The six strategic frameworks behind 80% of consulting engagements

Strategy consulting can look like magic from the outside. Inside, most engagements lean on a surprisingly small toolkit — applied with discipline, sequenced well, and pushed all the way to a recommendation. Here are the six frameworks you'll see again and again.

1. Porter's Five Forces

Diagnoses the structural profitability of an industry and where power sits. The starting point for almost any market or competitive question.

2. SWOT / TOWS

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats — but the value is in TOWS: crossing the quadrants to generate actual moves, not just a four-box list.

3. TAM / SAM / SOM

Market sizing that separates the total opportunity from what you can realistically serve and capture. Indispensable for any go/no-go or fundraising case.

4. PESTEL

Scans the macro environment — political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal — for the forces that reshape industries from the outside.

5. The value chain

Maps where value is created and captured along an industry, revealing where margin concentrates and where it's migrating.

6. Jobs-to-be-Done

Reframes the customer around the progress they're trying to make, which is where positioning and product strategy should start.

The frameworks aren't the hard part — choosing the right one for the question, and following it through to a decision, is. That's the craft.

None of these are secret. What's scarce is the rigor to apply the right one to your specific situation and carry it through to a clear recommendation. That's the gap Gevara closes — selecting and applying the appropriate frameworks automatically, then synthesizing them into a board-grade answer.