So You Want to Be a Strategist
(2026 Edition)
There are a handful of documents that have circulated for years about how to break into strategy. You’ve probably read them. They’re well-intentioned - written by people who wanted to help, who remembered how hard it was when they were starting out, who genuinely believed they were passing on useful knowledge.
I’m going to say something that might sound harsh: most of them need burning.
Not because they were wrong when they were written. But because the world they were written for no longer exists.
I came into strategy at a particular moment. The discipline was booming. Agencies were hiring. There were graduate schemes and internships and junior roles where you were actually expected to learn, where someone more senior would sit with you and explain why that deck didn’t work, where you could be bad at things for a while until you got better.
I had mentors. Real ones - people who gave a shit, who made time, who saw something in me and decided to invest in it. I had job security, or something close to it. I had high-paid agency jobs that let me build savings, take risks, say no to things that didn’t feel right. I had room to experiment, to fail, to figure out what I actually thought about things without the immediate pressure of economic survival.
When I started my own thing, I didn’t start from zero. I had a network that had been built over years of working in rooms with people who went on to run departments and agencies and brands. I had a reputation - not a massive one, but enough that people would take a call. I had twenty years of pattern recognition that I could draw on.
I also had luck. Timing that I didn’t engineer. Circumstances I didn’t create.
You are not starting where I started. You cannot follow my path. The path doesn’t exist anymore.
The agency model is broken. Not “under pressure” or “evolving” - broken. The holding companies are in survival mode, cutting anything that doesn’t directly service existing revenue. They’re not investing in training. They’re not building capability. They’re stripping assets and trying to maintain margins long enough to figure out what the hell comes next. When they do hire, they want senior output at junior prices. The idea of a junior strategist - someone hired specifically to learn, to develop, to be trained into something - is functionally extinct in most agencies. The economics don’t support it anymore.
Consulting isn’t much better. The big firms are contracting. McKinsey, Bain, BCG - they’re all pulling back, being more selective, leaning harder on AI tools to do the work that used to be done by analysts. The path of “get into a top firm, learn the craft, exit into something interesting” is narrower than it’s ever been.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is eating the bottom of the value chain. The tasks that used to be given to juniors - desk research, competitive audits, first-draft decks, trend reports - are increasingly being done by tools. Not because the tools are good at it. They’re not, mostly. But they’re cheap, and when margins are collapsing, cheap wins. So the apprenticeship model - where you learned by doing the grunt work, where someone more experienced would review your output and teach you why it wasn’t good enough - that’s disappearing. The grunt work is being automated. The learning opportunity goes with it.
And then there’s everything else. The economy feels precarious in a way that’s hard to articulate but impossible to ignore. Housing costs that make independence feel impossible. A job market where entry-level roles ask for three years of experience. The looming sense that the geopolitical order is shifting in ways that will affect everything but that no one can quite predict. Climate. Trade wars. The sense that the adults might not actually be in charge of anything.
So when people tell you to “build your personal brand” and “work in public” and “follow your curiosity” and “find your killer move” - I need you to understand that this advice comes from a generation that had the luxury of figuring out who they were while someone else paid their salary. It assumes a safety net. It assumes time. It assumes that the fundamentals of food and rent and basic financial stability are already handled, and now we’re talking about self-actualisation.
That’s not where most of you are.
You’re trying to figure out whether you have a future at all. Whether the career you were sold still exists. Whether the degree you took on debt to get is going to translate into anything. Whether there’s any point in trying to break into an industry that seems to be actively collapsing.
I don’t have a silver bullet. I don’t have a secret path. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot - what I would actually tell someone starting out now, if I wanted to be genuinely useful rather than just repeating comfortable platitudes.
Here’s what I’ve got.
First: Grieve the path that doesn’t exist
This might sound soft, but I think it matters.
A lot of you grew up being told a story about how this would work. Study hard. Get the grades. Get into a good university. Get the internship. Get the job. Work your way up. Build a career. Buy a flat. Have a life.
That story was already fraying when I came through. Now it’s in tatters.
You did what you were supposed to do. You got the degree, maybe took on debt to do it. You read the books, followed the right people, learned the language. You were told that if you were smart and worked hard and wanted it enough, there would be a place for you.
And now you’re sending applications into the void. You’re watching roles get cut before they’re even filled. You’re seeing people five years ahead of you getting made redundant and wondering what chance you have if they didn’t make it. You’re doing free work, endless coffee chats, posting on LinkedIn like you’re supposed to, and none of it seems to connect to anything real.
That’s not a personal failing. That’s a structural collapse. And there’s a kind of grief that comes with it - the grief of a future that was promised but isn’t coming.
I don’t think you can skip that. I think if you try to just power through, to hustle past it, it sits in you and turns into something worse. Bitterness, maybe. Or shame. The creeping sense that you must have done something wrong, when the truth is the game changed while you were learning the rules.
So feel it. Be angry about it if you need to be. It’s not fair. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
But you can’t build a new strategy while you’re still trying to execute the old one. At some point you have to look clearly at the terrain as it actually is, not as it was supposed to be, and start from there. Which means letting go of the path you were told to want - the big agency, the title progression, the career ladder - and asking a different question entirely: where is strategic thinking actually valued, and how do I get there?
Second: Go where the talent isn’t
Everyone wants to work on Nike. Everyone wants to work on Netflix, Apple, the glamorous brands with the beautiful case studies. Which means that’s where competition is most ferocious and where you have the least leverage.
Meanwhile, entire industries are desperate for strategic thinking and can’t get it.
Logistics and supply chain. DHL, Maersk, regional freight companies - they’re sitting on genuinely fascinating complexity and mostly being served by legacy consultancies who charge a fortune and deliver recycled frameworks. These businesses are trying to figure out what they are in a world of nearshoring, automation, climate regulation. They need thinking. They’re not getting it.
Healthcare and care infrastructure. Not the venture-backed digital health startups - the actual NHS trusts, care home operators, pharmacy chains, GP consortiums trying to navigate funding crises and staffing collapses. They have strategic problems that are as complex as anything a brand faces. More complex, often. And almost no access to strategic talent.
Agriculture and food production. The system from farm to supermarket is being reshaped by climate, regulation, labour shortages, changing consumer behaviour. Tesco’s suppliers need strategic thinking. Regional food manufacturers need it. Agricultural co-ops, food waste businesses, vertical farms, alternative protein companies. This is a sector in genuine flux, with very few strategically-minded people paying attention.
Waste management and circular economy. Veolia, Biffa, the companies actually dealing with what happens after consumption. The whole question of how we handle materials, how we reduce waste, how we build circular systems - it’s one of the most consequential strategic challenges of the next fifty years. Almost no one from “our” world is working on it.
Construction and trades. Housebuilders, materials companies, the businesses that actually build things. Travis Perkins has more interesting strategic problems than most creative agencies will touch in a year. Housing, infrastructure, the built environment - these are sectors where decisions have weight, where the problems are gnarly and real.
Vocational education and training. Apprenticeship providers, skills bootcamps, the people trying to figure out what learning looks like when the skills keep changing and no one can agree on what the jobs of the future actually need. This is a sector that’s both chronically underfunded and absolutely critical, and it’s full of strategic questions that no one’s really answering.
Energy and utilities. The transition from fossil fuels to renewables is creating massive strategic complexity - grid operators, energy retailers, the companies installing heat pumps and solar panels, the businesses trying to figure out how to decarbonise their operations. Octopus Energy didn't come from nowhere. The strategic questions in this space are genuinely consequential.
Insurance. Not the sexy fintech disruptors - the actual insurers and brokers trying to navigate climate risk, changing regulation, and customers who hate them. Lloyd’s syndicates, regional brokers, specialty insurers. Fascinating problems, very few strategically-minded people want to work on them.
Local government and public services. Councils are facing impossible decisions about where to cut and what to protect. Housing associations are trying to figure out how to build when the economics don’t work. Public transport operators are rethinking what their networks are for. These organisations desperately need strategic thinking and have almost no access to it.
Death and end-of-life. Funeral directors, estate planning, palliative care, the companies trying to modernise probate. No one wants to talk about it, which means no one’s competing for the work. Dignity PLC has strategic problems. So do the independent funeral homes trying to survive against them.
Pet industry. Vets, pet food manufacturers, pet insurance, boarding and grooming businesses. A sector that’s grown enormously but is now facing consolidation, private equity pressure, and consumer pushback on costs. More interesting than it sounds.
These aren’t consolation prizes. They’re not “what you do if you can’t get a real job.” They’re where some of the most genuinely interesting problems live. And because the talent pool isn’t fighting over them, you can have impact faster. You can get in the room. You can do work that matters. Go forth and explore.
Third: Create value before you have permission
If no one’s hiring, you need a different way to demonstrate what you can do.
The advice to “work in public” gets this half right. Yes, having visible evidence of your thinking helps. But “build a personal brand” is too abstract. Post what, exactly? To whom? For what purpose? And in a landscape where everyone’s posting, where LinkedIn is a wasteland of engagement-bait and ChatGPT-generated thought leadership, how does one more voice break through?
Here’s something more concrete.
Find a local business. Not a coffee shop, not a friend’s side hustle - a real business with real problems. Something with 10-50 employees that’s been running for five or more years and is facing a genuine transition.
Look for:
A trades business that’s grown past the founder’s ability to manage everything personally. Electricians, plumbers, builders who now employ teams but have never had to think strategically about what they’re building.
A specialist retailer facing the online question. Not a generalist, but a niche expert - cookware, running gear, craft supplies - trying to figure out what physical retail is for now.
A professional services firm at the small end - accountants, solicitors, surveyors - that knows it needs to modernise but doesn’t know how.
A care business - childcare nursery, domiciliary care provider - operating on thin margins in a policy environment that won’t stop shifting.
Any business where the founder is thinking about exit, or where the market is changing in ways they can feel but can’t quite articulate.
Approach them. Not with a sales pitch. With curiosity and an offer:
“I want to understand how your business actually works. I’ll spend time with you - a day, two days - watching, asking questions, looking at what’s working and what’s not. At the end, I’ll give you a document. It’ll identify three things you could do differently that would make a material difference to the business. If it’s useful, we can talk about what comes next. If it’s not, you’ve lost nothing but time.”
Don’t call yourself a strategist. Don’t use any of the language you learned in university or from agency job descriptions. Just be someone who’s good at looking at a business, understanding how it works, and spotting what could work better. That’s the actual skill. The job title is irrelevant.
Do this once, and you’ve got a learning experience. Do it twice, and you’ve got comparison data. Do it three times, and you’ve got the beginnings of a portfolio. Do it five times, and you understand more about how businesses actually work than most agency strategists will learn in a decade.
And here’s what else happens: those business owners talk to each other. They have accountants, solicitors, bank managers. They have friends who run other businesses. If you do good work, they tell people. The referral network builds itself.
This isn’t charity. It’s not volunteering. It’s building a practice from the ground up, based on demonstrated value rather than credentials.
Fourth: Learn the language of money
I cannot overstate how important this is.
The single biggest gap between strategists who get taken seriously and strategists who get patted on the head is whether they understand commercial reality. Not “big picture” commercial reality - actual, granular, how-does-this-business-make-money reality.
When you can say “this will cost £50k to implement and here’s how it pays back within eighteen months,” you’re speaking a language that founders understand. That CFOs understand. That anyone responsible for a P&L understands. You’re not the creative who has interesting ideas. You’re someone who can help them make decisions.
Learn:
Gross margin versus net margin. What’s the difference? Why does it matter? When someone tells you the margin on a product is 40%, which one are they talking about?
Customer acquisition cost. How much does it cost to get a new customer? How do you calculate it? How does it vary by channel?
Lifetime value. What’s a customer worth over time? What are the assumptions underneath that number?
Contribution margin. When you sell one more unit, what actually drops to the bottom line after variable costs?
Working capital. Why can a business be profitable on paper and still run out of cash? How does the timing of money in and money out actually work?
This might sound like finance, not strategy. It’s not. This is the foundation that makes strategic advice actually actionable. Without it, you’re just making suggestions. With it, you’re making recommendations that can be evaluated, funded, implemented.
Where to learn:
Read the annual reports of retailers. Tesco, Next, Greggs - they’re written to be understood by shareholders, which means they explain their own economics in surprisingly accessible language. Read the narrative sections, not just the numbers.
Follow anyone who does public breakdowns of how businesses actually work. Scott Galloway does this. So does The Generalist. So do the good threads on Hacker News when a company reports earnings.
Take a free accounting fundamentals course. OpenLearn has solid ones. So does Coursera.
Ask. If you know anyone who works in finance, ask them to explain their P&L to you. Most of them will be delighted that someone from the “creative side” gives a shit.
Fifth: Build skills that can’t be automated
A lot of the tasks that used to be junior strategist work - desk research, competitive audits, first-pass decks, trend reports - can now be done passably by AI tools. Not brilliantly. Often not even well. But passably, and fast, and cheap. That’s enough to eliminate the role in a lot of places.
But there are skills that can’t be collapsed into a prompt. Skills that require presence, trust, human judgment, the kind of pattern recognition that only comes from being in the room.
Research interviewing. The ability to sit with a human being and get them to tell you what they actually think - not what they think they should say, not the official line, but the real thing. This is a craft. Most people are bad at it. AI cannot do it. It requires reading body language, knowing when to push, when to stay silent, when to follow an unexpected thread. It requires trust. You build it through practice.
Facilitation. Running a workshop. Managing group dynamics. Getting a room full of people with different agendas to actually make a decision. This is undersupplied and incredibly valuable. Organisations waste thousands of hours in meetings that go nowhere because no one knows how to facilitate. Learn it. Actually practice it - run sessions, volunteer to lead offsites, get reps.
Synthesis. Not summarising - that’s what AI does. Synthesis is finding the non-obvious connection. It’s taking five different inputs that don’t seem related and finding the thread that ties them together. It’s the thing that makes someone say “I hadn’t thought about it that way.” This is the core of strategic thinking, and it can’t be automated because it requires a point of view.
Writing for decision-makers. Not decks. The one-page document that actually gets read. The executive summary that earns the trust to keep reading. Most strategists hide behind slides because they can’t write a clear argument in prose. If you can, you have an edge.
Quantitative literacy. You don’t need to be a data scientist. But you need to look at a spreadsheet and know when something doesn’t add up. You need to be able to interrogate a number, ask where it came from, understand what it’s actually measuring. This is rarer than it should be.
Reading a room. Who has power. Who’s aligned with whom. Who’s performing agreement while actually blocking. What’s the thing nobody’s saying. This is pure human insight. It’s built by paying close attention over time. It can’t be taught from a book, but it can be developed deliberately if you’re watching for it.
Sixth: Consider in-house, but be strategic about it
If agencies aren’t hiring and consulting is contracting, where do you actually go?
In-house can work. But “in-house” is a huge category, and most of the obvious entry points - junior roles in brand marketing teams - have the same problems as agencies. Overworked, under-resourced, not much room to develop.
Look instead at:
Transformation offices. When a big company is going through major change - digital transformation, post-merger integration, operating model redesign - they often create a central team to coordinate it. These teams are usually staffed by exhausted people from consulting backgrounds who desperately need help. They’re often more willing to take a chance on someone without a traditional pedigree, because they need bodies and they can see quickly whether you’re useful.
Commercial strategy. This sits between marketing and finance. It exists in retailers, FMCG companies, anywhere with complex pricing and channel decisions. It’s less glamorous than brand work but more connected to how the business actually runs.
Customer experience and service design. But only in organisations where this actually connects to operations. Some companies have CX teams that are basically internal agencies, making journey maps that no one acts on. Others have CX functions that are genuinely operational, redesigning processes, working with frontline teams. You want the second kind.
Corporate development. The teams that do M&A, partnerships, strategic investments. They need people who can assess whether an acquisition target makes strategic sense, who can see beyond the financials to the capability and market implications. It’s not what you think of as strategy, but it is.
Investor relations. This sounds boring. It’s not. It’s about narrative - how the company explains itself to the market, what story it’s telling, how it positions its decisions. Good IR teams need people who can write and think clearly. It’s an unusual path in, but it’s a path.
And look at companies you’ve never heard of. The FTSE 250 is full of them. Howdens. Bunzl. Halma. Spirax-Sarco. Diploma. These are real businesses, with real complexity, real resources, and real strategic challenges. They don’t have queues of applicants from people who want to work on “cool brands.” They’re often more willing to take a chance on someone smart and hungry because they’re not overwhelmed with options.
Seventh: This week
I’m wary of ending with a neat action plan, because I don’t want to pretend this is simpler than it is. But if you want something concrete to do right now:
Pick one industry from the unsexy list. Spend a few hours with it. Read its trade press, its company reports, its subreddits. Get a feel for what the people in that industry are actually worried about, what language they use, what problems feel unresolved.
Identify one local business that fits the criteria I described. You’re not going to approach them yet. Just notice them. Walk past. Look at their website. Think about what you’d want to understand about how they work.
Find one P&L walkthrough - YouTube has plenty - and actually follow along. Pause it. Take notes. Make sure you understand what each line means before moving on.
Write something. Not thought leadership. Not a post designed to perform. Just 500 words about something you noticed, something you’re thinking about, something you observed. Keep it in a Google Doc if you want. The point isn’t to publish. The point is to practice thinking in writing.
I’ve been doing this for a long time now. Long enough to have seen several cycles of people declaring that the industry is dying, that the model is broken, that there’s no future in it. Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they were wrong. Mostly they were half-right, in ways that took years to fully play out.
What I know is that the work hasn’t disappeared. The need for people who can make sense of complexity, who can help organisations figure out what to do - that need is as strong as it’s ever been. Maybe stronger.
But the work has moved. It’s not where it used to be. It’s not packaged in the roles that used to exist, accessed through the paths that used to work. It’s scattered, hidden, distributed across industries and functions and company types that don’t look anything like what the career guides told you to aim for.
The people who will build careers from here are the ones who can see where value creation is actually happening. Not where it’s supposed to happen. Not where it used to happen. Where it actually is, right now, today.
I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be okay. I don’t know if it’s going to be okay. The world is uncertain in ways that feel genuinely new, and I don’t have special insight into how it’s all going to shake out.
What I can tell you is that the skills that make someone useful - the ability to see clearly, to synthesise, to understand human motivation, to help people make better decisions - those skills are valuable. Will continue to be valuable. The challenge is finding the places that value them and the paths that let you develop them.
The foundations you were promised have fallen away. But you can build new ones. And sometimes, when the old structures collapse, you get to build something that actually fits the world as it is, rather than the world as it was supposed to be.
Good luck. I’m rooting for you all. 💫
That took me on a journey from feeling pretty bummed out to feeling like getting the pen and paper out and plotting a pretty big action plan. Thanks Zoe
As someone who's been to the industry for a little over 3 years, this is exactly the advice no one is giving at coffee chats, thank you. I especially appreciate the reminder to write observations.