What we stopped telling clients.

§I Advice ages badly.

A consulting firm's most valuable product is the advice it has not yet had to retract. Which means a consulting firm's most valuable discipline is keeping a list of the advice it has retracted, and why. We keep that list. It is shorter than people expect and sharper than we would like. Three entries on it have cost clients real money, and we wrote them in decks for years before we watched enough outcomes to know they were wrong.

What follows is the current version of that list. It will be updated, publicly, whenever the next correction earns its place. None of the three items were minority views inside the firm. Each was senior orthodoxy. That is the point.

The relevant epistemic move here, for anyone running a firm like ours, is to separate the advice you believe from the advice you have watched. The gap between the two is where consultancy retracts itself. Most consultancies never publish the gap. It is the single most useful thing a firm can publish, and the single most common thing a firm omits.

The advice you remember giving is not the advice you gave. The file is the file. Keep the file. — Saoirse Hale, internal strategy note, 2024

§II Retraction one: “Launch loud.”

For four years we told founders that the first six weeks of a launch were worth a year of ordinary marketing. Buy the week. Book the tastemakers. Front-load the press. Get the brand into the culture before the category has a chance to decide what the brand is. This was, for about a decade, roughly correct. It was more wrong than right by 2023, and we kept giving the advice for almost two years after that.

What changed is that the culture stopped granting launch week its old generosity. Feeds compressed; feed algorithms compressed; the window shrank from six weeks to six days and then to six hours. A loud launch now spends most of its budget getting attention that has already been re-ranked by the algorithm before any of the repeat rate data is back. What remains, after launch week, is the brand that did not finish being built before it spent its loudest dollar.

The advice we give now is the opposite: launch quietly, with the first hundred customers selected by hand, and let the first real press happen six to nine months in, when the brand has stories it can survive being asked about. It is slower, cheaper, and structurally compounding. Most founders still flinch at it; it reads as insufficiently ambitious. It is the correct advice.

§III Retraction two: “Hire the CMO early.”

For longer than we would like, we told founders that the right hire at Series A was a category-experienced CMO who could professionalise the marketing function. Take the noise off the founder. Let the founder be the face. Let the CMO own the system. It sounded responsible and it aged badly.

What we watched happen, across about eleven founder-led companies, was predictable. The CMO arrived with a playbook from a previous brand. The playbook was not wrong for the previous brand. It was wrong for this one. The founder, now one level removed from the creative decisions, approved a dashboard that looked fine for six months and bled taste the entire time. When the founder came back in — if the founder came back in — the reset cost eight to fifteen months.

The advice we give now: do not hire a CMO at Series A. Hire a brand director who reports to the founder, and keep the editing function on the founder for at least the first three years. The category-experienced CMO, when the brand does want one, can come in at Series B, at a company that already has a codified point of view. Putting the CMO in front of the codification is what broke our earlier advice.

The CMO is a hire for an existing brand. The founder is the only hire available for a brand that still needs to become one. — Correction, filed February 2024

§IV Retraction three: “Own the category.”

We used to tell founders that the goal was to define the category — to be the brand the customer named when asked. We gave language around category captaincy, around leading with a category point of view, around the repositioning required to get there. Most of this was fine. One part was not.

The part that failed was the instruction to do it early. In practice, category captaincy is a post-victory posture; taken before a brand is ready to defend it, it draws fire that a younger brand cannot yet absorb. We watched three brands take up the captain position in a category where the incumbent had more capital, more retail relationships, and more patience. Each of them ended up smaller than if they had held position.

The advice now is quieter: be the brand the customer feels least need to defend, not the brand defining the category. Let the category captain attract the critical reading. Build, underneath that, the quality of the brand that survives contact with the customer's actual home. Captaincy arrives later, if it arrives, and it arrives on terms you can afford.

§V The file, kept honestly.

The difficulty in running a file like this is that the current advice, five years from now, will appear on the same file. We know this. We try to write the advice we give today in such a way that its future correction will at least be interesting.

If there is a practice habit worth taking away from this, it is to write advice with the assumption that you will have to retract it in public, in five years, and that the retraction itself is what builds trust with the next generation of founders. The firm that hides its retractions is the firm that quietly reduces its own useful lifespan.