One engagement at a time, and both of us in the room
There is no team behind us and no associate you would meet in month two. It caps what we can take on, which is the reason the work is any good.
Three kinds of engagement
All three end with a document somebody inside your business owns. We do not stay to implement, and we will say at the outset if implementation is really what you need.
Operating model
What each part of the business is for, who decides what, and where two people are currently deciding the same thing. Six to ten weeks, and most of it is interviews rather than analysis.
Cost structure
Where the money goes and which of it is genuinely variable. We will not produce a savings target — a number set before the work is a conclusion the work is then made to reach.
Succession and handover
For founder-run businesses where one person holds everything. The hardest of the three, the least often asked for, and the one where six weeks makes the most difference.
How we charge
Four facts about the terms. There is no figure on this page about anybody else’s business.
The two of us
Both on every engagement, which is unusual enough to be the main thing worth knowing about this firm.
Shalini Iyengar
Fourteen years in manufacturing operations before this, eight of them running one. Does the interviews, which is where most of the findings actually come from.
Arjun Balakrishnan
A decade in corporate finance and six years advising founder-run businesses on handing over. Writes the document, and will argue with his own partner in front of you.
How an engagement runs
Four steps, and the first is free and frequently ends it.
A conversation, unpaid
Two hours, both partners. About a third of these end with us saying the problem is not one we should be paid to look at, which is not modesty — it is the fastest way to find out.
A written proposal
What we will look at, who we need to speak to, how long and what it costs. One figure, and it does not change unless the scope does in writing.
Interviews, then analysis
In that order and roughly two to one. A consultancy that starts with the data and interviews afterwards is a consultancy testing a hypothesis it arrived with.
A document, and a handover
Written for the people who have to act on it rather than for the person who commissioned it. Then we leave — and we will not bid for the implementation.
Reasonable questions
Four answers, and the first is why this page has no client list.
Who have you worked with?
We will tell you on the telephone and we will not publish it. A client list on a consultancy page is a set of names published because they look good, usually without asking, and the engagements we are proudest of are the ones nobody wants named.
What results have you produced?
Every honest answer to this is a claim about somebody else’s accounts. What we can do is put you in touch with two former clients who have agreed in advance to take the call, and let them tell you — including the parts that did not go well.
Do you have a methodology?
We have a way of working, described in the four steps above, and it does not have a name or a trademark. A framework named after the firm is a diagram, and calling it a method implies evidence behind it that a two-partner practice does not have.
Will you implement it?
No, and we will not bid for it. A consultancy that recommends work it would then be paid to do is a consultancy whose recommendation you cannot fully weigh — however careful everybody is being.
Send an enquiry
A paragraph about what is actually going wrong is enough. The first conversation is two hours and costs nothing, and about a third of them end with a recommendation of somebody else.