Principal-led engagements
The person in your first meeting does the work. We cap concurrent engagements so that stays true, which occasionally means asking you to wait.
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Leadership
Operators first
Red Drake Group is deliberately small. The person who advises is the person who has run the businesses — there is no bench, and no handover to a team you have not met.
At a glance
- 20+ years across banking, national infrastructure and consulting
- 1,000+ businesses advised
- Built a consulting firm to fourth largest in its market
- Author of the Strategos Loop
- Founder of the group's three companies
Founder & Principal
Atul Oka
Founder of Red Drake Group, author of the Strategos Loop, and the principal behind Expert Business Plans. Twenty years spent on both sides of the advice — running the programmes, then building the method.
Atul's career has moved between three worlds that rarely meet: corporate banking transformation, national infrastructure delivery, and hands-on consulting to owner-operated businesses. That combination is the reason the group is structured as it is.
At Barclays Group he led a suite of disruptive banking and technology programmes aimed at reinventing how a branch network serves its market — work that lifted client retention by 30% and cut branch network costs by 20% nationwide, alongside early ventures into virtual currency and the virtual branch.
He then moved to the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Committee, directing delivery on a national government's flagship programme to build out high-priority industrial sectors. The work meant sitting between government and private capital — defining scope, testing the business case, and taking major projects through to investment across oil and gas, rail, power generation, green technologies, medical and high tech.
As CEO and Managing Director of Business Doctors, he took an international consulting brand and built it into the fourth largest consulting firm in its market within three years. The firm advised more than 1,000 businesses and delivered average client growth above 70% across eight measured success factors. He built the surrounding ecosystem too — finance, sales and marketing subsidiaries — and hired and mentored the teams that ran them.
Those eight success factors are the direct ancestor of the business review Red Drake runs today, and the discipline of measuring a business before advising it became the foundation of the Strategos Loop.
From 2019 to the end of 2025 he was Senior Director of Strategy & Business Development at Duke Heights BIA, one of North America's largest employment areas — 2,500 businesses and 32,000 employees, from startups to large manufacturers. The role covered investment attraction, business support programmes and long-term area development, working alongside city officials and the private sector.
Since leaving that post he has been focused full time on the three companies that make up Red Drake Group.
The through-line
A conviction that strategy rarely fails because the analysis was wrong. It fails because nobody made the honest diagnosis first, and nobody built the rhythm to keep the plan alive afterwards. Everything Red Drake does — the Loop, the reviews, the operating cadence — is built around closing that gap.
Focus
- Enterprise strategy development and growth architecture
- Operational efficiency and margin recovery
- Strategy methodology — author of the Strategos Loop
- Long-horizon ownership of operating businesses
The group
Three businesses, built in sequence
Each one answered a problem the last one exposed.
2015
Expert Business Plans
Founded to serve the owner-operators who needed a fundable plan and a defensible forecast, not a consulting retainer. It remains the group's closest contact with the ground: hundreds of small businesses a year, each one a test of whether the thinking holds.
2018
Red Drake Group
Established as the consulting practice for larger organisations — enterprise strategy, growth architecture and operational efficiency — and as the holding company for the group's operating businesses.
2019
The Strategos Loop
The method itself, written down and published. Six moves with gates between them, wrapped in a renewal ring, distilled from twenty years of watching where strategy work actually breaks.
Strategy rarely fails because the analysis was wrong. It fails because nobody made the honest diagnosis first — and nobody built the rhythm to keep the plan alive afterwards.
Atul Oka, Founder & PrincipalHow we are structured
A small group, on purpose
Specialists when needed
For research depth, financial modelling or sector expertise we bring in named specialists on a project basis rather than carrying a pyramid of juniors.
Companies run by their own teams
Each operating company has its own people. The group sets direction and holds the cadence; it does not run the day to day.
Work with us directly.
No account managers, no handovers. Start a conversation and you are speaking to the person who will do the work.