Problems
Problems we solve.
Most firms in this category publish a list of services and then ask you to work out which one matches your situation, which is backwards. You already know what's happening in your business. What you don't know yet is which category it belongs to, and the category is our job.
So the pages below are organized by problem instead. Each one names a situation, describes how to tell whether you have it, and says what fixing it actually involves.
How we read a problem
Several visible symptoms, each with its own owner, converge on one constraint. The engagement is aimed at the constraint, not at the loudest symptom.
- 01Growth stalled
- 02Margins slipped
- 03Everything routes through the owner
- 04The systems disagree
- 05The constraint underneath The constraint.
- 06The engagement The intervention that follows from it.
The patterns underneath
- Incomplete information
- Fragmented stakeholders
- Difficult economics
- Regulated environments
- Unclear ownership
- Poor workflow
- Missing infrastructure
- Complicated transactions
- New markets
- Systems that do not exist yet
Where to start reading
Owner dependency
Every non-trivial decision routes through you, and the business slows down whenever you do. That's a design problem in the operating model, and there's a two-week test for whether you have it.
Operations that cannot scale
Headcount went up and output didn't. Growth usually stalls on operating design rather than on demand, and hiring against the symptom just makes it more expensive to fix later.
Fragmented data
You already have the data, but nothing can see all of it at once. You can build one operating picture without replacing every system you currently run.
Revenue leakage
Pricing, billing, handoffs, and follow-up are where money quietly leaves an owner-led company, and most of it is already inside the business and just uncollected.
Build versus buy
You've evaluated four tools and all of them break on the one requirement you can't waive. There's a way to decide before you spend, including the honest cost of building it yourself.
Entering the US market
A US corporate is interested but nothing is moving, or a pilot ran and no purchase order followed. The obstacle is usually the buying process rather than the product.
If it does not fit a category
We're often most useful when the assignment doesn't fit neatly anywhere: cross-disciplinary problems that no single function owns, capital-intensive projects that need evaluating before anyone commits, regulated and security-constrained environments, first-of-their-kind builds with no comparable precedent, transaction and diligence support, and situations where you can't yet state the question.
If everyone you've asked has told you it isn't their area, that's exactly the sort of thing to send us.
Not sure which one this is
That's the common case. The Operating Diagnostic is twelve questions, about two minutes, self-serve, and no call required. It scores demand, conversion, and operations, and tells you what to fix first. Or if you'd rather just write it out, tell us the problem instead.