And it’s why I’m breaking the #1 rule of strategy consulting today

This is not our usual insights-led publication, it is a reflection over the last 9 years and what comes next.

I’ll be straight with you. I’m half scared and half excited writing this.

Excited, because I’ve wanted to do it for years. Scared, because I’m about to open up something I spent the best part of a decade keeping behind closed doors.

Let me start where it started.

I founded FF&A in June 2017, nine years ago this month, around a single purpose: enabling growth in the FMCG industry. And a conviction that strategy consulting for the world's largest FMCG companies could be done better.

So I made myself a few promises about how we’d work.

• Focus only on the top FMCG companies and only where outperformance is actually won: corporate strategy, organic growth, digital route-to-market, M&A

• Develop effective replicable approaches (Zero-Based-Growth®, Ecommerce 3.0®, How Small Brands Grow®, M&A Best Acquirers®)

• Bring the best of strategy consulting to all teams by charging less than most passing through the benefit of a lean model & high utilization rate

• Share our thought leadership publicly & generously instead of hoarding it

• Grow & promote from within our own people to build a high-performing team and accumulate intellectual capital better than most Firm could

• Keep it small (we are 9 people, soon 10) because scale is often the enemy of quality

• And build long-term Clients relationships, not projects

We are proud of what we have achieved: 150+ strategic engagements completed, 70% of the top 20 FMCG companies are repeat Clients. Our content generates millions of impressions on LinkedIn every month.

Yet, we are not making a dent on our vision: enabling growth in the FMCG industry.

80% of the world's largest FMCG companies lost again market share in 2025. Their growth gap is widening, not reducing.

Our approaches were delivering high impact but our Clients kept sharing the same questions over the years:

• We love the impact but how can we rapidly (in a matter of months, not quarters or years) & cost effectively (vs. full-time strategy engagements) scale it across the entire organization (often including hundreds of brand/ country cells)?

• How can we build even further the teams' capabilities & embed the methodology across the organization at scale & at pace?

I could not answer. As a result, we often ended up focusing on the top value-at-stake areas for our Clients but it was hard to transform the entire organization at pace & at scale.

Achieving the above would have been commercial success for any Firm but I was frustrated.

Maybe I was too hard on myself and those were just the limitations of strategy consulting. At the end of the day, larger strategy consulting Firms could not answer those challenges either with their business models.

So we got back to the drawing board. Incremental scale could not be the answer. Being 50, 100 or 200 would not fundamentally make a difference and would likely dilute quality and our unique competitive advantages.

So in addition to our traditional strategy consulting business, we started building something radically new for our Clients. Something that would combine the best of:

• Strategy consulting (rigorous hypotheses-led problem-solving approach)

• FF&A proprietary replicable approaches

• Online education

• Coaching

Something that will be tailored to multifunctional brand teams' needs. Something that could be consumed anytime, anywhere at a fraction of the cost of a strategy consulting engagement but without losing the rigor and the personal interactions that are so critical to drive results.

The FMCG FF&A Academy® was born. With it, I finally found the answer I owed you.

We picked ZBG® to start, our best-selling approach at FF&A (50+ engagements delivered), the one the most capacity-constrained (~3-6 months Clients waiting list) & the one with the most transformational potential (500bps average growth acceleration).

Slowly, we turned ZBG® into ZBG® Sprint. It took us two years to productize it:

• Designed as a growth accelerator program for multifunctional brand teams, not as an individual academic course

• 6 chapters & 6h+ videos

• 40 ready-to-use actionable frameworks & turnkey management presentations

• 19 case studies

• Personal coaching with bi-weekly calls with me and my team

• Flexible packages (self-paced, 1:1 coaching, full strategy engagement) to meet every brand team's needs without compromising on quality and outcome

• Limited number of seats to maintain quality

• Access to all FF&A publication PDFs

• Includes a lifetime invitation to the yearly FF&A FMCG Growth Summit, where senior FMCG leaders gather in person for peer exchange — Friday 16 April 2027, Dolder Grand, Zurich. The 2027 speaker list is taking shape, with confirmations from the CEOs of Unilever, Coca-Cola Hellenic and Bel Group, and Presidents EMEA at Danone and Kenvue/ Kimberly Clark. More information on the Summit here

For the past few quarters, we have been running the ZBG® Sprint behind closed doors with a small number of clients. The time has now come to open it more widely. Starting today, we are giving priority access to our LinkedIn community for two weeks. 15 seats only, first come, first served. Public access will open Monday 29 June 2026 at 8 am CET.

To get priority access to the ZBG® Sprint -> link.

In the coming quarters, we will add Ecommerce 3.0® and How Small Brands Grow®. It is only the beginning of the journey.

The unwritten rule in strategy consulting is simple: keep proprietary methodology bespoke, sell it expensive, hand it only to clients who can sign six- and seven-figure cheques.

Today, I am breaking that rule to get us one step closer to our vision: enabling at scale growth in the FMCG industry. And it feels very good.

9 years after FF&A creation, it still feels like Day 1.

Exciting times,

Frederic

To know more about the FF&A FMCG Academy® & the ZBG® Sprint:

• link

• If questions, write us at: zbg@fredericfernandezassociates.com or book a call at this link

Get in touch:

To join the ~70k FMCG executives that follow Frederic on LinkedIn, please click here. To start a conversation, email at: frederic@fredericfernandezassociates.com

To join the ~42k FMCG executives that receive our newsletter and all our CEOs Insights, sign-up at the following link: FMCG CEOs - Managing For Growth

To read all our previous publications, visit our newsletter page: FMCG CEOs - Managing For Growth

About FF&A:

FF&A solves the most complex strategic problems of the world largest FMCG companies across with proprietary approaches developed along with our Clients over the last decade:

• Corporate Strategy (Zero-Based-Strategy®)

• Organic Growth (Zero-Based-Growth®)

• Digital RTM (Ecommerce, DTC and EB2B) (Ecommerce 3.0®)

• M&A (M&A Best Acquirers®)

14 out of the world 20 largest FMCG companies are repeat Clients. FF&A team intervenes all across the globe and across all FMCG categories.

To know more, please visit our website: www.fredericfernandezassociates.com