Consulting — Business Plan Reference Architecture

A structured three-engagement lifecycle for pre-seed and seed sponsors. Intake assesses fit. Sprint 1 produces an investor-ready Business Plan through a 10-phase / 4-week execution. Sprint 2 (optional) extends delivery into an MVP build. The methodology is stage-gated: each engagement closes with an explicit GO / NO-GO recommendation so a CIO or CTO sponsor can evaluate continuation on evidence, not momentum.

Audience note. Most LOB pages describe what we deploy into your environment. Consulting is different — what we deploy is mostly into the deliverable. This document names both: the stack we run the engagement on (so you can evaluate our execution rigor), and the thin infrastructure surface that lands on your side (so you can plan what your team hosts during and after).

Design principles

1. Stage gates beat continuous engagement. Each phase cluster ends with an explicit gate — Model Approved at Week 2, MVP Scope Decision at Week 3, Delivery at Week 4. Continuation past each gate requires evidence, not enthusiasm. Sponsors de-commit at any gate without sunk-cost pressure.

2. Founder time is a finite resource; engineer around it. The engagement is sized to consume ~32 hours of sponsor / founder time across Sprint 1. Weeks 1–2 require the most participation (only the founder carries the product insight); Weeks 3–4 step back (we produce the packaging). This asymmetry is a deliberate resource-management decision.

3. Artifacts survive the engagement — and are machine-readable. The Business Plan is a document of record, not a slide deck. Editable financial workbook. Searchable interview transcripts. Versioned assumption log. When the founder adds a cofounder, hires a CFO, or executes Sprint 2, the deliverables are the on-ramp — not a PDF that has to be re-read.

4. Stack-neutral, industry-fluent. We do not route sponsors to preferred cloud vendors for the consulting engagement, and the Sprint 2 MVP brief names reference stacks rather than imposes one. Regulatory and market analysis defaults to your industry's standards — CNBV for fintech, COFEPRIS / NOM-024 for healthcare, IFT for telecom — not a generic template.

The stack behind the engagement

Before the phases — what we run on. Every tool below is named so a CIO can evaluate the supply chain: where the deliverable data lives, who has access, what happens to it at engagement close.

Data residency. Interview audio and untranscribed materials live in MX- or US-region storage depending on sponsor preference. Final deliverables (markdown, workbook, PDF, DOCX) are delivered as plain files — sponsor owns them outright; we retain an archival copy for 12 months under NDA then delete.

Access. Vault access is per-engagement: the analyst assigned to the engagement, the engagement lead (Growgy), and the CTO (Teky, only when scoping Sprint 2). Audit log of vault access is available to sponsor on request.

What lands in your environment

This is the section a CIO / CTO actually budgets against. During Sprint 1, almost nothing lands in your cloud. The full infra footprint is:

What we deliberately do NOT require during Sprint 1: no VPN, no SSO integration, no access to your internal data warehouse, no procurement of new SaaS, no installation of agents on sponsor endpoints. The engagement runs clean-room style against public data + interviews — which keeps your security review at one meeting, not six.

If Sprint 2 activates: the MVP lands on a real stack (AWS/GCP/Azure or OSS) — see the MVP Development LOB architecture document for that deployment model. The Sprint 2 brief names the reference stack; the sponsor's CIO approves it before Week 5 kickoff.

The three engagements

Phase 0 · Intake (Days 1–5 · Included)

Fit-check against the consulting methodology. Deliberately short: 3–5 days, no fee.

• Kickoff workshop with the sponsor (2 hours, remote)
• Confirmation that the problem is consulting-shaped: a new venture, market entry, or business line without a validated playbook. Already-operating companies seeking optimization or data-driven transformation route to the Agentic Transformation LOB instead.
• Tooling decision: Drive vs SharePoint folder, transcription stack, calendar owner.
• Sprint calendar lock (which calendar weeks the engagement will occupy).
• Brief signature — commits both parties to scope, calendar, and price for Sprint 1.

Sponsor time commitment: ~4 hours. Output: signed Sprint 1 brief + provisioned shared folder.

Phase 1 · Sprint 1 — Business Plan (Weeks 1–4 · $8,000 USD)

The core engagement. 10 execution phases grouped into 5 clusters across 4 calendar weeks. Sponsor time: ~32 hours across the 4 weeks, front-loaded into Weeks 1–2.

Discover (Days 1–7 · Phases 1–2)

Phase 1 — Kickoff & Discovery. Day 1, 2-hour workshop on Zoom or Meet. Extract the founder's insight, evidence, and constraints. We capture with Otter/Whisper and commit the scrubbed transcript to the vault. Deliverable: Founder's Brief (markdown) — single source of truth for the engagement.

Phase 2 — Validation Interviews. Days 2–7, analyst-led. 10–12 structured interviews with target customers (not personal network), each 30–45 min over video call, recorded with consent, transcribed, PII-scrubbed. Coded pain-pattern extraction (frequency, severity, existing workarounds) using a simple taxonomy committed alongside the transcripts. Deliverable: Validation Dossier (markdown + coded data) with continue / pivot / stop recommendation.

Close of Week 1: 6 cumulative deliverables · ~12 sponsor hours.

Model (Days 8–14 · Phases 3–5)

Phase 3 — Brand & Narrative. One-sentence, three-sentence, and thirty-second pitch. Deliverable: Brand Spine — positioning, tone, key phrases. Captured as markdown so Sprint 2 can reference it.

Phase 4 — Business Model Canvas. Osterwalder canvas built against validated inputs (not hypotheses). We use Miro or a markdown canvas format the sponsor prefers; both versions committed. Deliverable: v1 canvas with assumptions flagged.

Phase 5 — Revenue & Unit Economics. Pricing, COGS, CAC, LTV, break-even analysis. Built in Google Sheets (or Excel on request) with a single driver block — every assumption is a named, colored cell. Sensitivity tables generate from the driver block, not by hand. Deliverable: Unit Economics Sheet + signed-off canvas.

Week 2 gate — Model Approved. Sponsor reviews, signs, or redirects. Close of Week 2: 14 cumulative deliverables · ~8 sponsor hours.

Validate (Days 15–21 · Phases 6–7)

Phase 6 — Market Sizing & TAM. Bottom-up + top-down. Sources: INEGI, Banco de México, DataMexico, industry reports, competitor disclosures. Every figure is cited with retrieval date and license. Deliverable: Market Sizing Memo with TAM/SAM/SOM + defensible assumptions.

Phase 7 — Competitive Landscape. Direct, indirect, and potential competitors. Positioning map + whitespace analysis. We use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and public company data for competitor mapping only — no outreach, no scraping. Deliverable: Competitive Canvas.

Week 3 gate — MVP Scope Decision. GO / NO-GO on Sprint 2. Close of Week 3: 24 cumulative deliverables · ~6 sponsor hours.

Strategize (Days 22–24 · Phase 8)

Phase 8 — Go-to-Market & Ops Plan. Channel strategy, first-100-customer plan, ops model, hiring plan, vendor strategy, regulatory path if applicable. If MVP gate was GO, includes the MVP Scope Spec — the smallest buildable product that validates the riskiest assumption, written in markdown with an ADR-lite decision log so the MVP LOB doesn't re-litigate choices during Sprint 2. Deliverable: GTM Playbook + optional MVP Scope Spec.

Plan (Days 25–28 · Phases 9–10)

Phase 9 — Business Plan Draft & Financial Model. All prior deliverables integrated into a single 16-section Business Plan of record, generated from markdown via Pandoc to PDF/DOCX. Financial model cross-referenced and editable. Deliverable: v1 Business Plan + Financial Model Workbook.

Phase 10 — Final Delivery. Sponsor walkthrough, question round, final revisions. Hard copy, editable markdown sources, editable financial model, full vault export. No license retention, no lock-in, no watermarked PDFs. Deliverable: Final Business Plan · 33 deliverables cumulative.

Close of Week 4: 33 cumulative deliverables · ~6 sponsor hours · Sprint 1 complete.

Phase 2 · Sprint 2 — MVP Build (Weeks 5–8 · Optional · $8,000+ USD)

Activated only on Sprint 1 GO recommendation at the Week 3 gate. Direct handoff to the MVP Development LOB — same team, no re-scope, no renegotiation theater. Builds the MVP scoped in Phase 8 against use cases validated in Phases 2 and 6.

This is where real infrastructure lands on your side. The MVP deploys into a sponsor-owned cloud account (AWS / GCP / Azure) or OSS stack on sponsor-provisioned hardware. Source control (GitHub or GitLab) under an org you own. CI/CD pipelines under an org you own. We build; you own. Reference stack options are named in the MVP Scope Spec during Phase 8 — sponsor CIO approves before Week 5 kickoff.

Price and timeline are locked at the Sprint 2 brief once scope is fixed. The price floor is $8,000 USD; complexity, integrations, and regulatory surface area move it up. The 4-week duration is fixed; scope within those weeks flexes.

Sponsor time commitment: ~16 hours across 4 weeks · weekly product reviews.

Cross-cutting planes (bind every phase)

Three systems run across the entire engagement and protect integrity:

Configuration management. Every deliverable references the Founder's Brief, Validation Dossier, and approved Canvas. Week 4 deliverables that contradict Week 1 inputs trigger an exception-resolution step, not silent drift. Vault commits are dated and versioned — sponsor can diff any deliverable against any prior week.

Knowledge management. All research, transcripts, models, and decisions land in the shared vault. At engagement close, sponsor receives a complete export (markdown + attachments + workbook). We retain an archival copy for 12 months under NDA, then delete with a written attestation.

Quality gates / feedback loops. Week 2 Model Approved, Week 3 MVP Scope Decision, Week 4 Delivery. Three formal chances to redirect, pause, or conclude the engagement on evidence.

Integration surfaces

Inbound: idea, evidence collected to date, sponsor calendar for the four engagement windows (Kickoff · Validation readout · Canvas checkpoint · Final), shared folder provisioned by sponsor's IT, transcription-stack consent from sponsor.

Outbound: Business Plan of record · 33 deliverables · editable financial workbook · GTM playbook · optional MVP Scope Spec for direct handoff to Sprint 2 deliverers · complete vault export (markdown + attachments).

Risk signaling: when a phase surfaces a finding that invalidates a core assumption — addressable market smaller than believed, regulatory path blocked, unit economics negative — the gate protocol activates. We pause continuation pending sponsor decision; the finding is captured in the vault with the evidence chain attached.

Business cases

The methodology has been executed against regulated and unregulated industries. Common sponsor patterns:

• Fintech pre-seed. SMB credit product targeting Mexican SMEs. Regulatory path: CNBV registration, ITF concession if applicable. Output supports SOFOM ENR or ITF application. Public-data stack: INEGI + Banxico + Buró de Crédito published stats.
• Healthcare platform. Specialty telemedicine (e.g., cardiology follow-up). Regulatory path: COFEPRIS + NOM-024. Output supports institutional partnerships and compliance planning. Public-data stack: INEGI + IMSS published stats + peer-reviewed literature under fair use.
• Retail / D2C expansion. Omnichannel marketplace entry (Mercado Libre, Amazon MX, direct). Output supports unit-economics validation before inventory commitment. Public-data stack: AMVO reports + Mercado Libre / Amazon MX public category data.

Adjacent fits: proptech, edtech, manufacturing services, B2B SaaS at seed, second-generation family-business ventures.

What this engagement is NOT

This section exists to prevent sponsor mismatch.

• Not RAG. The Business Plan does not answer questions; it is the answer. For corpus-grounded Q&A, see the RAG architecture.
• Not agentic. We do not ship autonomous agents during Sprint 1. For action-taking systems, see the Agentic architecture.
• Not market research. Research is an input to Phase 6. Output is a full operations plan.
• Not a pitch-deck polish service. Decks are symptoms. We deliver the underlying business case that produces the deck — and we deliver it as regeneratable source (markdown + Pandoc), not a Keynote file that dies on a laptop.
• Not ongoing advisory. Engagements close at Week 4 or Week 8. Long-term advisory is a different commercial shape and out of scope for this LOB.
• Not a SaaS you have to integrate. No new tooling lands on sponsor infra during Sprint 1. Sprint 2 brings the MVP Development stack into your environment — see that LOB's architecture page for its deployment footprint.

Latency & cost envelope

Payment: 50% at kickoff / 50% at midpoint of each sprint. Sprint 2 price floor is firm; ceiling is scope-dependent and locked at the Sprint 2 brief.

Compute / SaaS cost to sponsor during Sprint 1: $0 incremental. We carry our own seats for Zoom, Otter/Whisper, Miro, Drive. Sponsor's only spend is staff time.

Compute / SaaS cost to sponsor during Sprint 2: variable by MVP shape — sized in the Sprint 2 brief. Reference range: $150–$1,500/month during Sprint 2 for an SMB MVP on a major cloud (small database + small app service + object storage + CI minutes), scaling with usage thereafter.

Reference anchor: the relevant comparator is not other consulting engagements. It is the cost of pitching an unvalidated plan and recovering from a rejection — or worse, building the wrong MVP and deprecating it six months in. Sprint 1 exists to move that failure from the investor's conference room or the production incident review into a Week 2 or Week 3 gate where it can still be corrected cheaply.

Posture note

This methodology is opinionated. Each gate, deliverable, tooling choice, and sequencing decision above corresponds to a documented failure mode we've watched kill seed-stage ventures: unvalidated assumptions, scope drift, founder burn, vendor lock-in on methodology, deliverables as dead PDFs, MVP infrastructure that outlives its usefulness because it was never sponsor-owned.

Where your regulatory environment, industry, or organizational context does not map exactly to the 10-phase shape, the engagements tolerate adaptation — rename phases, add compliance lanes, expand a cluster, swap the transcription stack for one your security office already approves. The un-negotiable elements are the three gates, the founder-time budget, and the rule that everything we deliver is regeneratable from source you own. Everything else adjusts.

For engagement scheduling: Growgy runs the calendar. For methodology adaptation to your specific domain and Sprint 2 stack selection: Teky runs the technical scoping. Both conversations open with the Intake workshop, not a pre-sales questionnaire.