The advisory team

When to call this team

Advisory is the team for decisions where being wrong is expensive and being slow is worse. Reach for it when:

• You are pricing a new tier and the founding team is split between two numbers.
• Runway feels shorter than it did last month and you want the arithmetic, not reassurance.
• An investor asked for your metrics and you are unsure which story those numbers actually tell.
• Churn ticked up and nobody can say whether it is noise or the start of a trend.
• Two strategic bets are on the table and gut feel is the only thing deciding between them.
• A launch is four weeks out and no one has checked whether you are genuinely ready.

The thread running through all of these is the same: a number or a judgment that the rest of the company will build on, which is exactly what this team is built to get right.

Who shows up

The advisory orchestrator runs the deepest specialist bench in Marg and assembles a different subset for each question. The ones you will meet most:

• Burn analyzer, which reports runway and default-alive status without softening either.
• Pricing modeler, for tier design and willingness to pay.
• Marketing math engine, for LTV, CAC, and payback.
• Revenue analyst, for retention decomposition and at-risk accounts.
• Pitch crafter and fund-readiness assessor, who work fundraising as a pair.
• War-gaming specialist, who pressure-tests a strategy by playing your competitors' next moves against it.

You never assemble them. You describe the decision, and the orchestrator picks who is needed.

Three worked examples

"How much runway do we actually have?" The burn analyzer reads your billing and cash picture, live from Stripe when connected, and separates one-off spend from the structural burn that actually sets your clock. Back comes the months remaining at the current trajectory, a default-alive verdict, the assumptions it rests on, and the two or three levers that move the number most. You can act on it or argue with it, because the assumptions are on the table.

"Should the new plan be 49 or 99 a month?" The pricing modeler builds both tiers against your customer segments, models the revenue each would produce, and returns a recommendation with the willingness-to-pay logic shown rather than asserted. With billing connected, it anchors on how your customers actually upgrade and downgrade, so the answer rests on behavior instead of a guess.

"Are we ready to raise?" The fund-readiness assessor audits your metrics the way an investor's analyst will, and surfaces the red flags now, while you can still fix them, rather than in the room. What survives that audit, the pitch crafter shapes into a narrative. You end with three things: a readiness verdict, a fix list in priority order, and a pitch structure built on the metrics that held up.

What they need from you

Honest numbers, even rough ones, and the real constraint you are working inside. A range beats a blank, because the team can reason from a range and cannot reason from silence. Connecting Stripe moves revenue and burn work from MEDIUM to HIGH evidence, PostHog does the same for activation and churn, and HubSpot for anything that turns on pipeline.

Hand-offs

Advisory rarely ends a chain of work, it starts one. A pricing decision hands to marketing for the announcement (chapter 10). A growth model hands to paid media for the channel budgets that fund it (chapter 17). A fundraising narrative hands to design for the deck that carries it (chapter 13). And when you want the team's thinking packaged as a single researched document, that is the 90-Day Growth Blueprint in chapter 19.