Imageneer · For supplement contract manufacturers
Where 2 Play. How 2 Win. Own your next move.
A strategy instrument built for one industry: supplement contract manufacturing. It takes a leadership team through five moves in ninety minutes and ends with a plan your board can fund, priced against your own operating profit.
Every geography stays open. Every dosage format stays possible. Every customer is worth a quote. The word no appears nowhere in the plan, so the plan commits to nothing.
A position in which you are forced to move, and every available move makes your position worse. Most CDMOs live here: the next brief, the next price cut, the next capacity promise. ZUGPATH is the opposite. You choose the move.
The full Playing to Win cascade (Lafley & Martin), rebuilt for supplement CDMOs and calibrated to your size. The portfolio rules for a $15M specialist and a €300M platform are different, and the instrument knows it.
State the ambition, then face its math. The instrument computes your implied growth rate against market growth and tells you how many points of share you are planning to take. From whom, by name.
21% ambition vs 7% market: name whose share you takeMark every geography, dosage format, health space and customer segment as Play, Watch or Out, with the worth of each field beside it. The stage refuses to complete until something is marked Out.
A strategy that excludes nothing wins nothing on purposeOne source of advantage, defended. A SWOT against up to four named competitors, price-per-piece and MOQ positioning for your exact Play fields, and a value proposition that ends with the claims to stop making because rivals can make them equally well.
Ends with a “stop saying” listEvery capability you must build gets a price. The instrument sums them against your annual operating profit and answers the question most strategy decks avoid: can you fund this? With sequencing, and with the working capital your own growth will consume.
Fund, defer, partner, or killYour strategy restated as testable assumptions across market, customer, competition, capability and regulation, each tracked from untested to validated or broken. Then a 90-day roadmap: initiatives with owners, day 30/60/90 checkpoints, the first capex decision, the first hire.
Ends on Monday morning, not on a slideFrameworks are free and everywhere. ZUGPATH is an instrument: it pushes back, it counts, and it knows your industry’s rulebook.
Play/Watch/Out is enforced, with minimums calibrated to your revenue tier. Below 25 million in revenue the instrument demands focus; above 100 million it demands coverage. It will not let you leave without choices.
Regulatory screens for the EU, UK, Germany, Italy, US, Brazil and China at every stage: claims regimes, novel food and NDI pathways, registration mechanics, flagged by severity against your actual choices. Declare your site clearances, FDA registration to Informed Sport, and every screen names the markets you chose to Play that your certificates don’t yet unlock.
Guidelines as encoded at build time; verify with counsel.An AI sparring partner runs Porter’s Five Forces on your exact Play intersection, stress-tests your thesis against the competitors you named, and ends each analysis with the one force your strategy must neutralize.
Strategy for a CDMO is a cash question before it is a positioning question. Must-build investments are totaled against operating profit, converted into years of self-funding, and challenged.
An ingredient partnership scan matched to your Play fields: which categories to lock with science-backed suppliers, which deal structures fit your size, and the diligence question that separates clinical evidence from marketing.
Directional; verify claims with the supplier and exclusivity terms with counsel.Annotation marks borrowed from chess notation: ! a strong move · !? a provocative one · !! a brilliant one.
A strategy cycle at a mid-size CDMO usually burns three months: pre-reads, two offsites, a consultant deck nobody opens twice. ZUGPATH compresses it to the time it takes to type your choices. Fill the fields, argue with the sparring partner, export the board-ready report the same day.
Then run it again. Export the report, reset, and test the alternative move: gummies-first against softgels-first, US entry now against 2028, pharmacy channel against DTC. Two documents to compare by Friday, each built on the strategy cascade A.G. Lafley used to run Procter & Gamble.
Every session exports a board-ready document, as designed HTML or print-exact PDF: the aspiration and its growth math, the Play/Watch/Out scoreboard with field worth, competitors, capability investments, site clearance badges, the assumption register, and every analysis you chose to pin.
Frameworks are credited where due: Lafley & Martin, Porter, Moore. The synthesis and the CDMO calibration are ours; the canon belongs to its authors.
VitaNord is the fictional worked example that ships in the instrument, a Polish-German gummy CDMO. Your session runs on your numbers, in your currency, against your regulators.
ZUGPATH’s regulatory screens summarize the main guidelines from each authority as encoded at build time: claims regimes, novel food and NDI pathways, national maximum levels and notifications (BVL in Germany, the Ministero della Salute register in Italy), the GB/Northern Ireland split, positive lists, and registration and filing mechanics. Regulations change and national interpretations vary. Every flag is a starting point for your regulatory team, never a verdict. Verify against current official sources and confirm with qualified counsel before committing capacity, formulations or claims. Nothing on this page or in the instrument is legal advice, and AI-assisted analyses are directional inputs for your team’s judgment.
The instrument also holds your side of the ledger: a site clearances field covering FDA registration, TGA GMP, Health Canada site licences, IFS/BRCGS, FSSC 22000, Halal, Kosher, Gluten-free, Vegan, Cruelty-free and Informed Sport. Screens judge the markets; clearances state your company. The gap between the two is where the flags live.
A 30-minute live kickoff with Paula, then you run the cascade with your own leadership team, on your own numbers, at your own pace. Your work saves automatically between sittings. You leave with your strategy on a page. We leave with what to fix.
First come, first scheduled. Your inputs stay yours.