Here is exactly what happens once you get in touch.
We start with a 45-minute video or phone call. No slides, no pitch. We ask you to describe the problem in your own words: what is happening, when it started, what you have already tried. We also want to know the numbers you are tracking and the ones you are not. By the end of the call we can usually tell you whether we are the right fit and roughly how long the work will take.
If the problem sits outside our expertise, we will say so and point you to someone who can help. We have referral relationships with three specialist firms covering tax structuring, HR law, and IT infrastructure.
This is the stage most consultancies skip or rush. We spend five to ten days inside your business, depending on its complexity. We review financial reports from the past three years, interview key staff individually, sit in on operational meetings, and walk the floor if you have a physical operation. The goal is to see the business as it actually runs, not as the org chart says it should.
We compile findings into a diagnostic report that lists every issue we found, ranked by financial impact. The report is written in plain language. No jargon, no 80-slide decks. A typical diagnostic runs between 12 and 25 pages.
We present the diagnostic in person and walk you through our recommended actions. Each recommendation includes an estimated cost, timeline, and expected return. We are honest about uncertainty: if a projected benefit depends on market conditions we cannot control, we flag that clearly.
You choose which recommendations to pursue. Some clients take all of them; others pick two or three and defer the rest. Once we agree on scope, we issue a fixed-fee proposal. The fee covers everything: our time, travel within England, and all deliverables. There are no hourly add-ons or "change request" charges unless the scope changes materially, in which case we agree the adjustment in writing before any extra work begins.
This is where most of the work happens. Depending on the project, implementation might mean redesigning your pricing model and testing it with a pilot customer group, mapping and rebuilding a fulfilment workflow, or building a 12-month financial plan with monthly milestones for a planned expansion.
We are on-site or on-call two days a week during this phase. One of our consultants attends your weekly leadership meeting to track progress and flag blockers early. We do not hand you a plan and disappear. If a new process needs training, we run the training sessions ourselves rather than leaving it to your already-stretched managers.
Implementation phases typically last between six and fourteen weeks. Shorter projects, like a pricing review, sit at the low end. Operations restructuring for a company with multiple sites usually takes the full fourteen.
Thirty days after the last change goes live, we come back for a structured review. We compare the metrics we agreed to track at the start against actual results. Where targets have been met, we document the new baseline so your team can maintain it. Where results are lagging, we diagnose why and make adjustments at no extra charge, provided the shortfall is within the original scope.
The final deliverable is a handover pack: a concise document that records what changed, why, and how your team should manage it going forward. It includes contact details for the consultant who led the project, because questions always come up three or four months later and we want you to be able to reach the person who knows your business.
A few commitments we make on every project.
After the diagnostic, we quote a single number for the entire engagement. If the work takes us longer than we estimated, that is our problem, not yours. We have only revised a fee upward twice in five years, both times because the client asked us to add significant new scope mid-project.
The person who runs your diagnostic is the same person who leads implementation and conducts the final review. We do not rotate staff between projects. You will have one direct mobile number and one email address for the duration.
Before any work begins, we agree on two to four specific metrics that will define success. These might be gross margin percentage, order fulfilment time, customer acquisition cost, or staff utilisation rate. If we cannot agree on measurable outcomes, we will not take the project, because there is no way to know whether the work was worth doing.
Our weekly progress updates tell you what went well and what did not. If a recommendation is not producing results, we say so in week three rather than hoping it improves by week twelve. Early honesty gives us time to adjust course while the budget is still intact.
We bring a structured interview template, but the real value comes from unscripted conversation. When we sit with your warehouse supervisor for an hour, we learn things that never surface in board packs. One client discovered that a manual data-entry step, taking 20 minutes per order, existed only because two software systems had never been properly connected. The fix cost £3,000 and saved 15 hours a week.
We also review your contracts with key suppliers and customers. Renewal terms, penalty clauses, and volume commitments often contain opportunities or risks that nobody has looked at since the contract was signed. A construction-services client in Leeds had been paying a 12% premium on materials because their supply agreement auto-renewed at 2019 prices without a renegotiation clause. We helped them renegotiate and saved £74,000 in the first year.
The diagnostic is not an audit. We are not looking for blame. We are looking for the handful of changes that will produce the biggest financial impact in the shortest time.