Free Consult

Our Team

Operators, strategists, creators, & technologists with a shared belief in building great work.

Break / glass is built by a small, focused team that has spent years inside high-growth companies, running research cycles, creating industry-leading content, and building systems to scale.

After seeing see the frustration firms have communicating their expertise, we combined our experience in research, consulting, and content to build b/g as an end-to-end authority-building solution.

Perrin Carrell

Founder & CEO

Perrin Carrell

Founder & CEO

Eric Carrell

Strategic Advisor

Eric Carrell

Strategic Advisor

Michele Huffman

RFP Consultant

n@strativ.ai

Michele Huffman

RFP Consultant

n@strativ.ai

Jordan Lowry

Data & Analytics

Jordan Lowry

Data & Analytics

Brian Marsh

Content Lead

trativ.ai

Brian Marsh

Content Lead

trativ.ai

Jen Haper

Content & Research

trativ.ai

Jen Haper

Content & Research

trativ.ai

History

A few things to know about us:

Thing #1

Thing #2

11/2023

01/2025

Today

Thing #1

Thing #2

11/2023

01/2025

Today

2022

We know consulting.

Our founder, Perrin, comes from the consulting world, starting his career at Towers Watson, where he led campaigns for McDonalds, Mondelez, Harley Davidson, and a suite of other Fortune 100 companies. We know where the bar is.

2022

We know consulting.

we know thought leadership.

Our leadership team has a cumulative 30+ years of experience using thought leadership to drive brand, pipeline, and high-ticket revenue. In just the last 12 months, we've generated 3.2 million impressions, 6,000+ leads and millions of dollars in pipeline, all from thought leadership.

02/2023

we know thought leadership.

02/2023

original research drives everything.

The single biggest lesson that we've learned over the years is that talk is cheap. No one cares about opinions. If you want to be a thought leader you have to create new knowledge in your category. Research is how you do that. It's the only way to truly set the narrative and get a market to react to you.

11/2023

original research drives everything.

11/2023

We obsess over our clients.

We view our clients as partners. We strongly prefer long-term relationships where our outputs are expected to deliver bottom line, and where our partners' teams are strongly invested in activating the assets we produce. We aren't shy about being heavily invested in your business.

01/2025

We obsess over our clients.

01/2025

We're nerds at heart.

The best testimonial we've ever gotten was from an especially passionate founder in a highly technical industry. She said, "…more than anything, I appreciate the nerdiness with which you approached our business. You were at our level."

Today

We're nerds at heart.

Today

Join Strativ

Help us build the future of strategic thought leadership

We’re always looking for people who think in systems, care about clarity, and get energy from solving complex problems for real teams. Whether you love research, content, or data, break / glass grows by adding people who care deeply about the craft.
  
If you want to help shape the next generation of strategy tools, we’d love to meet you.

Join the team

Our Blog

Insights on research & thought leadership

Explore strategies, frameworks, and stories from the companies leading their categories.

View All Posts

Strategy & Leadership

Why great strategies fail and how leaders can keep them alive

February 2, 2026

Operations & Execution

How operational drag quietly kills execution and what high-performing teams do differently

January 26, 2026

Planning Systems

Why high-growth teams need a living strategy and not a static plan

January 22, 2026

Our Blog

Insights on research & thought leadership

Explore strategies, frameworks, and stories from the companies leading their categories.

View All Posts

Strategy & Leadership

Why great strategies fail and how leaders can keep them alive

February 2, 2026

Operations & Execution

How operational drag quietly kills execution and what high-performing teams do differently

January 26, 2026

Planning Systems

Why high-growth teams need a living strategy and not a static plan

January 22, 2026

Our Blog

Insights on research & thought leadership

Explore strategies, frameworks, and stories from the companies leading their categories.

View All Posts

Strategy & Leadership

Why great strategies fail and how leaders can keep them alive

February 2, 2026

Operations & Execution

How operational drag quietly kills execution and what high-performing teams do differently

January 26, 2026

Planning Systems

Why high-growth teams need a living strategy and not a static plan

January 22, 2026

Help & info

Questions & answers

Details on how break / glass works, who it’s built for, and how it creates measurable commercial impact.

01.
How does thought leadership actually drive revenue?
If you sell expertise, thought leadership is likely the single most powerful revenue driver at your disposal. True category thought leaders get invited to more deals, get shortlisted more often, win a lot more deals, and shorten sales cycles. Across 500+ top firms, estimated average return on $194k of thought leadership spend was $2.7m, and that number was expected to increase sharply (data was gathered in 2023). Real, research-driven thought leadership makes you a knowledge producer, which makes you extremely competitive in any closed deal scenario. We're also seeing more and more RFPs specifically ask for thought leadership in some form, and the best possible way to differentiate yourself is to be the firm that everyone else quotes, cites, and remembers.
02.
Why is original research so important?
Original reserach is the difference between “we have a point of view” and “we produced the study everyone in the market is reacting to.” Research gives your partners something resonant to say in sales meetings. It gives your BD team proof points for proposals. It gives conference speakers proprietary material. It gives clients a reason to forward your thinking internally. In other words, it makes you competitive in ways nothing else can, and where that edge is closest to revenue. It also solves the hardest content problem: deciding what to say. When you have real findings, the rest of the campaign has inate gravity. One poll found that 94% of executives say custom research makes thought leadership more effective. That is the whole bet.
03.
How does this help us win RFPs?
Strong thought leadership directly impacts revenue before, during, and after the RFP process. Before an RFP is issued, it can make your firm easier to shortlist because buyers already trust how you think. If your research has shaped the conversation, you may enter the process with a credibility advantage competitors have to build from scratch. During the RFP, it gives you stronger answers to the questions buyers already ask:How are you different? How do you innovate? Where is the market going? What do you know that other firms do not? Some RFPs even ask for thought leadership directly. Many more ask for it indirectly through questions about differentiation, innovation, methodology, and market perspective. After submission, thought leadership gives your internal champions ammunition. It helps them say, “This is the firm that understands where the market is going.” That matters because many consulting deals are not won only in the room. They are won in the internal conversations after the room. Good thought leadership travels into those conversations. It gives buyers something concrete to remember, repeat, and defend.
04.
Can thought leadership really help a less famous firm compete with bigger names?
Yes. That's one of the biggest reasons to do it. Brand recognition matters. But it is not the only thing buyers care about. The biggest study ever done on thought leadership found that 53% of both target and hidden buyers agree that if a company’s thought leadership is high quality, brand recognition matters less. It creates openings for challenger consulting firms. You may not be McKinsey, Deloitte, or Accenture. But if your firm is the one producing the clearest research in a specific category, you can become the most credible option for that problem. In a narrow market, authority beats awareness.
05.
What do we actually get?
Foundationally, we bring decades of experience in thought leadership strategy and research design. Materially, each campaign starts with professional-grade original research and turns that research into a full commercial asset stack. A typical quarterly campaign includes a flagship research piece, an executive summary, LinkedIn content, long-form articles, RFP-ready snippets, conference talking points, presentation slides, newsletter copy, internal talking points, data visualizations, and partner-ready POV material. The point is not to hand you a report and hope someone uses it. The point is to turn one strong research thesis into assets your partners, marketers, and BD team can use everywhere revenue conversations happen.
06.
What kind of research do you produce?
The research depends on the commercial question your firm needs to own. Sometimes that means surveying executives in your target market. Sometimes it means aggregating and analyzing disparate public data. Sometimes it means turning your own proprietary client data into a benchmark or industry insight. Sometimes it means building an index, scorecard, or market map. The format matters less than the outcome. The research needs to produce findings that are credible, useful, and commercially relevant. A good study should make a prospect think: “They understand this problem better than anyone else we are talking to.”
07.
We already have a marketing team. Do we need this?
This doese not replace your marketing team. It gives them exponentially more potent ammunition. Most internal marketing teams are already stretched across events, proposals, website updates, newsletters, recruiting, partner requests, and urgent BD needs. Thought leadership gets delayed because it requires deep expertise, partner access, research design, data engineering, writing, positioning, graphic design, and distribution planning. Plus, true, incisive, original research campaigns are extremely difficult to run and often lie outside the expertise of marketing generalists. We bring a professional-grade research engine and strategic narrative. Your team gets a complete campaign with high-frequency information that they can use to focus entirely on activation/distribution for months at a time.
08.
What is the cost of doing nothing?
The cost is being excellent but interchangeable. Many consulting firms have strong people, strong client work, and strong expertise. But from the outside, they sound like everyone else. Same claims, same case studies, same promises. That creates a revenue problem. If buyers cannot tell why your thinking is different, they compare you on familiarity, relationships, risk, and price. Thought leadership gives them another basis for choosing you: that you are the one setting the narrative in the category. It creates a wholly unfair advantage.
09.
What if the research does not uncover anything interesting?
That's why research design matters (and why we place such a heavy emphasis on it). Bad thought leadership starts with a topic. Good thought leadership starts with a tension. What does the market believe that might be wrong? Where are buyers underestimating risk? What's changing faster than leaders realize? What are competitors afraid to say? What would make a managing partner say, “We need to be the firm that publishes that”? We do not run research just to collect statistics. We excavate the narratives closest to your buyers, and then we design research to find the insights that allow you to own them.
10.
Who is this for?
This is for any company that sells expertise into complex buying environments. It is especially relevant for mid-market firms that are strong enough to win serious work but not yet recognized as the obvious authority in their category. If your firm depends on RFPs, referrals, partner reputation, executive trust, or high-stakes sales conversations, you're a great fit. However, it's also a strong fit for enterprise SaaS, government agencies, and anyone else who needs to publish serious expertise. This is not for firms that want daily content volume, generic PR, low-level pay-per-post services, or quick-fix lead generation. It's important to understand that this a premium service where we hope to build lasting partnerships and contribute meaningful bottom line for a long time. It's for firms that want to become known for a point of view the market cannot ignore.
11.
Why work on this annually instead of one campaign at a time?
One campaign can create attention. Consistent reserach creates what we call "market memory": a collective recognition in your category that you are a net-producer of knowledge, information, and best practices. A single report gives your firm something to talk about. Four research cycles create a platform: a body of evidence, a repeatable market presence, and a growing library of insights your partners can use in BD, proposals, events, recruiting, and client conversations. The goal is not to publish once; it's to become the firm people quote, cite, and remember.

Still need a hand?

We’re here to help you find the right roadmap. If you didn’t find what you were looking for, our team will point you in the right direction.

Get in touch

Help & info

Questions & answers

Details on how break / glass works, who it’s built for, and how it creates measurable commercial impact.

01.
How does thought leadership actually drive revenue?
If you sell expertise, thought leadership is likely the single most powerful revenue driver at your disposal. True category thought leaders get invited to more deals, get shortlisted more often, win a lot more deals, and shorten sales cycles. Across 500+ top firms, estimated average return on $194k of thought leadership spend was $2.7m, and that number was expected to increase sharply (data was gathered in 2023). Real, research-driven thought leadership makes you a knowledge producer, which makes you extremely competitive in any closed deal scenario. We're also seeing more and more RFPs specifically ask for thought leadership in some form, and the best possible way to differentiate yourself is to be the firm that everyone else quotes, cites, and remembers.
02.
Why is original research so important?
Original reserach is the difference between “we have a point of view” and “we produced the study everyone in the market is reacting to.” Research gives your partners something resonant to say in sales meetings. It gives your BD team proof points for proposals. It gives conference speakers proprietary material. It gives clients a reason to forward your thinking internally. In other words, it makes you competitive in ways nothing else can, and where that edge is closest to revenue. It also solves the hardest content problem: deciding what to say. When you have real findings, the rest of the campaign has inate gravity. One poll found that 94% of executives say custom research makes thought leadership more effective. That is the whole bet.
03.
How does this help us win RFPs?
Strong thought leadership directly impacts revenue before, during, and after the RFP process. Before an RFP is issued, it can make your firm easier to shortlist because buyers already trust how you think. If your research has shaped the conversation, you may enter the process with a credibility advantage competitors have to build from scratch. During the RFP, it gives you stronger answers to the questions buyers already ask:How are you different? How do you innovate? Where is the market going? What do you know that other firms do not? Some RFPs even ask for thought leadership directly. Many more ask for it indirectly through questions about differentiation, innovation, methodology, and market perspective. After submission, thought leadership gives your internal champions ammunition. It helps them say, “This is the firm that understands where the market is going.” That matters because many consulting deals are not won only in the room. They are won in the internal conversations after the room. Good thought leadership travels into those conversations. It gives buyers something concrete to remember, repeat, and defend.
04.
Can thought leadership really help a less famous firm compete with bigger names?
Yes. That's one of the biggest reasons to do it. Brand recognition matters. But it is not the only thing buyers care about. The biggest study ever done on thought leadership found that 53% of both target and hidden buyers agree that if a company’s thought leadership is high quality, brand recognition matters less. It creates openings for challenger consulting firms. You may not be McKinsey, Deloitte, or Accenture. But if your firm is the one producing the clearest research in a specific category, you can become the most credible option for that problem. In a narrow market, authority beats awareness.
05.
What do we actually get?
Foundationally, we bring decades of experience in thought leadership strategy and research design. Materially, each campaign starts with professional-grade original research and turns that research into a full commercial asset stack. A typical quarterly campaign includes a flagship research piece, an executive summary, LinkedIn content, long-form articles, RFP-ready snippets, conference talking points, presentation slides, newsletter copy, internal talking points, data visualizations, and partner-ready POV material. The point is not to hand you a report and hope someone uses it. The point is to turn one strong research thesis into assets your partners, marketers, and BD team can use everywhere revenue conversations happen.
06.
What kind of research do you produce?
The research depends on the commercial question your firm needs to own. Sometimes that means surveying executives in your target market. Sometimes it means aggregating and analyzing disparate public data. Sometimes it means turning your own proprietary client data into a benchmark or industry insight. Sometimes it means building an index, scorecard, or market map. The format matters less than the outcome. The research needs to produce findings that are credible, useful, and commercially relevant. A good study should make a prospect think: “They understand this problem better than anyone else we are talking to.”
07.
We already have a marketing team. Do we need this?
This doese not replace your marketing team. It gives them exponentially more potent ammunition. Most internal marketing teams are already stretched across events, proposals, website updates, newsletters, recruiting, partner requests, and urgent BD needs. Thought leadership gets delayed because it requires deep expertise, partner access, research design, data engineering, writing, positioning, graphic design, and distribution planning. Plus, true, incisive, original research campaigns are extremely difficult to run and often lie outside the expertise of marketing generalists. We bring a professional-grade research engine and strategic narrative. Your team gets a complete campaign with high-frequency information that they can use to focus entirely on activation/distribution for months at a time.
08.
What is the cost of doing nothing?
The cost is being excellent but interchangeable. Many consulting firms have strong people, strong client work, and strong expertise. But from the outside, they sound like everyone else. Same claims, same case studies, same promises. That creates a revenue problem. If buyers cannot tell why your thinking is different, they compare you on familiarity, relationships, risk, and price. Thought leadership gives them another basis for choosing you: that you are the one setting the narrative in the category. It creates a wholly unfair advantage.
09.
What if the research does not uncover anything interesting?
That's why research design matters (and why we place such a heavy emphasis on it). Bad thought leadership starts with a topic. Good thought leadership starts with a tension. What does the market believe that might be wrong? Where are buyers underestimating risk? What's changing faster than leaders realize? What are competitors afraid to say? What would make a managing partner say, “We need to be the firm that publishes that”? We do not run research just to collect statistics. We excavate the narratives closest to your buyers, and then we design research to find the insights that allow you to own them.
10.
Who is this for?
This is for any company that sells expertise into complex buying environments. It is especially relevant for mid-market firms that are strong enough to win serious work but not yet recognized as the obvious authority in their category. If your firm depends on RFPs, referrals, partner reputation, executive trust, or high-stakes sales conversations, you're a great fit. However, it's also a strong fit for enterprise SaaS, government agencies, and anyone else who needs to publish serious expertise. This is not for firms that want daily content volume, generic PR, low-level pay-per-post services, or quick-fix lead generation. It's important to understand that this a premium service where we hope to build lasting partnerships and contribute meaningful bottom line for a long time. It's for firms that want to become known for a point of view the market cannot ignore.
11.
Why work on this annually instead of one campaign at a time?
One campaign can create attention. Consistent reserach creates what we call "market memory": a collective recognition in your category that you are a net-producer of knowledge, information, and best practices. A single report gives your firm something to talk about. Four research cycles create a platform: a body of evidence, a repeatable market presence, and a growing library of insights your partners can use in BD, proposals, events, recruiting, and client conversations. The goal is not to publish once; it's to become the firm people quote, cite, and remember.

Still need a hand?

We’re here to help you find the right roadmap. If you didn’t find what you were looking for, our team will point you in the right direction.

Get in touch

Help & info

Questions & answers

Details on how break / glass works, who it’s built for, and how it creates measurable commercial impact.

01.
How does thought leadership actually drive revenue?
If you sell expertise, thought leadership is likely the single most powerful revenue driver at your disposal. True category thought leaders get invited to more deals, get shortlisted more often, win a lot more deals, and shorten sales cycles. Across 500+ top firms, estimated average return on $194k of thought leadership spend was $2.7m, and that number was expected to increase sharply (data was gathered in 2023). Real, research-driven thought leadership makes you a knowledge producer, which makes you extremely competitive in any closed deal scenario. We're also seeing more and more RFPs specifically ask for thought leadership in some form, and the best possible way to differentiate yourself is to be the firm that everyone else quotes, cites, and remembers.
02.
Why is original research so important?
Original reserach is the difference between “we have a point of view” and “we produced the study everyone in the market is reacting to.” Research gives your partners something resonant to say in sales meetings. It gives your BD team proof points for proposals. It gives conference speakers proprietary material. It gives clients a reason to forward your thinking internally. In other words, it makes you competitive in ways nothing else can, and where that edge is closest to revenue. It also solves the hardest content problem: deciding what to say. When you have real findings, the rest of the campaign has inate gravity. One poll found that 94% of executives say custom research makes thought leadership more effective. That is the whole bet.
03.
How does this help us win RFPs?
Strong thought leadership directly impacts revenue before, during, and after the RFP process. Before an RFP is issued, it can make your firm easier to shortlist because buyers already trust how you think. If your research has shaped the conversation, you may enter the process with a credibility advantage competitors have to build from scratch. During the RFP, it gives you stronger answers to the questions buyers already ask:How are you different? How do you innovate? Where is the market going? What do you know that other firms do not? Some RFPs even ask for thought leadership directly. Many more ask for it indirectly through questions about differentiation, innovation, methodology, and market perspective. After submission, thought leadership gives your internal champions ammunition. It helps them say, “This is the firm that understands where the market is going.” That matters because many consulting deals are not won only in the room. They are won in the internal conversations after the room. Good thought leadership travels into those conversations. It gives buyers something concrete to remember, repeat, and defend.
04.
Can thought leadership really help a less famous firm compete with bigger names?
Yes. That's one of the biggest reasons to do it. Brand recognition matters. But it is not the only thing buyers care about. The biggest study ever done on thought leadership found that 53% of both target and hidden buyers agree that if a company’s thought leadership is high quality, brand recognition matters less. It creates openings for challenger consulting firms. You may not be McKinsey, Deloitte, or Accenture. But if your firm is the one producing the clearest research in a specific category, you can become the most credible option for that problem. In a narrow market, authority beats awareness.
05.
What do we actually get?
Foundationally, we bring decades of experience in thought leadership strategy and research design. Materially, each campaign starts with professional-grade original research and turns that research into a full commercial asset stack. A typical quarterly campaign includes a flagship research piece, an executive summary, LinkedIn content, long-form articles, RFP-ready snippets, conference talking points, presentation slides, newsletter copy, internal talking points, data visualizations, and partner-ready POV material. The point is not to hand you a report and hope someone uses it. The point is to turn one strong research thesis into assets your partners, marketers, and BD team can use everywhere revenue conversations happen.
06.
What kind of research do you produce?
The research depends on the commercial question your firm needs to own. Sometimes that means surveying executives in your target market. Sometimes it means aggregating and analyzing disparate public data. Sometimes it means turning your own proprietary client data into a benchmark or industry insight. Sometimes it means building an index, scorecard, or market map. The format matters less than the outcome. The research needs to produce findings that are credible, useful, and commercially relevant. A good study should make a prospect think: “They understand this problem better than anyone else we are talking to.”
07.
We already have a marketing team. Do we need this?
This doese not replace your marketing team. It gives them exponentially more potent ammunition. Most internal marketing teams are already stretched across events, proposals, website updates, newsletters, recruiting, partner requests, and urgent BD needs. Thought leadership gets delayed because it requires deep expertise, partner access, research design, data engineering, writing, positioning, graphic design, and distribution planning. Plus, true, incisive, original research campaigns are extremely difficult to run and often lie outside the expertise of marketing generalists. We bring a professional-grade research engine and strategic narrative. Your team gets a complete campaign with high-frequency information that they can use to focus entirely on activation/distribution for months at a time.
08.
What is the cost of doing nothing?
The cost is being excellent but interchangeable. Many consulting firms have strong people, strong client work, and strong expertise. But from the outside, they sound like everyone else. Same claims, same case studies, same promises. That creates a revenue problem. If buyers cannot tell why your thinking is different, they compare you on familiarity, relationships, risk, and price. Thought leadership gives them another basis for choosing you: that you are the one setting the narrative in the category. It creates a wholly unfair advantage.
09.
What if the research does not uncover anything interesting?
That's why research design matters (and why we place such a heavy emphasis on it). Bad thought leadership starts with a topic. Good thought leadership starts with a tension. What does the market believe that might be wrong? Where are buyers underestimating risk? What's changing faster than leaders realize? What are competitors afraid to say? What would make a managing partner say, “We need to be the firm that publishes that”? We do not run research just to collect statistics. We excavate the narratives closest to your buyers, and then we design research to find the insights that allow you to own them.
10.
Who is this for?
This is for any company that sells expertise into complex buying environments. It is especially relevant for mid-market firms that are strong enough to win serious work but not yet recognized as the obvious authority in their category. If your firm depends on RFPs, referrals, partner reputation, executive trust, or high-stakes sales conversations, you're a great fit. However, it's also a strong fit for enterprise SaaS, government agencies, and anyone else who needs to publish serious expertise. This is not for firms that want daily content volume, generic PR, low-level pay-per-post services, or quick-fix lead generation. It's important to understand that this a premium service where we hope to build lasting partnerships and contribute meaningful bottom line for a long time. It's for firms that want to become known for a point of view the market cannot ignore.
11.
Why work on this annually instead of one campaign at a time?
One campaign can create attention. Consistent reserach creates what we call "market memory": a collective recognition in your category that you are a net-producer of knowledge, information, and best practices. A single report gives your firm something to talk about. Four research cycles create a platform: a body of evidence, a repeatable market presence, and a growing library of insights your partners can use in BD, proposals, events, recruiting, and client conversations. The goal is not to publish once; it's to become the firm people quote, cite, and remember.

Still need a hand?

We’re here to help you find the right roadmap. If you didn’t find what you were looking for, our team will point you in the right direction.

Get in touch

Free consultation

SEE HOW b/g FITS INTO YOUR legacy.

"Break / glass unlocked an entirely new category of client for us. We signed a $7b company."

Sebastian Schafer

Founder, Pocket Capital

It's not enough to just be excellent at what you do; the challenge is translating that expertise into lasting authority that actively creates revenue.

Tell us how about your firm, and we’ll prepare a full authority map & preliminary strategy free of charge.

Free consultation

SEE HOW b/g FITS INTO YOUR legacy.

"Strativ helped us uncover gaps in our decision-making that we didn’t even realize were slowing us down. The clarity we gained in a single session changed the way our team operates."

Daniel Brooks

Head of Product @ Helio Systems

Free consultation

SEE HOW b/g FITS INTO YOUR legacy.

"Strativ helped us uncover gaps in our decision-making that we didn’t even realize were slowing us down. The clarity we gained in a single session changed the way our team operates."

Daniel Brooks

Head of Product @ Helio Systems