A report answers the question you brought. Advisory begins earlier — we meet, we discuss, we understand the issue together, because the question you arrive with is rarely the one that decides the matter. What follows is a retained relationship with the same discipline as the reports: sourced, red-teamed, logged.
We meet. A conversation, not a form. You describe the situation in your own terms.
We understand. We ask until we hold the real question — often not the one that opened the meeting.
We scope. A defined engagement, deliverables, and price. Or an honest 'a single Report covers this'.
You decide. Retain, take the one-off scope, or walk away with a clearer question than you came with.
A retained relationship: your footprint, people, and open questions held in working memory — so advice starts from context, not a cold brief.
Direct access to the analyst while a situation develops — someone travelling, a location degrading, a counterparty surprise — with judgements sourced and logged as they're made.
Your analysts, vendors, or feeds produce a view — we argue against it the way we argue against our own, and show where it holds and where it doesn't.
5 retainers at a time — because that's how many pictures one analyst can genuinely hold in working memory, not because scarcity sells. We intend that number to rise as more of the mechanical work is carried by tooling rather than by attention, and we'd rather move it slowly than quietly let the standard slip to fit more names on the list. If capacity is full when you write, we say so and offer a start date.
Most firms treat this as a legal appendix. For an intelligence firm it's part of the product: the question you asked us is itself confidential, before any answer exists.
Describe the exposure you'd want held in working memory — we'll come back with a scope, a cadence, and a price.
→ A scoped retainer proposal, not a pitch deck→ An honest read on whether you need Advisory or just a Report→ Strict discretion from the first email