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How we work: a measured consulting method
The same four steps on every engagement, whichever practice you came in through. The last one is the one most consultants skip.
See it as it is
A visit, your records, and conversations with the people who deal with customers, students or inspectors. Owners describe the business they intend to run; the front desk describes the one that exists. The difference is usually where the gap sits.
Establish the baseline
We quantify where you stand today and what the attainable figure looks like, agreed in writing before any work starts. Without a number that existed before we arrived, nothing afterwards can be verified, including by you.
Change one thing at a time
A pricing model, a campaign, a set of collateral, a prospectus or a compliance file: built, put into use, and isolated enough that its effect can be attributed. Changing six things at once may work, but it teaches you nothing.
Check against the baseline
We re-measure and report either way. If the number moved, you have evidence rather than a testimonial. If it did not, we say so in writing and try the next hypothesis. This is the step most engagements quietly omit.
Why the baseline matters more than the recommendation
Consulting has a measurement problem. Advice is easy to produce and hard to falsify, so the industry has settled on a convention where the deliverable is a document and success is whether the client felt the document was good. That is a review, not a result.
Establishing a baseline first changes the incentive. Once the number is agreed and written down before any work begins, both sides are committed to an outcome that can be checked. It also protects you from us: if margin was already improving for unrelated reasons, the baseline shows that, and we cannot claim credit for it.
What you receive at each stage
- After Observe: a written account of what we found, including anything working well that should be left alone
- After Measure: the agreed baseline figures and the attainable target, with the assumptions behind both stated plainly
- After Intervene: the actual artefact, in use: the revised price list, the campaign, the prospectus, the filed application
- After Verify: the re-measurement against the baseline, and a routine your team can run without us
What we will not do
We will not present a benchmark from another company as though it were a finding about yours. We will not recommend a change we cannot measure the effect of. And where the honest answer is that the problem is outside our competence, we will say so at the first conversation rather than bill through the discovery.
Start with the symptom