Blog Post

I've spent my career in enterprise technology, and one pattern has become impossible to ignore: the strategy-execution gap doesn't just exist inside companies. It exists across portfolios.

If you're a management consultancy, you know this feeling. You've done the analysis. Built the framework. Delivered the strategy deck. The client nods enthusiastically. You leave.

Six months later, maybe 30% of it got executed.

If you're a private equity firm, the version is slightly different. You've completed the acquisition. Agreed the value creation plan. Set the 100-day priorities. Then you wait for the quarterly board deck to find out what actually happened - by which time, any underperformance has already cost you a quarter.

In both cases, the problem is the same: you're investing in strategy but flying blind on execution. And when you're managing five, ten, or fifty companies at once, that visibility gap doesn't just persist - it multiplies.

This is one of the most overlooked opportunities in enterprise technology today. And it's exactly what we built Zontally to solve.

The consultancy problem: delivery ends at the deck

Let's be honest about the traditional consultancy model.

An engagement starts with diagnosis. You map the client's strategic landscape, identify opportunities, build a framework, and deliver a set of recommendations. The work is often brilliant. The decks are certainly beautiful.

Then the engagement ends.

The client goes back to their day job. Your strategy competes with forty-seven other priorities. It gets filtered through middle management. Parts of it get implemented. Parts of it get adapted beyond recognition. Parts of it quietly die in a SharePoint folder nobody opens again.

And the consultancy? You move on to the next engagement. Maybe you do a quarterly check-in. Maybe you don't. Either way, you have no real visibility into whether your strategy actually drove results.

This creates three problems:

The proof problem. You can't demonstrate that your work created value. Your case studies say "we developed a transformation strategy for a FTSE 250 retailer." They can't say "our strategy delivered 12% revenue growth over 18 months" - because you don't have the data.

The relationship problem. Engagements are project-based. They end. The client moves on. There's no structural reason for them to come back to you rather than the next firm that pitches them.

The differentiation problem. Every strategy consultancy delivers decks. If your competitors also deliver decks, your only differentiator is the quality of your thinking. That's important - but it's not a moat.

Now imagine a different model.

Instead of delivering a strategy deck, you deliver a strategy execution platform. Your client's strategy lives in a system - with clear ownership, aligned initiatives, operating rhythms, and real-time visibility into execution progress. You maintain access. You can see whether the strategy is being executed. You can intervene early when it's not.

One platform. Multi-tenant. Every client running their strategy in a living system you can see into.

That's not just consulting anymore. That's a recurring relationship. That's proof of impact. That's a competitive moat the next firm can't replicate with a better slide deck.

The PE problem: quarterly surprises

Private equity firms have a different version of the same gap.

An operating partner at a typical PE firm might oversee ten to fifteen portfolio companies. Each one has its own management team, its own tools, its own way of tracking strategy execution. Some use OKRs. Some use balanced scorecards. Some use Excel. One particularly adventurous CTO built a custom dashboard that only he understands.

The operating partner's visibility into execution health comes primarily through one channel: the quarterly board pack.

Think about what that means. You're making investment decisions based on data that's 90 days old. By the time you spot that a portfolio company is off-track on its value creation plan, you've already lost a quarter. The intervention is late. The cost is real.

The best PE operations teams are starting to recognise that this model doesn't scale. They need:

Real-time execution visibility across the entire portfolio - not quarterly snapshots.

Standardised operational discipline - the same execution foundations applied consistently across every holding, regardless of which management team is running it.

Early warning systems - AI that flags deviations from the value creation plan before they become board-level problems.

Portfolio-level pattern recognition - the ability to see which execution practices are working across your strongest performers and replicate them in underperformers.

This is what Zontally's multi-instance architecture was designed for. Each portfolio company gets its own instance - their own data, their own configuration, their own execution environment. But the PE firm gets portfolio-wide visibility across all of them.

Same platform. Same methodology. Every company. Real-time.

It's the difference between managing by quarterly surprise and managing by continuous signal.

The platform shift

There's a broader trend here that goes beyond Zontally.

The companies that win in the next decade won't just deliver services - they'll deliver platforms. Consultancies that embed themselves in their clients' operating systems will outlast those that deliver PDFs. PE firms that standardise execution infrastructure across their portfolios will create value faster than those that rely on quarterly check-ins and hope.

This is already happening in other domains. Accounting firms moved from annual audits to continuous monitoring platforms. IT service providers moved from break-fix to managed services. The pattern is always the same: move from periodic delivery to continuous platform engagement.

Strategy execution is next.

And the technology now exists to do it properly. Zontally's AI layer - the Chief of Staff and Leadership Coach digital employees - doesn't just work for individual managers. It works at portfolio scale. Every manager, in every portfolio company, gets the same contextual, intelligent support. The PE firm or consultancy gets the same portfolio-wide visibility.

That's not a tool. That's execution infrastructure.

What this means for you

If you're a consultancy partner reading this, ask yourself: what would change if you could see, in real time, whether your clients were executing on the strategies you helped build? What would that do to your retention rates? Your case studies? Your competitive position?

If you're a PE operating partner, ask yourself: what would change if you had real-time execution visibility across every portfolio company? What would earlier intervention be worth? What would standardised operational discipline do to your exit multiples?

The strategy-execution gap is the most expensive problem in business. And for anyone managing multiple companies, it's not just expensive - it's invisible until it's too late.

It doesn't have to be.

James Neilson is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Zontally. He spent over three years at ServiceNow building enterprise relationships with some of the world's most complex organisations. Connect with him on LinkedIn.