Our Work: Carlisle & Company
A management consulting firm whose clients were too busy for white papers — and needed a faster way to encounter the thinking that made Carlisle worth hiring.
Our Work: Carlisle & Company
A management consulting firm whose clients were too busy for white papers — and needed a faster way to encounter the thinking that made Carlisle worth hiring.
The Organization
Carlisle & Company is a management consulting firm specializing in the automotive aftermarket — advising OEMs, dealer groups, tier-one suppliers, and investors on strategy, commercial excellence, and operational transformation. Their consultants are genuine subject matter experts whose thinking shapes how the industry understands its most pressing challenges: the shift to mobility, the threat of Amazon in parts and service, the warehouse automation question, technician recruitment and retention, the future of the service lane. The depth of that expertise is exactly what clients are paying for.
The Communication Problem
Carlisle & Company's clients are executives at large automotive organizations — people who make consequential decisions and have very little time to absorb information. The traditional consulting firm answer to the communication problem is thought leadership: white papers, research reports, conference presentations. Carlisle produced excellent work in this format. The problem is that a fifteen-page white paper requires a significant commitment of attention before it delivers any value. The executives Carlisle needed to reach didn't have that time, and the format was working against the message.
The communication challenge wasn't whether Carlisle had something worth saying. It was whether the people who needed to hear it would encounter it in a format they'd actually engage with. Three minutes of a credible consultant speaking directly to the most pressing question in your industry is a fundamentally different ask than fifteen pages of analysis — even if the underlying insight is identical.
The Thinking
The 2017 brand video established Carlisle's identity and positioned them as an industry thought leader across their four pillars of practice. But the more interesting strategic work happened in 2018, when Carlisle returned with a different brief: they wanted to turn their existing research and consulting expertise into a series of short, standalone thought leadership videos — one per topic, one consultant per video, each designed to deliver a single sharp insight to a time-pressed executive audience.
SVG's central contribution to this project was structural. Carlisle's natural mode of communication is analytical — outlines, frameworks, structured arguments. That mode produces excellent white papers and presentations. It does not automatically produce watchable video. The upstream work was translating each consultant's thinking from the format it lived in to the format that would actually travel.
For each of the five thought leadership videos, SVG developed a distinct question framework tailored to that consultant's topic and audience. The questions for Saurabh Mahajan on the future of the service lane were different from the questions for Nate Chenenko on uptime, which were different from Wyn Maling on new ownership models. In each case the goal was the same: get the consultant to the sharpest version of their thinking in conversational form, without a script, in a way that would feel credible and direct to the OEM executive watching it.
The 2017 brand video question that closed every interview — "you are face to face with a potential client — what do you want them to know? Why should they trust you?" — is the same instinct applied to credibility that Analysis Group and L.E.K. work reflects. Before any camera is set up, the consultant has to do the hardest communication work: reduce their expertise to a single impression worth carrying out of the room.
The Work
A brand video in 2017 introducing Carlisle & Company's four practice areas, featuring unscripted interviews with leadership on the firm's positioning, competitive differentiation, and client value proposition. In 2018, a series of five thought leadership videos — each two to three minutes, each featuring a named consultant on a distinct topic: the future of the service lane, technician retention and recruitment, warehouse automation, new ownership models, and uptime. Individual creative briefs and question frameworks developed for each consultant and topic. Shot in a single production day with multiple consultants rotating through.
The Signal
Saurabh Mahajan, one of the Carlisle consultants featured in the thought leadership series, described the strategic decision behind the project directly: they didn't want to write another white paper. Their clients are busy people and you can't expect them to sit down and read fifteen pages. Video was the natural answer.
He went on to describe what the collaboration actually looked like from his side: Carlisle thinks in outlines. SVG thinks in final products. The process worked because SVG took their structured analytical thinking and translated it into something that would actually work as watchable content — without losing the rigor that made the thinking worth communicating in the first place.
"The process entirely was great from start to finish — discovery meetings, the shoot date, and most critically the editing at the end. Every step focused on the little details and being thorough so that we get a 110% product instead of something that's just good enough."