Focus Designs · Advisory
Marketing Consultant Brisbane
Settle the decisions before you fund the delivery.
Some problems cannot be solved by better execution, because the business has not yet chosen who it is for or what it is claiming. Advisory work exists for that stage: a small number of decisions, made with the people who can authorise them, written down clearly enough to brief anyone.
Before delivery
Four questions that decide everything downstream
Clear answers give channel decisions a useful foundation and help explain the trade-offs.
Which customer do we serve first?
Most businesses can name five viable audiences and fund one properly. Choosing means accepting that some current revenue is not the future focus, which is uncomfortable and is exactly why it stays undecided for years.
What position are we claiming?
A position is only real if a competitor could credibly claim the opposite. 'Quality and service' fails that test. The useful version names a trade-off you are willing to make and defend in front of a customer.
What are we deliberately not doing?
A plan without exclusions is a wish list. Naming what will not be resourced this year protects the things that will be, and gives your team permission to decline the request that arrives in March.
What has to be true for this to work?
Every plan rests on beliefs about demand, pricing tolerance and capacity. Writing them down converts them from invisible risks into things you can check cheaply before committing.
Validation
Assumptions worth checking first
Each of these is cheap to test and expensive to be wrong about.
- Demand exists at the volume assumed
- Search demand, enquiry history, distributor or referral feedback, and what the sales team is already being asked for.
- Buyers will pay the intended price
- Recent won and lost quotes, discount patterns, and where price objections cluster by segment.
- The difference is visible to a buyer
- Ask five recent customers why they chose you, in their words, and compare it with what the website claims.
- Delivery can absorb the growth
- Current lead times, quote turnaround, and the point at which more enquiries would make service worse rather than better.
- Someone can own the work
- Named person, real hours per week, and what comes off their plate to make room.
The deliverable
What the decision brief contains
Advisory work produces a document, not an impression. It is short, specific and written to be handed to whoever implements it.
- 01
The decision, stated plainly
One paragraph naming the audience, the position and the priority order, written so it can be read aloud in a leadership meeting without interpretation.
- 02
The reasoning and what was rejected
The alternatives considered and why they were set aside, so the choice survives a change of personnel and does not get relitigated every quarter.
- 03
Assumptions and how to test them
Each material assumption with the cheapest honest way to check it, and what result would justify changing course.
- 04
A sequenced first ninety days
What happens first, what it depends on, and what must be finished before the next item starts.
- 05
Who can implement it
An honest read on which parts an internal person can carry, which need specialist hands, and what to look for when appointing either.
If the brief concludes that the work needs a standing team rather than a project, that is said plainly, and outsourced marketing is one of the options discussed.
How it runs
A facilitated sequence, not a report drop
Sessions are held in person in Brisbane where that is practical, and by call otherwise.
- 01
Preparation
We read what already exists — enquiry records, quotes won and lost, current site and campaign material — and come with questions rather than a template.
- 02
Working session
A facilitated session with the decision-makers. The purpose is to surface disagreement early and force the trade-offs into the open while everyone is present.
- 03
Drafting
The decisions are written up as a brief, including the parts that were left unresolved and why.
- 04
Review and hand over
A second conversation to challenge the draft, then a final version that belongs to you and can be handed to any supplier.
Context
Where this kind of advice lands well
Positioning conversations tend to be hardest where the product is technical and the buyer is cautious — long consideration periods, several people involved in approving a purchase, and a sales team carrying knowledge that has never been written down. That describes a lot of industrial and B2B businesses.
They also land well with startups and SMEs at the point where a broad early offer has to narrow, and with medical and healthcare practices where what may be claimed publicly is genuinely constrained and the positioning has to work within that.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What people ask before booking advisory work.
Contact
Bring us the decision you are stuck on
Describe the choice in front of you and who inside the business has a view on it. We will tell you whether a facilitated session would help and what we would want to read beforehand.
Focus Designs
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia