Strategic Planning
Consultant

It depends on whether you are buying a plan or a plan that gets built. Navigator's Strategy Map diagnostic is a fixed $1,500 and delivers a working operating blueprint, not a slide deck. If you then want the plan installed, a build engagement runs $5,000 to $10,000 CAD per month at 10 to 15 hours per week over 10 to 16 weeks, and an ongoing retainer after that runs $2,000 to $5,000 per month. For context, the Canadian fractional market ranges from $3,000 to $15,000 per month, and a full-time COO costs $150,000 to $300,000 per year. Traditional advise-only planners may quote lower for a document, but a document that never gets executed changes nothing.

A strategic plan defines where the business is going and why: the direction, priorities, and the few outcomes that matter most over the next one to three years. An operational plan defines how those priorities actually get executed: the systems, owners, sequence, and metrics that turn direction into daily work. Most businesses have some version of the strategic layer and almost none of the operational layer, which is exactly why strategy stalls. Navigator's Strategy Map bridges the two. It ends in an operating blueprint so the plan can be built, not just presented.

Most strategic plans fail because they are documents, not systems. A plan gets written at an offsite, everyone agrees, and then the business goes back to running the way it always did because nothing in the operation changed. The plan had no owner, no sequence, and no connection to the systems that run the day-to-day. Navigator treats strategic planning as the first step of a build. The Strategy Map diagnostic ends in an operating blueprint, and the 10 to 16 week build turns that blueprint into installed systems your team runs on, so the strategy survives contact with reality.

They solve different halves of the same problem. A strategic planning consultant helps you decide where to go. A Fractional COO, in Navigator's model an Operations Architect, owns getting there: audit, blueprint, build, team training, and handover. Navigator starts every relationship with the Strategy Map diagnostic at $1,500, which functions as strategic planning that ends in an operating blueprint. If you want that blueprint installed, the same operator builds the systems over a 10 to 16 week engagement. So you rarely have to choose between the two roles when the planning is designed to lead into the build.

Yes, when the planning ends in something you can execute. For a Canadian business between $500K and $15M+ in revenue, the risk is not the lack of ideas, it is the lack of an operating system to carry them out. A $1,500 Strategy Map diagnostic gives an owner a clear picture of where the business is going, where the operation is blocking it, and a prioritized blueprint of what to build first. That is a low-cost way to replace vague direction with a concrete sequence, and it is far cheaper than a full-time COO at $150,000 to $300,000 per year.

Navigator's Strategy Map diagnostic is a focused, fixed-scope engagement that maps the direction and returns an operating blueprint. If you move into the build, installing the plan as working systems runs 10 to 16 weeks from kickoff to handover: roughly two weeks of audit, one week for the blueprint, six to twelve weeks of building the systems, and a final handover with team training. A full engagement never exceeds 16 weeks. The point is that planning and building are one continuous path, not two disconnected projects separated by months of inertia.