Strategy · Corporate Development · Commercial Transformation

An experienced strategist who works inside your business, not from the outside looking in.

Watson & Company is a one-person practice designed for companies and consulting firms that need senior strategy, corporate development, or transformation capacity for a defined stretch of time. Mark joins your team, takes ownership of a problem, develops the analysis & plan, and enables seamless execution.

Start a conversation

How engagements work

Built to embed, not to bolt on.

Watson & Company does not sell packaged projects. Mark joins an existing team as a senior contributor on a defined scope, for weeks or months, and works inside your tools, your meetings, and your operating rhythm. The analysis, the plan, and the people to carry it forward are all still there when the engagement ends.

Consulting and advisory firms

Boutique and mid-sized firms that need an experienced, principal-level contractor to lead a workstream or a case during a busy stretch, including private equity value-creation work, with the client presence and independence to run it without hand-holding.

Companies that need more bandwidth

Strategy, corporate development, and commercial teams with more on the plan than people to deliver it: a market to assess, an acquisition to evaluate, a transformation to get moving. Mark takes a defined piece of the work and carries it through.

Services

Three kinds of problems, and what you get at the end of each.

Strategic Planning and Market Analysis

For a leadership team that needs to decide where the business goes next, with evidence instead of instinct.

Market sizing and segmentation, with a defensible view of where demand is actually growing.
Competitive intelligence: who is winning, how, and what it would take to respond.
A three-to-five year strategic plan the board can read in one sitting, with the initiatives, owners, and numbers behind it.

Annual strategic planningMarket entry and expansion casesCompetitor and industry intelligencePricing and product-line reviewsBoard and investor materials

Corporate Development and Transactions

For a company weighing an acquisition, a divestiture, or a partnership, that needs the work done rigorously and quickly by someone who has done it before.

Target identification and screening against a clear set of strategic and financial criteria.
Commercial and operational assessment of a target, including customer conversations and a candid read on the risks.
Integration planning that starts before close, so day one has an owner for every open question.

Acquisition screening and pipelineTarget assessmentSynergy and business-case modelingIntegration planningPartnership and channel evaluation

Commercial Transformation

For a company whose growth plan has outrun its sales and marketing engine, and needs the commercial organization rebuilt to deliver it.

Go-to-market redesign: which customers to pursue, through which channels, with what offer, and who owns each piece.
Commercial organization and operating model changes, from structure, roles, and coverage to how the team is measured and paid.
Sales capability building, so process, pipeline discipline, and reporting are running in your team's hands before the engagement ends.

Go-to-market strategyCommercial organization redesignOperating model and coverageSales process and pipeline managementCommercial metrics and reportingChange management and rollout

About

Mark Watson

Founder & Principal

Mark Watson founded Watson & Company in 2023 after fifteen years split between corporate strategy and management consulting. The through-line is the same in both: taking a hard business question, doing the analysis properly, and turning it into a plan people will execute.

He started at Whirlpool Corporation in its Global Finance Leadership Development Program, then moved into competitive intelligence. That experience, inside a large operating company and close to strategic planning decisions, shapes how he works with clients today.

He then spent more than a decade in consulting, including L.E.K. Consulting and Beckway Group, leading case teams and workstreams for clients across industrials, business services, and technology-enabled sectors. Much of that work was for private equity firms and their portfolio companies, building and executing value-creation plans, which taught him to work fast, stay close to the numbers, and write for an audience that has read a lot of decks.

He lives in Chicago and works with clients across the United States.

LinkedIn mark@watsandco.com