Engagement terms.

01

Identity and invoicing

02

Scope of the engagement

• A four-week Strategic Discovery Sprint, equal to twenty working days.
• The calendar starts on the day perimeter, brief and requested materials have been approved and delivered.
• The perimeter is fixed: one strategic question, one company, one reference market. Any widening is a new engagement, not an extension of the current one.
• At the end, an Executive Opportunity Blueprint is delivered: a bilingual digital hub gathering the analysis documents, the preliminary economic logic, the discarded alternatives and the reasons why, the assumptions register, the risk map and the validation plan.
• Perimeters spanning several markets, several business units, primary research or regulatory questions are handled separately as Extended Diligence, by invitation and under their own scope.

03

Working rhythm and points of contact

The work is asynchronous by design and concentrated in the moments where a decision requires it.

• An initial thirty-minute fit call.
• A structured digital brief.
• A data room with the company's materials and answers.
• Written requests for clarification, when a piece of information changes the quality of the decision.
• One written checkpoint at the midpoint.
• Delivery of the Executive Opportunity Blueprint.
• An optional forty-five-minute final walkthrough.
• A seven-day written clarification window from delivery.

There are no workshops, no recurring meetings, no operational support and no continuous presence.

04

What the company must provide

• A single point of contact with decision-making authority.
• Access to the data agreed in the brief: volumes, margins, channels, cost structure.
• The relevant internal materials that already exist, even if incomplete.
• Answers to requests for clarification within three working days.

Any delay in delivering the materials moves the delivery date by the same number of working days.

05

Confidentiality

• A mutual confidentiality agreement signed before any materials are handed over, on the company's template or on the practice's own.
• Client materials are not shared with third parties, nor reused in other engagements.
• The case is not published without written authorisation. Without authorisation it remains unpublished, or published in anonymised form only by explicit agreement.

06

Data processing and retention

• Materials are retained for the duration of the engagement and for the following twelve months, then deleted on written request.
• No special categories of personal data are processed. If a material contains any, it must be anonymised before delivery.
• Data controller: De Rose Nicoletta, Italian VAT number IT18747131003. Privacy contact: info@ndrstrategy.com.

07

Use of artificial intelligence tools

• Artificial intelligence tools are used to widen the research, compare more alternatives and stress-test the hypotheses.
• No confidential company data is entered into third-party tools without written authorisation. Confidential materials are handled only in the environments agreed in the contract.
• Every framing of the problem, selection criterion, priority and conclusion is attributable to NDR Studio, who is accountable for it. The deliverable is not generated text: it is documented, verifiable judgement.

08

Intellectual property

• On delivery and once payment is settled, ownership of the deliverable and the right to use it, modify it and transfer it to third parties pass to the commissioning company.
• The method, the models, the templates and the reusable components remain the property of the practice, and the company does not acquire them exclusively.
• The practice may refer to the engagement only within the limits authorised in writing.

09

Investment and payments

• A fixed-scope, fixed-price engagement, agreed before the start and not subject to revision while the work is under way.
• No day-rate billing: the cost does not vary with the hours spent.
• Payment arrangements: specified in the written proposal before acceptance.
• Payment deadlines: specified in the written proposal before acceptance.
• Italian flat-rate tax regime: VAT is not charged under Article 1, paragraphs 54–89, Law 190/2014. Any stamp duty and external costs are specified in the proposal before acceptance.

10

What this work is not

• It is not primary market research, nor a sample-based survey.
• It is not legal, regulatory, tax or patent due diligence.
• It is not engineering, industrial design, software development or detailed design.
• It is not Phase 1 support, launch management or continuous presence.
• It is not a guarantee of a commercial outcome. It is the preparation of a decision.