We stay until the number moves
Operating strategy for mid-sized businesses, measured against one figure agreed before the engagement starts.
Three problems we take
And a great many we decline, which is the more useful half of the list.
Margin recovery
Gross margin has fallen two or three points over a couple of years and nobody can say exactly where. Usually it is four things at once, none individually large enough to have been escalated, which is precisely why it went unnoticed.
Growth that stalled
The thing that took the business to its current size has stopped working, and the obvious next move has been discussed for a year without being taken. Often the constraint is operational rather than commercial.
Integration after an acquisition
Two businesses that were supposed to become one and have instead become two with a shared bank account. The window for this closes faster than anyone expects — about a year, in our experience.
The figure we are judged on
One number, agreed before we start
Every engagement begins by agreeing the single number it will be judged on, and that number goes in the contract. It is almost never revenue — it is the gross margin on a product line, the days a working-capital cycle takes, the proportion of orders that ship complete. A metric broad enough to be safe is a metric nobody can be held to, so we would rather argue about the definition for a week at the start than deliver a deck at the end that everyone agrees is interesting.
A speciality chemicals business, eleven months
They spent the first three weeks refusing to write anything down, which was uncomfortable, and then produced a definition of our margin problem that nobody internally had managed in two years. The four causes were unremarkable individually. Together they were four points. Their people were in our plant, not in a hotel conference room, and the plan was built by the same managers who then had to run it.
How an engagement runs
Four stages. You can end it after any of them.
Define the number
Two to three weeks, and deliberately the least satisfying part. We argue with you about what exactly is being measured and how it will be calculated, until a definition survives contact with your own finance team. Nothing is recommended in this stage.
Find the causes
Four to six weeks inside the business rather than beside it. Interviews, transaction-level data and a great deal of time on the floor. The output is a short written diagnosis with the causes ranked by what they are worth, not by how interesting they are.
Build with your people
The managers who will run the change design it, with us in the room. This is the stage that makes the difference and the one clients most often want to skip. A plan handed over at the end is a plan nobody in the building feels they wrote.
Stay until it moves
We do not leave at the recommendation. The engagement ends when the number in the contract has moved and held for a quarter, or when it is clear it will not and we have said so plainly.
How the firm got here
Two people and one client
Founded after an operations turnaround that its own consultants had walked away from at the recommendation stage. The staying-until-it-moves rule is from that year and has not changed.
The number goes in the contract
Made binding after an engagement everybody called a success and nobody could measure. It has cost us three pitches since, all of them to clients who did not want a number.
Integration practice
Added after being asked three times in one year to fix an acquisition eighteen months after it closed — by which point the window had shut.
Eleven of fourteen came back
The only marketing figure the firm publishes, and the reason there is no business-development team.
Start a conversation
The first one is a phone call, not a pitch. If the problem is not one of the three we take, we will say so and name the firm we would send you to — that happens about half the time.
If you cannot name the number, start there
Most businesses that call us cannot, and the first conversation is usually about that rather than about us. It costs nothing and takes half an hour.