For the builders
Grada means to build.
This is for the executives, founders, and operators who build things, who are responsible not just for reacting to what the market does, but for making the choices that determine whether their organisations win or lose. The people who sit in the room where strategy is decided and who live with the consequences.
The world has plenty of commentary. What it needs is clarity and structured thinking that cuts through the noise and surfaces the questions that matter. That’s what this is.
Why subscribe?
Industry deep dives that map the structural forces reshaping Australian sectors and the strategic bets competitors in those sectors are making in response.
Company strategy breakdowns that go deep into whether the stated strategy is internally coherent, where the logic breaks down, and what the board should be asking.
Regular operating environment briefs that cut through the noise, the macro and industry signals that matter this week, mapped to specific sector and company implications.
What you won’t get: stock picks, consulting speak, strategy theory, trading ideas, or macro forecasts. If your job is to allocate capital in markets, there are excellent newsletters for that. If your job is to allocate capital within an organisation, making the strategic choices that determine whether the business wins or loses, this is for you.
The question nobody is asking
Morningstar gives you moat ratings and fair value estimates. IBISWorld gives you voluminous industry insights. McKinsey gives you marketing disguised as thought leadership. Gartner provides a platform for vendors to buy credibility rather than provide objective insights.
Nobody consistently asks whether your company’s strategy actually holds together. What is your unique theory of value creation? Why would a customer choose you over a competing brand they’ve used for fifteen years? Do your capabilities match the theory of advantage? What specific conditions must be true for this to work?
The strategy graph
A company’s strategy can be traced as a connected set of choices: what it aspires to achieve, where it chooses to compete, how it plans to win in those arenas, the capabilities it must build to deliver on that theory, and the management systems that hold the whole thing together. These aren’t independent decisions. They’re a chain of logic. Each choice constrains and enables the next.
The strategy graph makes that chain visible. It connects a company’s public statements, financial data, and observable behaviour into a structured diagnosis. Where the logic is tight, the strategy is coherent. Where it breaks - where the aspiration doesn’t match the playing field, where the capabilities are missing, where the management systems send conflicting signals - the graph reveals the gap.
Then it asks the forward-looking question: what would have to be true for this strategy to work? And tracks whether those conditions are being met.
This is what produces the analysis you’ll read in grada. Not opinion. Not narrative. Structured diagnosis grounded in public evidence, surfacing the questions the board should be asking.
What’s coming
The first series covers the Australian automotive aftermarket, a $21 billion industry most people have never thought about, where three companies are making fundamentally different strategic bets on how to win the same customer.
One is spending its way to scale with a US$23.5 billion parent behind it. One is trying to integrate its way out of a crisis with a genuinely distinctive strategic idea, but with no proof that it can execute. And one has the structural assets to disrupt the entire supply model from a direction nobody is defending.
Then we will deep-dive into the major sectors and businesses that shape and drive the Australian economy, one sector at a time.
Subscribers get the full analysis, deep dives, strategy graphs, forward-looking conditions, and a say in which sectors to analyse.
