Expertise
Six practices, built round the decisions boards actually have to take.
Not a service catalogue. Each of these exists because the same question kept arriving and we got good at it; where a question falls outside them we say so rather than assemble a team to find out.
Analysis carried into the room on paper, because an exhibit nobody can mark up is an exhibit nobody argues with.
Strategy and market entry
Where to compete and where not to. Market and competitor economics, entry and expansion cases, portfolio choices, and the commercial due diligence that either supports a deal or stops it.
- Market and competitor economics
- Entry, expansion and exit cases
- Portfolio and capital allocation
- Commercial due diligence
Operating model and cost
Structure, spans and layers, shared services, procurement, and the cost base that does not quietly come back the following year. We map the work rather than the organisation chart, because the chart is a description of intentions.
- Structure, spans and layers
- Shared services and outsourcing
- Procurement and third-party spend
- Sustainable cost reduction
Transformation delivery
A delivery office that tracks value rather than activity, run by people who have carried a line target themselves. It is handed to your own COO on a date agreed in advance, and the handover is a deliverable rather than an afterthought.
- Programme design and sequencing
- Value tracking to the P and L
- Delivery office and governance
- Capability handover
Commercial and pricing
Pricing architecture, discount governance and sales effectiveness. Most price problems are governance problems wearing a commercial hat: the policy is fine and the behaviour drifted away from it about eighteen months ago.
- Pricing architecture and uplift
- Discount and rebate governance
- Sales coverage and incentives
- Customer and product profitability
Organisation and leadership
Decision rights, top-team design, succession, and the operating rhythm that makes a strategy survive contact with a Monday. Where a strategy is not being followed, the cause is nearly always that nobody was told which decisions it removed.
- Decision rights and governance
- Top-team design and succession
- Operating rhythm and performance management
- Culture and ways of working
Data and decision systems
Not a data platform programme. The numbers that matter, defined once, owned by somebody by name, and produced on time — which is a governance exercise with a modelling exercise attached, and almost never the other way round.
- Management information design
- Forecasting and scenario models
- Data ownership and definitions
- Analytics that reach a decision
What we need from you
Three things, and the engagement fails without them.
We ask for these in the first conversation rather than discovering they are absent in week six. Where one of them cannot be provided, that is usually worth knowing before a fee is agreed.
A sponsor who can decide
Not a steering committee. One person who can say yes to the answer, and who is prepared to be in the working sessions rather than briefed after them.
The data as it is
Unreconciled, in the format it currently exists in. Time spent tidying it before we arrive is time spent hiding the thing we were hired to find.
Somebody to hand it to
Named in week one, not week twelve. If there is nobody, the engagement will produce a document rather than a change, and we would rather say so early.