A quarter at a time, or a single pitch. A fixed fee, agreed up front, with senior hands on the work.
No hours. No overage. No surprise finance meeting.
The problem
A pitch starts with a junior strategist. The work comes back thin, so a senior rewrites it. The CSO rewrites that. Three people have now done one job, the deadline hasn't moved, and the real number doesn't appear until after the pitch is over.
By then it's a line in a finance meeting rather than a decision anyone made. Win or lose, the cost is the same. It's the least forecastable spend in the building, on the work that decides whether the building grows.
Agencies have tried to solve this by hiring ahead of demand and then cutting when the pitches slow down. That trade doesn't work anymore. The senior strategists are freelance now, and the bench is the first thing to go.
Cost of strategy across one pitch
What it is
A quarter of reserved senior strategy capacity, priced once, used as hard as you like. You run one major assignment at a time. Everything small is free and unlimited, which is the whole point.
Positioning, audience strategy, campaign strategy, RFP strategy, brand platform, strategic narrative, creative brief. Any discrete body of work that requires real creation. Finish one, start the next. No cap on how many you run in a quarter.
"Read this deck." "We just got this brief, what's your read?" Thirty minutes with the team before they go the wrong way. None of it touches the assignment slot, so nobody has to decide whether it's worth asking.
A standing hour with whoever needs it that week. Strategy, new business, creative leadership. Use it or don't.
When an RFP lands on a Thursday, you have a senior strategist on it Friday instead of a hiring conversation.
Who does the work
That is a credential and a constraint at the same time. There is no junior draft to fix, because there is no junior. The person in the room is the person doing the work, start to finish.
It's also why the fee can be fixed. The cost of pitch strategy isn't senior time. It's senior time spent redoing someone else's.
Mike Bruno founded Strangely after two decades building and leading strategy teams inside large agencies, then building the repeatable category-design process behind work for companies like Cloudflare, HubSpot, and DocuSign. He watched the rewrite spiral from the inside for long enough to build the thing that skips it.
Edelman · Weber Shandwick · Cloudflare · HubSpot · DocuSign
What it costs
A fixed fee, scaled to the size of the business you're pitching for. You know it on day one and it does not move on day ninety.
Most agencies start with a quarter. Some start with the pitch that's already on the desk, and that's fine too — a single RFP, priced and scoped on its own, with the option to keep going afterward.
Either way, the end of it is the exit. If it hasn't earned its place, you stop and nothing has to be unwound. No notice period, no headcount, no severance conversation.
Pricing is quoted after a short conversation about what's actually coming.
Start
Twenty minutes, no deck. If Strangely isn't the right shape for what you're facing, we'll say so and point you at what is.