When to hire a strategy consultant vs. a designer
When I started Eclow, I kept trying to explain what I did by pointing at the two things it wasn't. "I'm not a strategy consultant. I'm not a designer. I'm… somewhere in between."
That between-space turned out to be harder to describe than I expected. Not because it's rare — I do it constantly — but because it doesn't have a clean job title. And when something doesn't have a job title, people don't hire for it. They hire for the closest familiar thing, and hope it solves the problem underneath.
This article is my attempt to describe that in-between layer clearly, so people can decide whether they actually need it.
What a strategy consultant is actually for
A strategy consultant helps you decide what to do. They come in when the question on the table is directional: which market, which product, which pricing model, which acquisition, which restructure.
They're good at:
Diagnosing where a business is stuck.
Running analysis that stress-tests options.
Producing a recommendation you can bring to a board or an investor.
They're less good at what happens the day after the recommendation lands. The deck gets filed. The team goes back to their day jobs. The strategy stays abstract because no one has translated it into something the organisation can actually see, share, and work with.
That's the gap I see most often. Not a bad strategy. An invisible one.
What a designer is actually for
A designer helps you make something specific. A logo. A website. A deck. A packaging system. A brand identity.
They're good at:
Taking a brief and turning it into a crafted, considered output.
Making the thing look and feel like it belongs to you.
Solving execution problems inside their medium.
They're less good at the layer above the brief. If the brief itself is unclear — if you don't yet know what story the deck is meant to tell, or what the brand is really for — a designer will still deliver something beautiful. It just won't fix the underlying confusion. You'll get a polished version of a fuzzy idea.
That's the other gap. Not bad design. Design pointed at the wrong thing.
Where most real problems actually sit
If you look honestly at the moments where a business genuinely feels stuck, they rarely land cleanly in either box.
A founder can't get their team to align on the strategy — not because the strategy is wrong, but because no one has structured it in a way the team can hold in their head.
A leadership deck keeps landing flat — not because the slides are ugly, but because the argument underneath them hasn't been made yet.
An NGO knows what it wants to change in the world, but can't explain the path from what it does to what changes — so funders keep asking the same question.
A brand has grown into three products, four audiences, and two markets, and no one can draw the picture of how it all fits together anymore.
None of those are pure strategy problems. None of them are pure design problems. They sit in between — in the layer where thinking has to become structure, and structure has to become something visible.
That's the layer I work in. It doesn't have a clean job title yet, which is part of why it's underserved.
A rough decision guide
If it helps, here's how I'd sort it:
Hire a strategy consultant when the question is what should we do? and you need a defensible recommendation.
Hire a designer when the brief is clear and the question is how do we make this specific thing well?
Hire someone in between when the question is we know roughly what we're trying to do, but we can't get anyone else to see it, agree on it, or move on it.
That last one is where I spend most of my time. Not inventing new strategy. Not producing final artwork. Building the scaffolding that lets an idea become real — a workshop, a framework, a visual, a structured document — so the team can point at something and get moving.
The honest answer
Most of the time, people don't need a full strategy engagement and don't need a full design project. They need someone to help them structure the mess — to sit with it long enough to name it, draw it, and hand it back in a form the team can work with.
A few weeks of clarity, a scaffolder in the room, and a picture on the wall the team can agree on.
If that's the shape of the problem you're dealing with, that's what I do.