The Diagnostic
I come into the business and map where the effort actually goes, then hand you the evidence, a redesign of how the company should operate, and a department-by-department install list with every line costed.
Some businesses that buy this are creaking. Plenty aren't, they're operating fine and want to do it on less effort. Either way, the job is the same: find where the biggest gains are, and put a plan behind them that your team has already agreed to.
No guessing. I read it three ways.
Your team knows where the effort goes. Your files show the map, the errors, the waste, the lowest-hanging fruit, but not the velocity: how often, how much, how the work really moves. Only the days on site show you that. Put the three together and the biggest gains are obvious.
It starts before I set foot in the building.
The first stage happens before day one, and it's where the picture starts forming:
Everyone, not just managers. Four questions to every member of the team, a few minutes each. The people spending the effort are the ones who know where it goes.
Each department gets a simple folder structure, what comes in, what you produce, and drops in the real working files: the spreadsheets, the order forms, the reports, the paperwork that actually moves through the business.
Before I arrive, I read every file from every department. The last business that did this dropped over a thousand of them, and I went through all of it. That builds the map: where the errors are, where effort's being wasted, the lowest-hanging fruit. But files only ever show you half of it, what's happening, not how often or how much it's costing. They don't show velocity.
The days in the business.
The files are one half of the strategy, not the whole of it. Between them and the questionnaire I arrive knowing where the effort goes and where the errors are, but not how the work actually moves: how often, how much, and how those files are really used. That's what the days on site are for: with the people who do the work, watching it happen. How much time that takes depends on the size of the operation, a single site isn’t a five-site group.
Department by department, end to end: where information comes in, what gets done to it, where it goes next. The double-handling, the re-keying, the numbers nobody can see without half a week's work.
How the company should operate: the workflows, who owns what, the rules of the road, and the numbers that should be on the wall every week.
What to put in, in what order, and what each line is worth, every line costed two ways: your team puts it in, or I do.
Agreed with your team, not done to them.
The review is done with the people who do the work, and the plan is agreed with them before it reaches your desk. That's deliberate: a plan the team helped write is a plan the team will actually follow.
Four documents, eleven pages, one decision.
Because you can't buy what you can't picture, I've built the complete worked example for a fictional producer, Calder & Frome Fine Foods, a 35-person speciality food business. One consistent story, cover to cover. Every line below is drawn from it.
Then it’s yours. Have your team run the list, have me do it, or do neither, the picture belongs to you either way, and it’s worth having under any of the three.
Deliberately tight.
It’s enough to do the operational backbone properly, not a thin pass over everything. Anything worth deeper attention outside the backbone gets flagged for later, honestly, rather than squeezed in badly.
And it’s scoped to your business. A single-site operation and a five-site group aren’t the same job, so I don’t quote it off a 30-minute call. The figure follows a short pre-assessment: the questionnaire, or a first look on site. It’s rarely below £4,500, so that’s where it starts.