The uncomfortable page
How a piece of work is judged
The honest measure of consulting is whether anything changed, and it cannot be taken on the last day of the engagement. So we take it ninety days later, and sometimes the answer is nothing.
Why there is not a percentage anywhere on this website
You will not find a figure on these pages saying that clients typically see a thirty per cent improvement in anything. Not because the work does not change things, but because we have not measured a population of businesses and could not honestly present a number as if we had. A percentage on a consultancy's website is either taken from one client and generalised, or constructed backwards from a testimonial, or simply chosen because it sounds credible. All three are invented data with a percentage sign on them.
Nothing here is benchmarked against anything. Nothing on this site compares your business to any other. We have not measured a sample of businesses like yours, so we cannot tell you what they typically do, and a figure presented as if we had would be invented data with a percentage sign on it.
What we ask instead, ninety days later
Four questions, on a telephone call that costs nothing and that we ring to make.
What did you actually do?
Not what was recommended. What was done, by whom, and when it stopped being a project and became how the place works.
What did you decide not to do, and why?
This is the most useful of the four. A recommendation nobody acted on was usually wrong about something we did not understand, and finding out what is worth more to us than the fee was.
What has changed that you can see from where you sit?
A sentence, in the owner's own words, about the business rather than about the engagement. If there is not one, there is not one, and we write that down.
What went back to how it was?
Some of it always does. Which parts, and how long they lasted, is the thing that tells us whether the work was built to survive us leaving.
What counts as a failure here
- A document that was read once and is now in a drawer. That is the commonest one and it is ours, not the client's: it usually means the work was written for the person who commissioned it rather than the people who would have to live with it.
- A change that only holds while somebody is watching. If a new way of scheduling needs a consultant in the building, it is not a new way of scheduling.
- An engagement that quietly turned into a second engagement. Work that has to be extended twice was scoped wrongly the first time, and the scoping is our job.
- A recommendation that was right and unusable. Advice a business genuinely cannot act on, because of money, people or the season, is a failure of the advice.
And what we will not claim
We will not attribute a change in your revenue to a piece of work we did, because a business is not a laboratory and there is no version of your year without us in it to compare against. What can honestly be said is narrower and more useful: this is what was decided, this is what was built, this is what is now measured every month that was not measured before, and this is what the owner says is different. That is the whole of what a consultancy can honestly claim, and most of what is claimed in this trade is larger than it.
Every case study on this site is a composite. Every case study on this site is an illustrative composite assembled from several businesses. No client is named, no logo appears, and there is not a single testimonial on this website attributed to a person — a fabricated one would be the one genuinely dishonest thing a consulting site can do.
$2,200 a partner day · ninety minutes free · about one in four we talk out of it
The assessment is the same idea in four minutes
It tells you what your answers suggest and stops there, because twelve answers cannot support anything stronger. It is indicative and not professional advice, and there is a page about what it cannot know.