Director of Strategy

The Hiring Challenge in Venture-Backed Businesses

Strategy at scale-up stage looks different from strategy at enterprise scale. There's less data, less precedent, and far less time: a Director of Strategy is expected to help decide what market to enter next, how to position against well-funded competitors, and what the next funding round's narrative should be, often all within the same quarter. Few candidates have genuinely operated at that pace.

The Enterprise Strategist Gap

Many candidates have strong strategy backgrounds from larger, more established organisations, but the rigour they're used to applying over months doesn't always compress into the weeks a scale-up actually has, and recommendations can arrive too polished and too late to be useful.

The Founder-Adjacent Generalist Gap

Other candidates have strong general scale-up experience but have never been accountable for structured strategic thinking specifically: market sizing, competitive positioning, and the analytical case behind a major directional decision.

Why Scale-ups Mis-Hire

Some founders ask a trusted early employee to take on strategy work without the structured training to do it rigorously, and decisions end up resting on instinct alone when the stakes are too high for that. Others hire a strategy consultant straight from a firm with no scale-up experience, and the output reads well but assumes resources and time horizons the business doesn't have.

The Movemeon Approach

Our network includes ex-consultants from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and other top-tier firms who have moved into Director of Strategy and senior strategy roles at venture-backed companies themselves.

Consulting Background, Applied at Scale-up Speed

These candidates bring the structured, hypothesis-driven thinking built in consulting, paired with the pragmatism to compress that rigour into the timelines a fast-growing, resource-constrained business actually has, delivering a credible answer in weeks, not a perfect one in months.

What Strong Candidates Solve For

• A major market or product decision with no structured analysis behind it: building the case for where to compete next and why
• A fundraising narrative that needs sharpening: translating the company's traction and ambition into a strategy investors find credible
• Competitive pressure from better-funded rivals: assessing the landscape honestly and recommending where the business can genuinely win
• Growth targets without a clear path to deliver them: translating ambition into a sequenced plan the team can actually execute against
• A founder making high-stakes calls without a strategic sounding board: providing the rigour and outside perspective to pressure-test major decisions before they're made

Built for the Permanent Mandate

Continuity Through Growth Stages

A permanent Director of Strategy builds strategic context across successive funding rounds and growth phases, developing judgment about the business that a one-off advisor or consulting engagement cannot replicate.

Investor and Board Fluency

Candidates are assessed on their ability to translate strategic thinking into materials and narratives that hold up in front of investors and the board, a distinct skill from strategy roles outside a venture-backed context.

Why Scale-ups Choose Movemeon

Speed

A vetted network of 100,000+ ex-consultants and strategy operators delivers shortlists in days, against the 8-12 weeks typical of retained search; critical when a fundraising or competitive timeline won't wait.

Fit

Every candidate is evaluated for their ability to operate at scale-up pace, not just for analytical strength, so the strategy work lands in weeks rather than months.

Start Your Search

Tell us about the decision you're trying to make, the narrative you need to sharpen, or the strategic capability you're missing, and we'll put forward candidates who've operated under the same pressure before.