We take four engagements at a time. That is the constraint that makes the promise possible, and it is why we say no more often than yes.
Sanitised, because the clients are identifiable. The numbers are real.
Forty stores, flat like-for-like sales for three years. The answer was not more stores — it was that eleven of the forty were losing money and nobody had ever asked which.
Returns had reached 34% and were being treated as a logistics problem. They were a sizing and photography problem.
A family group about to acquire a competitor. Two weeks in we found that 60% of the target's revenue sat with three customers, two of whom were already tendering.
Every project was bid on a template that had not been updated in six years while material costs had moved 40%. They were winning tenders precisely because they were underpricing.
A manufacturer running duplicate lines in two emirates after an acquisition, each convinced the other was less efficient. Neither had comparable data.
Nine hundred customers, no customer-level margin analysis, and a sales team paid on revenue.
A professional services business of 120 people with every decision routed through the two founders. Growth had stopped because their calendars were full.
Sales effort was spread evenly across segments. Three quarters of profit came from one segment that received a quarter of the effort.
An acquirer valuing a client book on revenue. We looked at retention by cohort and found the book was shrinking underneath the headline number.
Engagements finish with a decision made and someone accountable for it, in a document short enough to be read. The hundred-page deck exists to justify the fee, and we would rather justify it differently.
Describe the problem. We will tell you whether it is a consulting problem at all — about half the time it is a hiring problem or a decision someone is avoiding.
