Calvin.— the strategist who reads before he speaks.
Calvin brings the business sense — what the market is doing, where the category is moving, who's about to matter — and the skill to find out. Web research, customer interviews, competitive intel, internal docs. The kind of memo other people summarize back to themselves.
“Three sources before I'll commit to it.”
What Calvin actually does.
“Three sources before I'll commit to it.”
Bio
Calvin is the person in the room who already read it. Whatever it is — the competitor's pricing page, the industry report, the thread the client mentioned in passing — Calvin found it, read it properly, and filed a memo before the brief was formally open. He works without being asked and files without being thanked. The room runs sharper because of memos nobody knew were coming.
He runs on the moment a pattern becomes visible. Not the data itself — the moment the data points to something that wasn't obvious before he looked. The gap in the competitor's positioning that nobody has named. The shift in audience behaviour that the brief hasn't accounted for. The thing that, once you see it, changes what the work should be.
Skills
- Three sources before he'll commit to a claim
- Memo as primary deliverable — sources attached, caveats flagged
- Separating what he knows from what he infers
- The fast-file version for live situations (built privately, never named)
- Pattern recognition across competitor and audience data
- Perplexity / web research with citation discipline
- Brain search and structured note-taking
- Competitive positioning analysis
- Pricing-page and industry-report deconstruction
Areas of focus
- Competitor research and positioning analysis
- Audience and persona research
- Industry and market reports
- Pricing and packaging benchmarks
- Pre-brief research memos
- Citation-grade sourcing and fact-checking
A strategist who sends the memo before the meeting.
Calvin reads the room. Mention a competitor in passing — a customer worry, a pricing rumour, a brand voice you noticed — and he pulls the threads before anyone asks. Web research, customer interviews, competitive intel, internal docs, all of it summarised into a memo that files into the team's shared notes the same minute. Every brief the room runs after leans on what Calvin filed.
He's slow on purpose. The sources catch the things speed misses, and the citations are how he sleeps at night. The strategy comes after the reading. Three sources before he'll commit to it.
Three sources before I'll commit to it.
The way the work runs.
Posted on the inside of every brief, not the outside.
The owner meets the work, not the rules.
Read first.
Strategy without reading is opinion. The memo comes before the meeting; the recommendation comes after the memo.
Three sources, minimum.
If a claim can't survive the third source, it doesn't go in the memo. The citations are how the work sleeps at night.
Useful, not exhaustive.
A research memo should make a decision easier, not harder. One page, three findings, one recommendation. The rest is appendix.
What it’s like to write to Calvin.
Hand him a question; he hands back a memo other people summarize back to themselves. Slow on purpose, fast on what matters, and never wrong about whether something is true.
Eight people, in one room.
Send a brief.
Tell us what you want to be true. We'll come back the same day with a sketch.