Frequently Asked Questions

Financial services and specialist B2B firms — investment management marketing agencies, boutique asset managers, RIAs, wealth managers, family offices, financial media platforms, compliance technology firms, and B2B FinTechs serving institutional clients. Typically businesses between $2M–$20M in revenue that have built something real and hit a ceiling they can't see from the inside.

Every engagement starts with a diagnostic — a structured conversation and assessment to identify where commercial value is being lost or left on the table. From there, the scope is defined around the specific problem: revenue architecture, GTM strategy, pricing, pipeline, operational alignment, or some combination.

Engagements are hands-on and time-bounded. We work alongside leadership teams until the problem is fixed. We don't produce reports that live in a drawer.

It depends on the problem. A focused commercial audit might take four to six weeks. A more involved GTM rebuild or operational alignment project might run three to six months. We scope to the problem, not to a calendar — and we don't sell open-ended retainers without a defined outcome to work toward.

BRIDGE is Bifrost's structured diagnostic and execution framework — six lenses through which we assess and address commercial problems: Business Strategy, Revenue Architecture, Infrastructure & Operations, Development of Leadership, Go-to-Market, and Execution & Accountability.

It's not a rigid process applied the same way to every client. It's a framework that ensures we're looking at the right things in the right order. Named for the Norse mythology concept of Bifrost — the bridge between worlds — it reflects the role we play: connecting where a business is to where it's capable of being.

Most consultants in this space are either ex-agency people who never ran a P&L, or strategy generalists who don't know the industry. John Connolly is neither.

He started his career in institutional asset management before building and scaling a financial marketing agency from scratch to a multimillion-dollar business, then running it as global CEO. That combination — domain depth, operator track record, pattern recognition — is what Bifrost is built on. It's not common. Most advisors theorize about the problems we've actually lived.

Engagements are scoped and priced based on the problem, not a standard rate card. We work on a project basis — defined scope, defined output, defined timeline. We don't do open-ended monthly retainers without a clear problem attached.

The right conversation to have before discussing fees is whether Bifrost is the right fit for the problem you're trying to solve. If it is, the commercial discussion is straightforward.

Yes. John is based in Edinburgh but spent the majority of his career in the US — his institutional financial services background is US-based, and his network spans both markets. Bifrost works with firms on both sides of the Atlantic, with particular depth in the US financial services and investment management ecosystem.

The honest answer is that not every engagement is the right fit — and we'd rather tell you that upfront than take a project we can't move meaningfully.

The firms we work best with have built something real, have a leadership team that's genuinely open to outside perspective, and have a specific commercial problem they can articulate — even if they can't yet identify the root cause..

If that sounds like your situation, the right first step is a direct conversation. No pitch, no deck.