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A bright meeting room with a long oak table and a whiteboard of diagrams
Strategy and designManchester

Strategy and design for founders who need to be clearer, faster.

An independent Manchester consultancy for positioning, brand, product and growth. Small senior team, short engagements.

Book an intro call See our results
What we do

Four practices, one small team across all of them.

Most clients start with one practice and find the others follow. You work with the same senior people throughout.

Positioning

What you sell, to whom, and why you over the alternative. We test it with real customers before it goes on a slide.

Usually 2 to 3 weeks.

Brand

Name, voice, identity and the guidelines your team will actually open. Built to hold up on a website, a deck and a delivery van.

Usually 4 to 6 weeks.

Product

Roadmaps, service design and first releases. We sit with your product team and cut the list down to what matters this quarter.

Usually 5 to 7 weeks.

Growth

Pricing, channels and a plan with owners and dates. We measure what moves revenue and drop the rest.

Usually 4 to 8 weeks.

Four people talking around a white table in a meeting room
A positioning session in progress, with the partner leading the room.
Two consultants and a founder discussing printed brand sketchesBrand proofs and swatches from a recent engagement
Who you work with

Partners do the work, not the pitch.

Northgate & Vale is independent and deliberately small. The people you meet in the intro call are the people in the room every week, so nothing gets lost between sales and delivery.

86

founders and operators advised since 2017

8 wks

typical engagement, start to handover

5

senior consultants, no juniors

Case studies

Two engagements, measured results.

Brand identity proofs and swatches laid out on a desk

Brand and positioning, 9 weeks

Hollin & Reed, specialist food producer

Repositioned from wholesale supplier to premium brand, with new packaging and a direct-to-trade range.

41%

rise in average order value within two quarters, with trade accounts up from 38 to 61.

A founder reviewing packaging prototypes in a bright workshop

Product and growth, 7 weeks

Tideway, logistics software

Cut a 60-item roadmap to six bets, rebuilt onboarding and reset pricing around how customers actually use it.

2.3x

trial-to-paid conversion, and churn down from 7.4% to 4.1% a month.

How we work

Short engagements, clear handovers.

Fixed scope and a fixed price agreed after the intro call. You always know what happens this week.

  1. Week 1

    Listen

    Interviews with your team and customers, and a look at the numbers. We write down what we find, plainly.

  2. Weeks 2 to 3

    Decide

    A working session with you to choose the direction. One recommendation, with the reasons.

  3. Weeks 4 to 7

    Build

    We design, write and prototype alongside your people, with a review every Friday.

  4. Week 8

    Hand over

    Files, playbook and a 30-day check-in, so your team runs it without us.

Hands arranging sticky notes on a customer journey map
The week 2 working session: the journey map that becomes the plan.

After handover we stay on call for 30 days. Most clients return within a year for a second practice.

Contact

Thirty minutes with a partner. No pitch deck.

Tell us where the business is stuck and we will say honestly whether we can help. We reply within one working day.

A product team gathered around a laptop in a modern office