Nova Dragon converts competitive intelligence into rand-denominated decisions. We tell you what a signal is worth, who moves next, and what it costs to be wrong — then we stand behind the number.
Market scans get filed. Competitor profiles get circulated. Nothing changes on the income statement. The distance between what an enterprise knows and what it earns from knowing is the value gap — and closing it is the only job we have. We do it with three disciplines that most firms keep apart.
Structured collection and analysis of competitor, market, regulatory and customer signals — including human-source and open-source collection run jointly with our alliance partner, Octopus Intelligence.
Formal modelling of moves, counter-moves and bargaining positions. Every recommendation anticipates the response it will provoke, so you are never surprised by the second move.
The through-line. Every insight from the first two disciplines is priced in Economic Profit before it reaches your board. No financial consequence, no recommendation.
Revenue can be bought and earnings can be engineered. Economic Profit — the spread between return on invested capital and the cost of that capital — cannot. It is the only honest measure of value, and it is the destination of everything we do.
Seven stages take a raw signal to realised value. A wall runs through the middle of them — and where that wall sits is the entire design of this firm.
AI handles volume without fatigue: collection across fragmented sources, processing of thin and inconsistent data, pattern and anomaly detection at a tempo no analyst team can match.
Meaning, recommendation, execution and value tracking are owned by senior people who sign their names. Context, relationships and consequence do not automate — and we never pretend they do.
Everything left of the wall is automated and relentless. Everything right of it carries a senior name and a rand figure.
Analytical stacks built for developed markets assume deep data, clean disclosure and arm's-length institutions. Sub-Saharan Africa offers none of these as a default — so tools that press a button and read off an answer fail here, quietly and expensively. Value analysis in this region is human-led and AI-refined. It is not a button-press, and firms that sell it as one are selling you their assumptions.
Coverage is sparse and uneven. We build from primary signals and reconcile gaps with stated judgment, rather than letting a model silently interpolate.
Group structures disclose inconsistently across segments and jurisdictions. Economic Profit has to be reconstructed deliberately, top-down — not scraped from whatever line items happen to exist.
Institutional behaviour follows relationships as much as rules. Reading it takes people on the ground with standing networks — which is precisely what our collection alliance provides.
Competitive damage is rarely random. It arrives through one of six structural mechanisms — mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Each is detectable early in the chain, and each is priced in rand before it reaches your results.
Squeezes your position from every side — channels, suppliers, talent — until the core can no longer breathe and exit becomes the rational choice.
Takes value one thin, deniable slice at a time. No single loss justifies a response. The sum of them is fatal.
Nests inside your customer relationship — as a partner, a supplier, a feature — and then displaces you from it.
Controls the infrastructure you must cross to reach your market, and reprices your margin as a toll.
Wins on tempo — resetting product, price or capacity faster than your decision cycle can answer. The attack is the clock.
Pulls capital, partners and talent into its own orbit until every alternative — including you — is starved of all three.
Nine pillars structure every engagement: four external pillars that read the environment, five internal pillars that test the enterprise's capacity to respond. Every pillar feeds the same destination — Economic Profit.
External pillars tell you where value is moving. Internal pillars tell you whether you can move with it. The gap between the two is where Economic Profit is won or lost — and it is where every Nova Dragon engagement begins.
Advisory firms ask you to take impact on faith. We carry four metrics into every engagement from day one, each expressed in rand.
The rand value of threats identified before they reached your income statement — the earliest, most defensible measure of intelligence working.
Value surfaced and influenced, divided by fees paid. The headline efficiency test, and the number we expect to be judged on.
Invested capital moved to a higher-spread use on the strength of our work — value-based management made visible on the balance sheet.
The priced downside of the decision you nearly took. Often the largest number in the engagement, and the one no one else will show you.
Attribution is honest by design, reported in three tiers: value identified (fully ours), value influenced (shared), and value realised (signed off by you). We claim nothing in a tier above its evidence.
We do not ask for a retainer before we have demonstrated value. The sequence below is deliberate: each step earns the next.
A focused read of your competitive position and value exposure against the nine pillars, delivered to your executive with the findings priced in rand. There is no fee — and we state explicitly what the work would have cost, so its value is on the record from day one.
One decision, one attack archetype, or one bargaining table — modelled, priced and resolved in weeks. The fee is set against the value at stake, and the Value-to-Fee Multiple is reported at close.
Continuous Value Intelligence across the full chain — always-current collection, quarterly foresight with senior advisors, and the four metrics reported against every material decision. We ask for this commitment only after the first two steps have paid for themselves.
Defending Economic Profit in contested markets, where a single structural attack can erase a year of operating discipline.
Pre-deal intelligence and hold-period value protection, built for thin-data markets where the data room never tells the whole story.
Board-grade local signal for capital committed into the region — read by people who live in these markets, not modelled from outside them.
If a decision moves invested capital in this region, it is our market.
Everything right of the Judgment Wall is owned by people who sign their work.
Twenty-five years in transformation and strategy across Africa and the UK, including senior roles at Deloitte Digital and Accenture Strategy. Rob owns the right-hand side of the chain: interpretation, recommendation and the rand figure attached to both.
Debbie runs the firm's market engine and operating discipline — how clients find us, how engagements are run, and how the proof-first model is kept honest from diagnostic through standing partnership.
Structured human-source and open-source collection capability, operated jointly with Octopus Intelligence (UK & Dubai). This is a joint capability inside the chain's collection stages — people with standing networks in-market — not a data feed bolted on at the end.
Start with the free diagnostic, or take the capability questionnaire and we will respond with a view on where your value exposure sits.