Service

Consulting & Roadmaps

Senior strategy and quarterly roadmaps with measurable KPIs — without the slide-deck theatre.

Consultant presenting a strategy roadmap on a whiteboard to a small business team — consulting and roadmaps by NTL of NYC.
Senior strategy with clear KPIs and a roadmap.
2007In business since
100sof small businesses ranked
6Global offices, one accountable team
Why this matters

The problem we solve

Most strategy consulting we see ends with a slide deck that sits unopened on the founder\'s desktop. The recommendations are abstract, the timelines are vague, the owners are "the team," and three months later nothing has actually shipped. The consultant is paid, the founder feels productive for a week, and the business operates exactly as it did before the engagement started.

Our consulting work is built around the opposite premise: the deliverable is execution, not theatre. We do the strategic thinking — positioning, ideal customer profile, channel mix, growth model — and then we package it into a quarterly roadmap with specific deliverables, specific owners, specific dates, and specific KPIs. Either it moves the business or we were wrong, and both are easy to see at the next quarterly review.

We work with founders, marketing leads, and operations leads who already know their business well enough to execute — they just need a senior outside perspective on what to actually execute. We do not pretend to know your industry better than you do; we pretend to have seen more digital growth playbooks across more verticals than you have, and we adapt those to what you know about your specific business.

Quick read

Want a free audit of where your business stands right now?

30-minute call. We'll look at your site, your search visibility, and tell you the 2-3 highest-leverage moves.

How we work

Our approach

A repeatable playbook refined across hundreds of small-business engagements since 2007.

  1. 1

    Discovery — current state, friction, and goals

    Two-week deep dive into where the business is today: revenue, channel mix, lead flow, conversion rates, customer LTV, sales process, team capacity. Plus where you want to be in 12 months: revenue, customer count, market position, team structure. Output: a written diagnostic that captures both, with specific gaps identified — and a short list of misaligned beliefs about your own business that almost every engagement surfaces.

  2. 2

    Positioning workshop — who you serve and why

    Half-day workshop with founders and key leadership. We map the real ideal customer profile (not the aspirational one), the competitor landscape (named, not abstract), and the specific positioning gap your business occupies — or could occupy with adjustment. Output: a positioning brief, an ideal-customer document, and a refusal list (what you choose not to do, which is often more strategy-defining than what you do).

  3. 3

    Channel mix + growth model

    Map the realistic 12-month growth model. Which channels can sustain growth at your current customer LTV? Which ones break math (too expensive per customer for the LTV)? Which ones compound (SEO, email, brand, referral) vs which ones tax you forever (paid ads, third-party platforms). Output: a recommended channel mix with hypothesized contribution from each, plus the underlying assumptions that we will track to know whether the model is holding up.

  4. 4

    Quarterly roadmap — specific deliverables, owners, dates, KPIs

    Translate the strategy into a quarterly roadmap. Each item: what gets built, who owns it (named individual, not "the team"), the date it ships by, and the KPI that proves it worked. We aim for 5-10 high-leverage items per quarter, not a 40-item wishlist that nobody can execute. Smaller, sharper roadmaps actually ship.

  5. 5

    Quarterly review — what shipped, what worked, what is next

    End of each quarter: a 90-minute review meeting. Walk through what shipped vs what slipped (and why), what the KPIs say about the underlying model, what to keep, what to kill, what to add. Refresh the next quarter's roadmap. This cadence is the difference between strategy that compounds and strategy that goes stale.

Scope

What's included

Every engagement covers the work below — adjusted to where your business actually is.

  • ✓Discovery diagnostic (current state, gaps, misaligned beliefs)
  • ✓Positioning workshop (half-day with founders + leadership)
  • ✓Ideal customer profile document
  • ✓Competitive landscape map (named competitors, named differentiators)
  • ✓Refusal list — what your business chooses not to do
  • ✓12-month channel mix recommendation with contribution hypotheses
  • ✓Quarterly roadmap with 5-10 specific deliverables, owners, dates, and KPIs
  • ✓Monthly check-ins (45 minutes) during the quarter to keep execution on track
  • ✓Quarterly review meetings (90 minutes) at end of each quarter
  • ✓Refreshed quarterly roadmap each cycle based on what shipped and what the KPIs show
  • ✓Senior team access (founders + senior strategists, not just account managers)
  • ✓Access to our full implementation team for execution if needed
Industries

Built for businesses like yours

We tailor every engagement to the specifics of your vertical — same playbook, different application.

🏠
Real Estate
From solo agents to multi-office brokerages — websites, local SEO, and lead-flow tooling built for how real estate actually closes deals.
See the playbook →
🚚
Moving Companies
Our deepest specialization — over a decade of work with carriers, brokers, and household-goods movers across the U.S.
See the playbook →
🍽️
Restaurants & Hospitality
Websites that fill tables — menu SEO, reservation integrations, and review-driven local rankings for restaurants, cafés, bars, and hotels.
See the playbook →
🧹
Cleaning Services
Local-SEO-first websites for residential and commercial cleaners — instant-quote forms, service-area pages, and the lead routing that converts.
See the playbook →
🏢
Your industry not listed?
Our cross-vertical capabilities still apply. Tell us about your business — if we're not the right fit, we'll say so.
All industries →
FAQ

Common questions

Is this consulting or execution?
Consulting — but with the option to engage our team for execution on specific roadmap items. Some clients use us purely for strategy and execute everything in-house. Others let us handle execution on the digital marketing items where they do not have in-house capacity. Both work. The pricing and engagement model are different.
How long are typical engagements?
Minimum 6 months (two quarterly cycles) for the work to actually show meaningful results. Most engagements run 12-24 months. Longer than that, the value diminishes — at some point your team has absorbed enough of the strategic perspective that ongoing outside consulting is just overhead. We are honest about that and tell clients when to graduate.
What industries do you consult in?
We have deep specialization in moving, real estate, restaurants and hospitality, cleaning services, and home-service trades. We have working knowledge in e-commerce, professional services, fitness and wellness, and healthcare-adjacent services (med spas, dental). We do not consult in industries where we have not done implementation work — we tell prospects this directly when their vertical is outside our range.
Founder-level engagement or CMO-level?
Both, depending on company stage. For businesses under $2M revenue without a CMO, the founder is usually the right counterpart — we are effectively a part-time outside CMO. For businesses with an internal marketing lead, we engage at the strategic-advisor level — providing the senior outside perspective the internal lead does not have, without competing with them. We are clear about the relationship structure up front.
How is consulting priced?
Monthly retainer based on scope and engagement depth. Typical range: $4,500-$12,000/month depending on number of stakeholders, breadth of strategy, and whether implementation support is bundled. We quote fixed monthly after the discovery diagnostic. No hourly billing — that punishes efficient work and rewards slow work.
What if the strategy is not working at the 6-month mark?
Then we adjust — that is the entire point of quarterly reviews. The strategy is a hypothesis; the KPIs tell us whether the hypothesis is holding. When something is not working, we ask why honestly, refresh the model, and revise the roadmap. We are not attached to being right; we are attached to the business moving forward. If our advice is consistently wrong, the right call is to stop the engagement — and we will tell you so directly rather than burn months of your money.

Ready to see what consulting could do for your business?

Free 30-minute consultation. We'll look at where you are, tell you straight if we're the right team, and give you a candid read on what would actually move the needle.