How To Hire A Strategy Advisor: 6 Traits To Look For (& What To Avoid) When Building A Great Business Strategy

Too many strategy consultants don't sell strategy—they sell recycled slide decks and million-dollar case teams.

In How To Hire A Strategy Advisor, Category Pirates—Eddie Yoon, Christopher Lochhead, and Katrina Kirsch—pull back the curtain on the broken business of strategy consulting.

This mini-book exposes how industry insiders at firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Bain repurpose insights from one client and sell them to the next, often masking average ideas as elite advice.

Don't blindly trust the “best practices” of big-name firms. Instead, you'll see what makes a great strategist: an ability to think independently, simplify the complex, and spot the data that others overlook. Drawing from real-world examples—like a breakthrough growth strategy for Swingline staplers, the misuse of financial benchmarks, and lessons from legendary strategist Roger Martin—this guide gives you a clear lens for evaluating who actually belongs at your strategy table.

Whether you’re hiring an advisor or trying to be one, this is your BS detector.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• Why most “strategy” consultants sell Monkey See, Monkey Do work based on recycled competitive insights.
• How real business strategy is about identifying weird data that predicts the future—not benchmarking the past.
• The six traits of great strategy advisors (including why you should beware the industry “expert”).
• How category design, a simple POV, and deep customer insight drove outsized results in Swingline’s office product business.
• What to ask when vetting a strategy consultant—and how to tell if they’ve actually delivered real outcomes.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with valuable insights, this “mini-book” will help you separate the signal from the noise when it comes to hiring the right people to help design your business future.