Bedrock Alignment
A 30-day program built to find the one path worth taking first. It’s strategic planning built for the AI era. But more importantly, it’s built around you.
We start with Bedrock. Everything else builds from there.
Thirty days on the one objective that matters most to your company.
You bring the objective. Saxum’s senior strategists work it from every side and hand you the strategy most likely to meet it: where you stand, where you could go, and what it’s going to take to get there.
Industry. Market. Organization.
Three rounds in thirty days, each one run without sight of the others. Where the openings are, what they’re worth, and whether you can take them. Each round, our intelligence tools generate and score twenty strategies. Every one is worked by executive strategists before it reaches you: people who have made calls like yours, who challenge what the analysis says, and who put their name on what comes back.
Industry
What does the landscape look like from the outside, what has this organization committed to in public, and where are the openings nobody is standing in? This is the widest view and the least dependent on the client.
It establishes the terrain before anyone argues about tactics.
Market
What will the market actually bear? What does it cost to reach a customer, what is that customer worth, how long until the investment returns?
This is where strategy stops being directional and starts being priced.
Organization
Can this organization actually execute it, and what would it have to build? Capabilities, capacity, structure, the investment required, and the honest gaps between the plan and the people.
This is where a good idea meets the people who would have to deliver it.
What comes out is the lead strategy, or the two or three that, in combination, are most likely to meet your objective, paired with a year-one plan.
What could these potential strategies look like?
Five kinds of strategy, in language you’ll recognize. This is the work Saxum oversees for clients, with the people and the system to run it.
Our Capabilities
Direction & Decisions
We help you see what’s coming before it arrives, and decide what to do about it: what’s moving in your market, what your competitors are about to do, what happens if rates, regulation, or demand turn against you.
A company drifts one way: slowly, then all at once. Deciding on purpose, with the ground read, is how you stay ahead of it.
- Strategic planning and priority setting (Bedrock Alignment program)
- Market, audience and stakeholder research
- Stakeholder mapping and alignment
- Scenario planning and risk foresight
- Leadership and board facilitation
- Executive advisory
Growth, Brand & Market Position
We make sure the right customers know who you are, what you stand for, and why they should choose you, and that every time they deal with you, it’s easy to keep choosing you. Brand, marketing, and how customers get treated, run as one job.
You’ve built more than the market gives you credit for. Position is what turns that into pricing power, loyalty, and the right kind of growth.
- Brand strategy and positioning
- Messaging and narrative architecture
- Go-to-market and campaigns
Reputation & Trust
What people say about you when you’re not in the room: customers, regulators, reporters, the towns you operate in. We build standing that holds when a headline, a regulator, or a lost account tests it, and we’re there when it does.
Trust is the one asset you can’t buy back. Protecting it costs less than rebuilding it, every time.
- Crisis and issues management
- Public relations
- Media relations
- Public affairs
- Community and tribal relations
- Executive visibility and media training
AI & Technology Readiness
We find where AI will actually save you money or make you faster, where it’s a distraction, and what has to be in place so it doesn’t put your data, your customers, or your name at risk.
Your competitors are using it whether they’re ready or not. The advantage goes to the ones who decide deliberately, not first.
- AI strategy and use-case roadmap
- AI governance and responsible-use policy
- CRM and marketing automation
- Data, analytics and measurement
- Visibility in AI search and answer engines
- AI-enabled marketing and communications
People & Capability
We make sure the way the company runs can carry what you’re building: the right people in the right seats, clear calls on who decides what, and systems that don’t depend on you being in every room. Before you hire people you don’t need.
Growth breaks the structure that produced it. The gap between what you’re building and who can run it is where good companies stall.
- Internal and change communications
- Employer brand and recruitment marketing
- Leadership communications
- AI and skills training for teams
- Culture and employee engagement
Sixty strategies can be combined more than a quintillion ways. We built the system that works through them.
Each round produces twenty strategies, so sixty in all, and each one carries a score for its chance of success, what it would cost to run, and what it would take to build. The strategy we recommend is usually one of the sixty, and sometimes two or three that work together. There are more than a quintillion ways to combine them.
No firm works through that many options by hand. Saxum built software that does. It generates the strategies, scores them, and sorts the combinations. Our executive strategists and an independent panel then review what it produces, strike what doesn’t hold up, and sign the recommendation that reaches you. That is why the answer you get is drawn from the whole field, and why a person you know will stand behind it.
Your team is chosen from
executive strategists. Executives-in-Residence. executive advisors. economists. regulatory experts. data scientists. our unicorns.
Purpose-built intelligence tools generate the sixty strategies and work every combination of them. Your lead strategist is your sherpa, architecting the findings and telling the story. An independent panel of outside experts, the same panel all three rounds, adds strategic guidance and candid reflection to every one.
Illustrative caseA regional electric cooperative needs member support for a rate increase.
Your lead strategist carries every finding through all three rounds to the reveal.
This isn't thirty days of silence, then a reveal.
You’re in it with us. At each checkpoint we bring the next round, you react, and your read sharpens what comes next. Thirty days, multiple checkpoints, one answer: the strategy most likely to meet your objective.
DAY 0
Discovery
What arrives: Your objective in one sentence, pressure-tested with you until it holds, plus a short questionnaire and a reading list so the field we build is yours.
DAY 5
Round 1 • Industry
What arrives: Twenty strategies, built from the outside in, each scored for its chance of success. An independent panel has endorsed or dissented on every one, and our executive strategists tell you what each means for your objective.
DAY 15
Round 2 • Market
What arrives: Twenty more strategies, each priced: the cost to reach the customer, what the customer is worth, how long until it returns. Same panel, no sight of round one.
DAY 25
Round 3 • Organization
What arrives: A short pre-read for day thirty: who should be in the room, what to expect, and the decisions we’ll ask you to make. No spoilers. Behind it, round three is mapping twenty more strategies for the effort to build against what you have.
DAY 30
Reveal Session
What arrives: One room, one screen, one storyteller. The three rounds laid over one another into one strategy: the Vital Few that make it up, how we got there, then the workstreams and critical tasks for year one. You leave with the plan in hand.
Your part in it: Sign off on the sentence and open the doors: who we should talk to, what we should read. An hour, mostly conversation.
Your part in it: Your read. What’s been tried, what’s off the table, what surprised you.
Your part in it: Your appetite. Which costs rule a strategy out, and which bets are worth stretching for.
Your part in it: The names. The two or three people whose alignment matters most.
Your part in it: The decision. The plan is yours; how it gets done is your call.
The Day 30 Reveal Session
Sixty strategies went in. 1.15 quintillion ways to combine them. Three rounds, each run blind. A panel on every one. The Vital Few.
On day thirty we meet at our office: you and the two or three people whose alignment matters most. One room, one screen, one storyteller. The Vital Few first, then how we got there, then the first year of tasks.
60Strategies still standing
What You Leave With
Not a report for the shelf.
Three things, and you'll use all of them.
The Output
The Vital Few
Sixty strategies can be combined 1.15 quintillion ways. You get one path: the few strategies all three rounds agree on, combined into the one strategy you'll run, with the chance of success, the cost to run, and the effort to build behind each one.
Behind each strategy
- Chance of success Round 1
- Cost to run Round 2
- Effort to build Round 3
How to Act on It
The Map & the First Year
A strategy map of the path, and the workstreams for year one with the critical tasks inside each. Year one only, even when the strategy runs longer. If a workstream calls for people or capability you don't have, it says so: a fractional executive, an Executive-in-Residence, or a standing partner like Saxum.
Whose It Is
A Plan That's Yours
You leave with the plan, and how it gets done is your call. Nothing in it ties you to Saxum. Split it by workstream: run some in-house, hand some to a partner, and bring us in only where you want us.
Each workstream can go to
- Your own team
- A partner you choose
- Saxum, through Bedrock OS℠
The path is set. Now we put it to work.
Bedrock Alignment℠ ends with one path and the tactics to get there. Then we activate the work: the workstreams that move you toward your objective, each with the right specialists, all held to your plan. From there, we serve as your Chief Strategy Office for as long as the objective calls for. The same executive strategists who ran your Alignment carry it forward. The decisions stay yours.
BEDROCK OS℠
How we run your Chief Strategy Office. Executive strategists, the right specialists, and purpose-built intelligence orchestrated as one, so nothing drifts between day thirty and your goal.
What We'll Ask of You
Less of your time than you'd think. More candor than you're used to.
The objective, in a sentence. A few hours of your leadership team’s time across the month, most of it in conversations we schedule around you. Access to the people and the material we ask for. And straight answers when we ask hard questions, because the strategy is only as good as what it’s built on.
How long is it?
Thirty days, day zero to day thirty. It doesn’t stretch. Day zero starts once your intake and onboarding is complete.
Couldn't any strategy firm do this?
No. A strategy firm’s options are limited to what its people have time to think through, which is usually a handful. Bedrock Alignment℠ starts from sixty strategies, generated and scored by software Saxum built, reviewed by an independent panel, and narrowed by our executive strategists to the one most likely to meet your objective. You get the whole field, and people who have made calls like yours deciding what in it deserves your time.
Who does the work?
A senior strategist leads it from the first day and is in the room on the last. Specialists join by domain when the objective calls for them.
Who needs to be involved on our side?
You, and the two or three people whose alignment matters most to the objective. We’ll tell you who by day twenty-five.
What if the honest answer is that we don't need you?
Then that’s what you’ll hear. The plan is yours either way.
Does this replace our team, or our other advisors?
No. Our intention is to support the strategy work that gets neglected, not to replace the people doing everything else. Bedrock Alignment℠ is a diagnostic, not a replacement. If the objective calls for people or capability you don’t have, it will say so, whether that’s a fractional executive, an Executive-in-Residence, or a standing partner like Saxum. A Chief Strategy Office gives your team direction to execute against and keeps everyone relentlessly focused on the objective and the path to it.
What happens after day thirty?
You decide. Clients who continue move into Bedrock OS℠, where the same strategists and the same intelligence tools stay on the next decision, and the one after it. Clients who don’t leave with a plan they can run.
See how Bedrock Alignment℠ can change everything.
You don’t need a pitch. You need a starting move.
Our 30-day Bedrock Alignment℠ Diagnostic gets you there.