Boost has appointed Marta Novak as Head of Client Strategy, effective immediately. In this role, Marta leads the design and expansion of Boost's Consulting pillar — the strategic advisory arm that works alongside Agency, Labs, and Academy to deliver integrated growth infrastructure for mid-market companies.
The appointment reflects a specific strategic decision about where Boost is headed and what our clients are asking for. But before we discuss the direction, it's worth understanding who Marta is and why she chose Boost over the consulting establishments where she'd built her career.
From McKinsey to the Mid-Market
Marta spent seven years at McKinsey & Company, rising to engagement manager — the role responsible for leading client projects, managing consulting teams, and translating analytical findings into strategic recommendations. Her specialization was growth strategy for professional services and B2B technology companies, and by any conventional measure, her career was on an exceptional trajectory.
She left because of a problem that anyone who's hired a management consultant will recognize.
"The analysis was always excellent," Marta says. "McKinsey hires extraordinary people and gives them extraordinary analytical tools. The strategy decks we produced were rigorous, insightful, and beautifully designed. And most of them ended up on shelves. Not because the clients were lazy or the strategies were wrong. Because the strategies were designed by people who understood analysis but not operations. We'd hand over a 120-page recommendation to a leadership team that was already running at 110% capacity and say 'implement this.' Then we'd move on to the next engagement."
The implementation gap — the structural disconnect between strategy design and strategy execution — is well-documented in the consulting industry. Research on strategic plan execution consistently puts the failure rate between 60% and 90%. Marta saw it firsthand, engagement after engagement.
"I started tracking it informally during my last two years," she says. "Not officially — this isn't something McKinsey measures, and for good reason, because the numbers aren't flattering for anyone in traditional consulting. But I'd follow up with clients six months after we delivered. Of the engagements I tracked, roughly 70% had implemented less than 20% of our recommendations. The ones that implemented more were almost always the ones where the CEO personally drove execution. The strategy succeeded when one extremely motivated individual forced it through the organization despite the organization's natural resistance. That's not a scalable model."
The realization that crystallized her decision to leave wasn't that the strategies were bad. It was that the delivery model was structurally incapable of producing implementation.
"Traditional consulting separates thinking from doing," she explains. "Strategists think. Operators do. The strategist doesn't have to live with the consequences of a recommendation that's brilliant on paper but impossible to execute with the tools, team, and timeline the client actually has. At Boost, strategy connects directly to execution infrastructure. When I design a 90-day sprint for a client, it's not a document they'll try to implement. It's a plan that connects to the CRM configuration, the automation workflows, the marketing campaigns, and the dashboards that my colleagues are building simultaneously. The strategy doesn't go on a shelf because it's already wired into the systems that execute it."
Why This Hire, Why Now
The decision to bring Marta on board reflects a shift we've observed across our client base over the past eighteen months. When Boost launched, most clients engaged primarily through the Agency pillar — they needed sales infrastructure, marketing engines, and automation systems built and deployed. The Consulting pillar existed but was secondary. Clients wanted execution first, strategy second.
That ratio is changing. As our client portfolio has matured and as word has spread about the integrated model, we're seeing a growing segment of operators who want strategic partnership before — or alongside — execution. They don't just want us to build their sales infrastructure. They want someone to help them decide which markets to enter, how to allocate resources across growth initiatives, and how to structure the next twelve months of investment for maximum compound impact.
Michael A., CEO and Co-Founder of Boost, describes the shift: "When we started, clients came to us and said 'build me a sales system.' Now an increasing number come to us and say 'help me figure out what to build first and why.' That's a fundamentally different conversation. It requires a different depth of strategic capability. Marta brings that depth — and more importantly, she brings it with an operator's instinct for what actually gets implemented versus what looks good in a presentation."
The Consulting pillar under Marta's leadership will expand in three specific directions.
Deeper strategic engagements. The 90-day sprint framework — which has been the backbone of every Boost consulting engagement — is being enriched with more rigorous strategic analysis at the front end. Competitive intelligence, market sizing, pricing architecture, and resource allocation modeling will become standard components of the sprint design process. The sprint itself remains 90 days. The strategic foundation underneath it becomes more robust.
Fractional C-suite capability. A growing number of mid-market companies need strategic leadership they can't yet afford full-time. Marta is designing a fractional advisory model where Boost strategists serve as part-time strategic partners to client leadership teams — attending monthly or bi-weekly strategic sessions, providing ongoing competitive intelligence, and ensuring that the sprint architecture stays aligned with the evolving market reality. This isn't the traditional fractional executive model where a consultant shows up periodically and offers opinions. It's a model where the fractional strategist has real-time access to the client's operational data through the Boost infrastructure, making their strategic input grounded in current performance rather than last quarter's board deck.
Executive education integration. Marta is working closely with Samira Patel's Academy team to ensure that the strategic frameworks taught in the Growth Architecture Cohort align with the consulting frameworks deployed in client engagements. The goal is continuity: an Academy graduate who later engages Boost Consulting should experience the same strategic language, the same sprint architecture, and the same OKR methodology. The education and the advisory aren't separate products. They're different entry points into the same operating system.
The 90-Day Sprint Framework
Since the sprint framework is central to Marta's role and to the Consulting pillar's expansion, it's worth explaining what it is and why it matters for mid-market operators.
The 90-day sprint is Boost's alternative to the traditional annual strategic plan. The premise is simple: annual plans fail because they're designed with assumptions that become obsolete within weeks, they're too long-horizon to maintain urgency, and they don't include structured mechanisms for adaptation. The 90-day sprint addresses all three failures.
Each sprint begins with a design phase — typically a one-to-two-week period where the leadership team defines 3–5 OKRs for the quarter. Not twelve objectives. Not a comprehensive strategic plan covering every department and initiative. Three to five objectives that represent the highest-leverage investments for the next 90 days. The discipline of constraint — choosing what not to do as explicitly as choosing what to do — is one of the framework's most valuable features.
Each OKR has measurable key results, each key result has weekly milestones, and each milestone has an owner. The cascade from strategic objective to weekly action is explicit and traceable. A team member working on a Tuesday afternoon task can trace that task through the milestone through the key result to the quarterly objective. That traceability creates alignment without requiring everyone to be a strategic thinker. It requires them to be a disciplined executor against a clear plan.
The sprint includes built-in adaptation points at approximately week four and week eight. These aren't optional check-ins. They're structured reviews where the leadership team examines the leading indicators (pipeline velocity, activity metrics, lead quality, system adoption) against the assumptions that informed the sprint design. When the data contradicts an assumption, the sprint is adjusted — not abandoned, adjusted. The adaptation is the system working as designed, not a sign of failure.
At sprint end, a formal review measures outcomes against OKRs, identifies what worked and what didn't, tests the assumptions that proved correct and incorrect, and uses those learnings to design the next sprint.
"The sprint framework isn't revolutionary in concept," Marta acknowledges. "Agile methodologies, OKRs, quarterly planning — none of these ideas are new. What's different about the Boost version is that it's connected to infrastructure. When I set an OKR about pipeline growth, it's not an abstract target. It's connected to the CRM pipeline data that updates in real time. When I set a milestone about marketing-qualified lead volume, it's connected to the actual marketing systems that are generating those leads. The measurement isn't a retrospective exercise. It's a live feed. And that changes everything about how quickly you can detect problems and adapt."
The framework has been deployed across every Boost consulting engagement since inception. The results, measured across 200+ engagements: companies using the full sprint architecture achieve their strategic objectives at roughly 2–3x the rate of companies using traditional annual planning. The improvement isn't from better strategy. It's from better connection between strategy and the operational systems that execute it.
What This Means for the Mid-Market Consulting Landscape
Marta's appointment and the Consulting pillar's expansion reflect a broader trend that extends well beyond Boost. The mid-market consulting model is being rethought industry-wide, driven by a fundamental dissatisfaction among operators with the traditional approach.
The traditional model: a consulting firm arrives, conducts interviews and analysis over several weeks, produces a strategy document, presents it to the leadership team, and departs. The client is left to implement the recommendations with whatever internal resources they have. If the implementation stalls — and it usually does — the consultant is available for additional engagement at additional fees.
The problems with this model are structural, not incidental. The consultant doesn't have operational context. They've studied the business from the outside, but they haven't operated the systems, managed the team, or experienced the daily constraints that shape what's actually feasible. Their recommendations are analytically sound and operationally naive — optimized for a version of the company that exists on paper rather than the version that exists in reality.
The emerging model — the one Boost is building and that Marta's appointment accelerates — looks fundamentally different. The strategist has real-time access to operational data. Their recommendations are tested against current performance, not last quarter's survey. The strategy connects directly to execution infrastructure. The sprint architecture keeps strategy fresh — reviewed, measured, and adjusted every 90 days. And the strategist has operator experience — they've run P&Ls, managed teams, and built companies, so their recommendations carry the weight of lived operational reality.
"The mid-market is done paying for advice that doesn't connect to action," Marta says. "Operators at this stage don't need someone to tell them what's wrong. They can feel what's wrong. They need someone who can connect the diagnosis to a treatment plan that actually runs — on their systems, with their team, in their timeline. That's what Boost Consulting is designed to do. It's what I left McKinsey to do."
What This Means for Current and Future Clients
For companies currently engaged with Boost Consulting, Marta's appointment means three things.
First, enhanced strategic depth. The sprint design process will include more rigorous analytical components — competitive positioning analysis, market opportunity sizing, and resource allocation frameworks that bring McKinsey-level analytical rigor to the operator-speed sprint format. The sprints themselves don't get longer or more complex. The foundation underneath them gets stronger.
Second, continuity with the operator ethos. Marta was specifically hired because she brings elite analytical capability and an operator's instinct for implementation. The Consulting pillar won't become more academic or more theoretical. If anything, the emphasis on connecting strategy to execution infrastructure will intensify under her leadership. Every strategic recommendation will continue to have a direct line to the systems that execute it.
Third, expanded advisory capacity. As the Consulting pillar grows, Boost will be able to serve more clients with dedicated strategic partnership. The current model — where a senior strategist is assigned to each consulting engagement rather than shared across forty accounts — will be maintained. The expansion is in the number of strategists, not in the dilution of attention.
For companies considering a Boost engagement, Marta's appointment signals that the Consulting pillar is not a secondary offering bolted onto the Agency's execution capabilities. It's a co-equal pillar with its own leadership, its own methodology, and its own expansion trajectory. Operators who need strategic partnership before or alongside execution now have a dedicated entry point with the depth to match their ambitions.
The goal hasn't changed. What Accenture does for the Fortune 500, reimagined for the mid-market and built on AI. Marta's appointment is the next step in making that real — bringing world-class strategic capability to the companies that need it most and can least afford to waste it on recommendations that never get implemented.
About Boost
Boost is the growth infrastructure company for ambitious mid-market businesses. We integrate AI-powered sales, marketing, automation, and strategic consulting into one compounding ecosystem. Founded by operators. Powered by AI. Learn more at Boost.com.
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