If this looks familiar, I posted at Linked In about November 1, but not here at the DIHP blog.
They Infest Linked In
Lately, every day Linked In has been offered me "McKinsey Guide to CLAUDE," "Consultant's Guide to CLAUDE." Usually the exciting-sounding offers dead end at a registration page and sign in with your email.
Steve Jobs Got His Best Ideas Walking, TooWalking home from lunch with some consultant colleagues, it occurred to me that my own Claude account could probably write me a guide to strategy consulting in ten minutes. It did. And honestly, it’s pretty good.
As I read, I kept thinking: “I can use THIS to help Client A today—and THAT with my deck for Client B tomorrow.” So I’m sharing it here. Free. No registration or email required.
What You Get (for free)
It’s a 44-page booklet in two parts.
The first 17 pages introduce 21 consulting skills—from framing a problem and auditing assumptions to pricing strategy, competitive war-gaming, and writing a decision memo. Each includes a reusable instruction you can paste into Claude, plus a worked example involving a fictional genomics company facing major strategic decisions.
Pages 18–44 start over and take that same company through a detailed consulting engagement. You see how the skills connect, how one finding changes the next decision, and how the analysis becomes a recommendation for the board..
It’s a little “MBA in a Box”—with a genomics startup as the classroom.
DOWNLOAD IT HERE.
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In the case study, nearly every fact is labeled with its origin. S, sourced from a "data room" (a list of key facts), D (derived from such facts, such as revenue - cost = profit [D]). Or A, assumed, which you'll find why in that sentence or two.
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This was my initial prompt, with some screen shots of covers. It came back with a book, 16pp, 7500 words. It offered to expand with a detailed business school type case study; I said yes. Claude then basically doubled its length which produced the 44 page work product. Claude and I spent perhaps an hour with back-and-forth refinements.
The case study, which Claude made up quickly while writing its deliverable.Meridian Genomics is a fictional 120-person CLIA lab in Phoenix with a tumor-informed MRD assay for colorectal cancer. It has a PLA code but no Medicare coverage, $14 million in revenue, a $6.2 million annual loss, and $22 million in cash. The board wants a three-year plan and has mostly decided what it should say: get MolDX coverage. Management’s plan is to submit in early 2027, expect coverage a year later at about the $1,900 rate the dominant national competitor reportedly receives, and triple commercial volume by 2029.
The first twist comes from arithmetic on the client’s own numbers. Meridian’s fully loaded cost per test is $2,100. Its commercial tests bring in $1,522, so each one loses $578. Coverage at $1,900 would still lose about $200 per test. The board’s strategy would turn a flat, money-losing channel into a growing, money-losing channel. The real business is biopharma. Trial sponsors using the assay as an endpoint account for 68% of revenue, grew 40% without any sales effort, and earn about $694 per test. The board had been treating that business as a bridge to coverage.
The second twist is in the profit pool. The money in MRD isn’t in the test fee. It sits in trial services, meaning documentation, logistics and regulatory support, and in licensing longitudinal data. Meridian already does trial services but has never charged for them as a product. The national competitor’s low-margin covered volume turns out to be a way of building the data asset.
The recommendation is to make trial services a named business line with per-program pricing, data-rights clauses and regulatory-grade documentation, and to cut cost per test toward $1,400. Meridian would prepare the coverage dossier but submit it only after passing gates the board sets: cost at or below $1,500, a full sponsor pipeline, and a realistic MolDX timeline. In the base case this is worth about +$19 million in NPV, compared with roughly −$2 million for cost-then-coverage. The downside is mild under this plan and could eat most of the balance sheet under the coverage-first plan.
The third twist comes from the war game. It breaks an earlier assumption that the competitor would take 12 to 18 months to respond. In the simulation it offers sponsors free assays in exchange for data rights within a year. Meridian can’t beat free on price, so it retreats to registrational trials, where documentation and exclusivity are worth more than a discount. That revision then flows back into the segmentation and the roadmap.
