom you serve and what you offer, start there.

The customer segments in your business model canvas are a useful place to describe your target clients. You can develop these into ideal customer profiles, or ICPs.

Go beyond “SMEs” or “senior leaders”. Describe the type of organisation, the person who buys your services, the problem that prompts them to seek help and why your approach suits them.

You can fill in the other parts of the canvas as your thinking develops.

Be specific: give the AI something useful to work with

The more specific the context you capture, the better the AI can help you explore it.

Consider these two SWOT entries:

Strength: I have good AI skills.
Weakness: I have poor AI skills.

Neither explains which skills you mean, how they affect your work or why they matter.

A more useful strength might be:

I can use AI to turn my workshop notes into a structured first draft, then check it against the original notes. This helps me prepare follow-up material while retaining control over its accuracy.

A more useful weakness might be:

I can draft proposals with AI, but I cannot reliably check its market research. That matters because I need credible evidence for client recommendations.

These are illustrative examples. Your own entries should reflect your actual capabilities and experience.

For each observation, ask:

• What exactly do I mean?
• Where does this show up in my work?
• Why does it matter to the business?
• What evidence supports it?

If you have useful figures, include them. If you do not, explain the situation clearly and identify what you still need to find out. Do not invent precision.

For more on writing observations that support strategic decisions, see Are your strategic insights insightful? and Unlocking the Power of Evidence-Based Strategies.

Use the AI to explore the gaps

Once you have captured what you are confident about, you have a foundation for a more useful conversation with StratNav’s AI.

You could ask it to:

• Suggest additional goals based on the business you have described.
• Break a goal down into objectives and key performance indicators, or KPIs.
• Propose specific initiatives to achieve a goal.
• Identify assumptions or gaps that deserve further investigation.

Give it a focused task. For example:

Based on what I have captured about my consultancy, suggest three additional goals worth considering. Explain the reasoning and identify any assumptions I would need to check.

Or:

Help me turn this goal into measurable objectives and practical initiatives. Ask me about anything important that is missing.

Review the suggestions before incorporating them into your strategy. Keep what fits, amend what needs work and set aside what lacks a sound basis. See StratBot chat and actions for more on what you can ask the AI to do.

Turn an observation into action

Return to the illustrative weakness about checking AI-generated market research.

A possible response could be:

The AI can help you explore that chain. You decide whether the objective is appropriate, what target to set and whether the initiative addresses the actual weakness. For further guidance, see Maximising Strategic Impact with Key Performance Indicators and Unlocking the Power of Strategic Initiatives for Business Success.

This is where capturing a specific observation pays off: it gives you a clearer route towards a useful decision.

Keep confidence, assumptions and evidence distinct

AI can produce a plausible explanation without establishing that it is true. Your own familiarity with the business can also make an assumption feel more certain than it deserves.

Record why you believe an important statement. Is it based on client feedback, engagement results, sales records or your interpretation of a few conversations?

If the evidence is incomplete, capture the uncertainty and decide how to test it. For example, you might review recent proposals or speak with former clients before concluding that there is demand for a new service.

You do not need every answer before you start. You do need to recognise which answers remain provisional. For more on assessing information critically, see Critical Thinking in Business Strategy.

When you are stuck, ask for guidance

At any point, you can click on the AI and ask it:

Guide me.

You can also make the request more specific:

Guide me through defining my ideal client. Ask me one question at a time.

Or:

I have captured a few goals, but I am unsure what to do next. Guide me.

If you want help from a person, click Contact us or reply to any email from StratNav with a specific question. They all get read and answered.

Make your first step small

For your first session, aim to capture a few things you know, explore one gap with the AI and choose one action.

You do not need to complete every framework. You do not need to finish your consultancy’s strategy before using StratNav with a client. If an immediate client need brought you here, you can begin there.

Your own business is simply a useful place to learn—and a business that deserves the same strategic attention you give your clients.

Open StratNav, create a project for your consultancy and capture the thing you are most confident about.

See also

• What is StratNav and why should you use it?
• How to use StratNav