An engagement generates exactly the records the work requires: contact details for the named client team, the papers exchanged, and the notes of what was decided. Nothing is appended from data brokers or public scraping, nothing is enriched, and never pass it to brokers. Payment details, when an order is placed, are handled by our payment processor and we never see the card number ourselves. We retain order records for tax purposes for the period required by law (typically six years), and contact-form messages for up to two years unless you ask us to delete them sooner. You have the right to access, correct, port, or erase any of it; email us and we will respond within thirty days. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority if you believe we have mishandled your data.
A discovery call generates a short note: company, sector, the decision you are wrestling with, and how Marcus can help. If no engagement follows, the note is deleted after six months. Engagement files — workshops, decision memos, board papers we have drafted — are retained for five years, because clients come back years later asking what the reasoning was, and the honest answer lives in the file.
Strategy work involves commercially sensitive information. It is held on encrypted storage at the Honmachidori office, never on personal devices, and never used as anonymised 'case studies' without written consent.
This site sets no marketing cookies and runs no behavioural analytics; the booking page uses a session cookie that dies with your browser tab. You may request a copy, correction or deletion of anything we hold about you — write to Spruce Crestpath, 2-3 Honmachidori, Okazaki City, Aichi 444-0051, Japan, or call +81 564-21-0933. Verified requests are answered within fourteen days.
Strategy workshops generate flipcharts, sticky-note walls and photographs of both. Those photographs are engagement records: they go into the client file, not into anyone's slide library. Names of workshop participants are kept on the attendance sheet for the life of the engagement file and are never used to market to those individuals afterwards — attending your employer's strategy day is not consent to hear from a consultancy.
Referees and case contacts are approached only with the client's introduction. Cold outreach lists have no place in this practice and none are bought or built.
If client data were ever lost or accessed without authorisation, the affected client hears it from us first — within 72 hours of discovery, with what was involved, what was done, and what changes to prevent recurrence. Regulatory notification follows where the law requires it. This paragraph has never been used, and the working practices described above are how we intend to keep it that way.
Backups are encrypted, kept domestically, and tested twice a year by restoring an engagement file and checking it reads.
Revisions are dated at the foot of this page. Active clients are told directly about any change that touches engagement records. Three years of prior versions are retained.
Patterns learned across engagements — that pricing decisions stall more boards than product decisions, say — inform how future workshops are designed. That learning is carried as method, never as data: no client's numbers, names or documents cross into another engagement's room, and the workshop that benefits cannot tell whose experience taught it.
The notes mailing list sends one email when a new article is published — no drip sequences, no re-engagement campaigns, no tracking pixels inside the emails. Open rates are unknown to us by design; the list exists to deliver writing, not to measure readers. Replies to those emails reach a monitored inbox and are treated as reader correspondence under the retention rules above.