Six stages, and five places we can be told to stop.
The sequence runs Evaluate, Structure, Align, Grow — our ESAG framework, in that order because that is the order in which businesses are actually fixed, learned the hard way in a line job rather than drawn on a whiteboard. Every stage carries a test that has to pass in your numbers before the next one begins, and you are the one who says whether it passed. Here is the whole sequence, and the five points at which you can end it.
Stage 1
Discovery
Your objectives, market and competitive ground — understood from inside the business, not from a template. We sit with the sales data, walk the operation, and listen more than we talk.
Exit test — We can state your real constraint
Stage 2
Analysis
Market research and business analysis that surfaces the two or three levers that actually matter — because most businesses are not held back by ten problems, they are held back by two.
Exit test — Evidence, not opinion
Stage 3
Strategy
A data-driven plan matched to your goals and your resources — not a deck, a working document, with owners and dates. If your team cannot run it, it is not a strategy yet.
Exit test — Your team can run it
Stage 4
Implementation
We execute alongside your team. The plan meets the shop floor, the distributor and the sales call, and gets amended by what it finds there.
Exit test — Visible in operations
Stage 5
Measurement
Progress tracked on KPIs agreed on day one — visible to you, not buried in our reporting. The numbers are the engagement’s scoreboard, and everyone can see it.
Exit test — The numbers moved
Stage 6
Refinement
What the numbers teach us goes back into the plan. The standard is not a date on a Gantt chart; it is that the gains hold after we leave.
Exit test — Gains hold without us
What it costs to begin
Before any retainerStep 01
The callFree · 30 minutes
Thirty minutes with a senior consultant. You describe the situation; we share our first read and tell you honestly whether we are the right people. If we are not, we say so and point you somewhere useful. Nothing is invoiced for this.
Step 02
Discovery sprint2–4 weeks · fixed fee
A scoped, fixed-fee piece of work covering Stages 1 and 2. It ends with a written deliverable: the two or three constraints actually holding the business back, the evidence behind that conclusion, and the plan to remove them. It stands on its own — plenty of clients have taken it and run the plan themselves.
Step 03
ImplementationScoped per phase
If you want us alongside for Stages 3 to 6, that is scoped and priced per phase against the plan we just wrote together. Retainer programmes — fractional CMO, CFO or COO — are available where a business needs standing senior capacity rather than a project.
What we ask of you
The other half of the dealA consulting engagement fails for predictable reasons, and most of them sit on the client side. So we are explicit up front: we need access to the real numbers, not the presentation version; one decision-maker who can actually say yes; and your team's time in the diagnosis, because they already know most of the answer.
“We champion people as the core of competitive advantage — strategy only works when your team owns it.”