Northbeam Studio came to us with a problem that looked like a strategy problem but was actually an operating problem. They had a clear sense of where they wanted to go — a boutique creative agency expanding into brand strategy for mid-market consumer brands. What they didn't have was a path from their current state to that one, and three co-founders who agreed on how to find it.
Their shared priority list, the one they'd built in their last offsite, had fifty-one items. Every item was legitimate. Every item had a co-founder who felt strongly about it. The list had been sitting in a Notion doc for four months and had not been touched since the day it was created.
The Session
We started with a constraint: pick the two moves that, if they worked, would make the most difference to where you want to be in eighteen months. Not ten. Not five. Two. The co-founders pushed back initially — they'd been living with the list long enough that every item felt load-bearing. That feeling is almost always wrong.
After ninety minutes, the list had two items on it. The first was a positioning shift: stop calling themselves a creative studio and start presenting as a strategic creative partner, with pricing to match. The second was a single client target — one specific segment of mid-market consumer brands where they had two existing case studies and a clear referral path.
“The fifty-one-item list wasn't a strategy. It was a record of everything they'd been afraid to say no to.”
Three Months Later
The positioning shift went live in week two — a rewritten website homepage and a repriced service menu. Within six weeks, their average deal size had increased by 40%. The client target work took longer, but by month three they had two qualified conversations in the segment they'd identified and a third on referral.
The other forty-nine items didn't disappear. They went into a second document — the 'not now' list — with a quarterly review date attached. Two of them came off that list at the 90-day check-in. The rest are still waiting, and that's working exactly as intended.