There's a particular kind of consulting engagement that everyone has experienced and no one enjoys. You bring in a team. They spend eight weeks interviewing your people, reading your docs, and building a model. They deliver a 120-page deck with a SWOT analysis, three scenarios, and a recommendation buried on slide 87 that says, essentially, "it depends."
The bill arrives. It's six figures. The deck sits in a shared drive. Nothing changes.
We started EspressoShot because we believe strategy consulting is broken at the delivery layer, not at the thinking layer. The analytical work that good consultants do is genuinely valuable. The way they package and deliver it makes that value almost impossible to act on.
A 120-page deck is not strategy. It's a hedge against being wrong.
The espresso principle
Espresso isn't just smaller coffee. It's a fundamentally different extraction process. You take the same raw material, the same beans, the same water, and apply pressure to pull out only what matters. The result is concentrated, not diluted. More intense, not less useful.
That's our model for consulting. Same rigor. Same depth of analysis. But the output is a few pages, not a few hundred. The recommendation is on page one, not page 87. And it's written in sentences, not bullet points, because if you can't explain a strategy in plain English, you haven't actually figured it out yet.
What we actually do differently
This doesn't mean we do less work. If anything, concentration requires more clarity, more precision, more willingness to commit to a point of view. It's harder to write a two-page recommendation than a fifty-page one. The fifty-page version lets you hide.
Who this is for
We work with founders and senior operators, people who are time-poor, context-rich, and allergic to busywork. They don't need a consulting team to explain their business to them. They need a sharp outside perspective that names the thing they've been circling but haven't quite articulated.
The work usually starts with a single question: what's the one decision you're avoiding? Not the ten decisions on your roadmap. The one that, if you got it right, would make the other nine obvious.
If you can't explain a strategy in plain English, you haven't actually figured it out yet.
Plain English, sharp edges
Our deliverables read like essays, not slide decks. That's deliberate. Slides encourage hedging. They let you put a bullet point that says "consider optimizing the customer acquisition funnel" and never have to explain what that actually means or who should do it.
Prose forces accountability. You have to write a sentence with a subject and a verb. "The sales team should stop discounting enterprise deals by more than 15% because the current average discount of 32% is destroying unit economics and training buyers to wait." That's a strategy. It has a who, a what, and a why. It can be debated, tested, and, most importantly, acted on.
Concentrated, not small
People sometimes mistake our approach for lightweight. It's the opposite. Concentration is the result of doing the hard analytical work and then having the discipline, and the courage, to boil it down to what actually matters. To commit to a recommendation rather than presenting options. To say "do this" rather than "here are three scenarios."
Every engagement we run follows the same principle: compound, don't dilute. Find the decision that compounds. Ignore the ones that don't. Write it in language that a smart person can read once and understand.
Strategy, concentrated. That's what we do.
If your current strategy deck is collecting dust in a shared drive, we should talk. Reach out at hello@espressoshot.consulting.