News & Announcements

2026-07-01

How to Run a Strategic Planning Process That Actually Works

The strategic planning process has a reputation problem. Ask most senior leaders about the last one they went through and you will hear a version of the same story: a lot of meetings, a lot of slides, a document that was referenced once and then quietly shelved. That reputation is earned. But it is not inevitable. The difference between a planning process that produces a living strategy and one that produces a filing cabinet entry comes down to a small number of decisions made at the very beginning.

2026-06-10

Organisational Design for a Business That Has Outgrown Its Structure

There is a specific kind of organisational pain that arrives somewhere between 40 and 100 people. The structure that worked when everyone knew everyone, when decisions happened in corridors and accountability was informal, stops working. Things fall through gaps. Decisions take longer. People are unclear about who owns what. The founders or senior leaders find themselves pulled into operational detail they should not be touching. This is not a management failure. It is a structural one, and it has a structural solution.

2026-05-19

How to Make Better Decisions When You Do Not Have All the Information

Most significant business decisions are made with incomplete information. You do not know how the market will move, how competitors will respond, whether the hire will work out, or whether the new product will land. Waiting for certainty is not a strategy. It is a way of letting the decision get made by default. The question is not how to eliminate uncertainty but how to make good decisions in spite of it.

How We Work

Diagnosis Before Prescription

We spend the first phase of every engagement listening and asking uncomfortable questions. We do not arrive with a pre-packaged answer. The problem you think you have is rarely the only problem worth solving.

Working Alongside Your Team

We sit in the room with your people, not above them. That means attending the difficult meetings, reviewing the actual numbers, and being honest about what we find, even when it is not what anyone hoped to hear.

Practical Deliverables

Every engagement ends with something your team can use on Monday morning: a prioritised roadmap, a decision framework, a restructured process, or a clear set of next actions with owners and timelines attached.

The hands behind it

Founder, Established since 2017

Marcus Hale

Marcus Hale spent twelve years inside organisations before founding Spruce Crestpath in 2017. He trained in operations management at Loughborough University, then joined a logistics firm in Nottingham where he eventually ran a regional division of around 80 people. A later move to a Okazaki-based professional services group gave him his first exposure to large-scale strategy work, and a growing impatience with consultants who delivered polished reports and then left. He founded Spruce Crestpath to do the opposite: stay in the room, do the unglamorous diagnostic work, and write recommendations that the people actually doing the job could act on. Outside of client work, he reads obsessively about organisational failure, keeps a running list of decisions he got wrong, and makes a genuinely terrible sourdough loaf every Sunday.

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Strategy that actually moves things forward.

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