What a consultant cannot do

Want it more than you do

This is the one that decides most engagements and it is decided before we arrive. Work that an owner has commissioned because a bank, a spouse or a business partner told them to has a very poor record here, and it is visible in the first meeting: the answers are about what other people think should happen. We would rather say so at the ninety-minute mark than take the fee and produce a document that goes in a drawer.

Make a decision that is yours

An adviser who starts making the calls is an expensive employee with none of the accountability, and the business gets worse at deciding rather than better. We will tell you what we would do and why, plainly, and several clients have found that more direct than they expected. But the authority stays where it is, nobody here signs anything on your behalf, and a recommendation you disagreed with and implemented anyway is a recommendation that will not survive its first bad week.

Substitute for money or time you do not have

Advice a business genuinely cannot act on is a failure of the advice, not of the client. A recommendation that needs a hire you cannot fund, or six weeks of somebody's attention in your busiest quarter, is not useful and we count it as a mistake on our side. It is also why the first meeting asks what has already been tried and what stopped it: something that failed once for a reason that has not changed is not worth repeating with a nicer document attached.

Know your business better than you do

We turn up for eight days. You have been there for eleven years. What an outsider has is not more knowledge but a different position: no stake in which of the five ideas survives, no history with the person everybody is being careful about, and no habit of not seeing the thing that has always been like that. That is genuinely worth something and it is worth exactly that — which is why the work is built around what we can go and count, rather than around insight.

Guarantee an outcome

Nobody can, and a firm that offers to is either pricing the guarantee into the fee or guaranteeing something it controls, like the delivery of a document. What can be promised is what is written into every proposal: a number of days, a piece of written work, a weekly note, and the ability to stop at the end of any week. Everything past that depends on a business we do not run.

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.

Either side can stop at the end of any week. Either side can stop at the end of any week. You pay for the days worked, you keep everything written so far, and there is no notice period and no termination fee.