The consulting half
Someone who dives in, unpacks it, and stays for the fixing.
Most consulting ends with a document. This ends with the thing actually being different.
The bit consultants get wrong
You already know what is broken.
They arrive, spend six weeks discovering what you could have told them on day one, and hand you a deck that says it back in nicer fonts.
You pay for the discovery. You already owned the finding.
What you did not have was someone impartial enough to be believed when they confirm it, and someone still there on the Tuesday when it needs doing.
So we skip the discovery theatre. You tell me what you think it is. I tell you whether I agree. Then we go and unpack it properly with the people who actually do the work.
Pick the one that stung
You would recognise yourself in one of these.
Pick the one that made you wince. It is usually connected to two of the others.
The chain
It starts as one thing and it never stays one thing.
A process problem is almost never only a process problem.
The workflow is broken, so people work round it. Working round it means nobody is quite sure who owns what. Nobody being sure means decisions wait for you. Decisions waiting for you means you are the bottleneck. And now you are working weekends on a business that was supposed to give you your time back, and the team has quietly learned that nothing is real until you touch it.
Which is why I separate it out first. Is it you, is it the team, is it the process, or is it a combination nobody has pulled apart yet.
Most of the time it is a combination. That is the honest answer and it is the one nobody selling a single service wants to give you.
The other half
Why I do not stop at consulting.
Because the operation is usually only half of it.
The workflow quietly rots back to what it was inside a quarter.
I have rebuilt processes for people who then did not run them, because the reason the process broke in the first place was that its owner did not believe they were allowed to hold anyone to it. Fix the workflow, leave the leader exactly as unsure as you found them, and nothing holds.
One person, both halves.
The sounding board. The thing you cannot say to your team, your board or your co-founder. That is the whole proposition, and it is why I do not describe myself as one or the other.
The shape of it
What the work looks like.
How embedded I am is decided together. Some people want me in the business days a week. Some want me at the edge. Some just want the line open for when it goes sideways.
We talk.
Twenty minutes, free, nothing to prepare.
We find what it actually is.
Impartial, and from the outside, which is the only way anyone sees it clearly.
A plan, agreed first.
Steps, outcome, duration, cost. Sent over, tweaked, signed off. I do not spring proposals on people.
Then we move.
Logged, tracked, shared. No secrets, no surprises. The work ends on a difference, not on a document.
Real work, real engagements
What actually got fixed.
Five of them, in their own words where they gave them. The rest are on the proof page.
A managing director doing all four jobs.
He launched, won three clients straight away, then did sales, account management, project management and development himself. Asked how he was doing, he said he was getting there. He was drowning.
We took the business apart and rebuilt it as one sequence, where finishing a thing surfaces the next thing in order.
Five years selling one meeting at a time.
Nobody had told her why nothing came inbound. Four hours pulling the story apart, then new words for it.
Running a department he had never worked in.
He knew what he was doing. He did not yet believe he was allowed to say so, which meant his team had started running him. Him first, then every person on that team individually, then the processes underneath them.
Selling well and seen by nobody.
Every cup that walked round town looked like everyone else’s, and the marketing was quietly enforcing it. The change was to the product, not the campaign.
Planning permission, half a building and paralysis.
The workload was so big they had stopped moving. Steps put in order, work cut into chunks that fitted a week, competitor analysis deep enough to drive the whole brand.
Eight in full, with what moved.
Inbound leads, funding raised, teams unstuck, and the ones where the hardest part was saying the thing out loud in the first place.
Honestly
Why one person beats a firm, and when it does not.
If a firm is the right answer I will tell you so on the call rather than take the work.
You get the person you met.
Nobody hands you to a junior after the pitch. Nothing gets padded to fill a team’s utilisation. And you can say the real thing, because there is one person to say it to rather than four in a room taking notes.
Thirty people on site for six months.
You need a name on the report because the board demands one. You need specialist regulatory or technical depth that no generalist has. If that is you, hire the firm.
Two refusals
The two things that break consulting.
I refuse both, and they are the two most common ways this work gets sold.
Working on your team without you.
Teams do not tell the truth to a consultant who turns up on their own with a notebook and a relationship with whoever is paying. I only ever work alongside you, never as a separate stream.
Reporting who said what.
Everything I find is shared with you. Who said it stays entirely anonymous. They need the same safety you do, and if they do not have it none of this works.
Be honest with yourself
Who I work with.
Founders and leaders, any industry, any size. Any industry is deliberate rather than a gap in the CV. Banking, software sales, recruitment, rec tech, and now this. Every one of those was an industry I had not worked in. That turns out to be the actual skill, because I am not attached to how your sector has always done it.
- If you want a document to put in a drawer, we will both be disappointed.
- If you want someone to blame for a decision you have already made, I am the wrong hire.
- If nobody in the business is allowed to say “this is not working”, start there first.
Before you book
The ones people ask.
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. Nothing is a daft question and none of it will offend me.
Are you a consultant or a coach?
What does it cost?
How involved are you?
What if the project needs to change halfway?
Do you work with my team?
Do you sign an NDA?
Related: when your team stops telling you the truth, how the work runs, and what actually moved.
Where to start
You already know what is broken. You have known for months.
Twenty minutes, and we find out whether I am the person to help you move it.