Do you sell or resell any of the software you recommend?

No. We take no fee, commission or referral from any vendor, and that is written into the engagement. The whole value of this work is that the person doing it has nothing of their own to sell, and the moment that stops being true the report is worth nothing to you.

Can you look at just one part of the business instead of all of it?

Yes, and it is often the better purchase. Scoping a single process — order intake, quoting, dispatch — gives you a plan you can actually start next month, at the bottom of the range rather than the top. Whole-company programmes are worth doing when several departments are already blocked on each other.

Will you also build what you recommend?

We can, and it is quoted separately and decided separately. Keeping the two apart is the point — an assessment written by someone who already knows they want the build contract is not an assessment.

How many of our people will you need, and for how long?

Between fifteen and forty interviews depending on size, thirty to forty-five minutes each, held individually rather than in groups. We also need a few hours sitting beside people while they do the actual daily task. The number of interviews is written into the contract so neither side is guessing.

What if we already know what we want to buy?

Then say so at the start and we will price the work as a validation rather than an assessment — faster and cheaper, with a written statement of what would have to be true for that choice to be right. What we cannot do is run a full assessment and arrive at a pre-agreed conclusion.

What happens after the report?

A forty-five minute walkthrough where we read it with you and take the objections that never arrive by email, a named owner for each phase, and a follow-up from us at thirty to sixty days to ask what has moved and what is stuck.

Consulting, Product & Talent

Digital transformation consulting

A costed, phased plan for moving how your business actually runs onto systems — what to build, what to buy, and what order to do it in.

From: $3,000–$50,000
Typical time: 1–4 months
Usually bought by: Traditional companies

What this actually solves

The business works. That is what makes this difficult. A long-established distributor is profitable, the phones ring, the orders go out. Then two things happen in the same year. The largest customer stops accepting orders by email and takes them only through its own portal, so somebody on your side now retypes every line by hand, every morning. And a newer competitor takes orders without a salesperson in the loop at all, and undercuts you while doing it. You know something has to change. You do not know what the first move is, and nobody inside the building can tell you either, because they are all busy running the version of the company that already exists.

If vendors have already been through the office, you will know the pattern. Each sold its own platform, each demo was convincing, and each answer contradicted the others. What is missing is not a product. It is an order of operations, priced, with somebody prepared to put their name on the sequence and to say plainly which of those systems you should not buy. You are buying a sequence, not software. The report is worth what it is worth because it is written by someone with nothing of their own to sell.

What we do, and in what order

The order carries the value. Skipping the assessment and starting at the roadmap produces a document that reads well and describes a company that does not exist.

Current-state assessment. How the work actually happens today, where the hours go, which numbers live in which spreadsheet and who keeps them. Not how the process is documented — how it runs on a Tuesday. Three to five days.
Interviews, from the owner down to the person filling in a register by hand. Fifteen to forty people depending on size, thirty to forty-five minutes each, held individually. Individually matters — an employee does not tell the truth about a broken process with the owner sitting in the room. One to three weeks.
System and licence inventory. Every tool currently running, what each one costs per month, who has admin on it, and which ones nobody has opened in a year. This step regularly pays for a meaningful slice of the engagement before anything is built. Two to four days.
Gap analysis and target operating model. The distance between where the work is and where it needs to be, and a plain description of what a normal working day looks like once the change has landed. One week.
The roadmap, in phases, with money and months against each phase. Build, buy or leave alone, decided item by item, with the dependencies made explicit so nobody starts phase three while phase one is still open. One to two weeks.
Business case and governance. What the programme saves or earns, and — the part that is usually missing — who runs it after we leave. A named person, a standing meeting, and a review date. Three to five days.
Readout, then follow-up. A forty-five minute session where the report is read aloud with you, ending on the single thing you can start next week. We come back at thirty to sixty days to ask what actually happened. Half a day, plus the follow-up.

Tools, so you know what you are getting rather than a black box — Miro or FigJam for process mapping, a spreadsheet model for the cost and licence numbers, Slides for the board version, and a recording and transcript of every interview. The honest note is that tools matter least on this service. The load-bearing part is the hours spent standing in the warehouse watching the work happen.

What moves the price

The range is $3,000–$50,000 over 1–4 months, and three things decide where an engagement sits in it.

How much of the business is in scope. One process assessed properly sits near the bottom of the range. Six departments with shared dependencies between them is a different piece of work, because every interdependency has to be mapped before anything can be sequenced.

Who the report is read to. A document read across a desk to an owner and a document that goes into a board pack are not the same deliverable. The board version carries more risk, needs a defensible business case behind every number, and is priced accordingly.

Whether the people side is included. A roadmap is cheaper than a roadmap plus the training plan, the adoption checkpoints and the named owner for each phase. The second one is what makes the first one happen.

What usually goes wrong

The transformation quietly becomes one piece of software. A budget is approved, a system is bought or built, it goes live, and the old way of working carries on beside it - because changing how people work was the actual job, and that part was never in the proposal. If a plan does not say how people will learn the new way and who reminds them daily, it is a software purchase wearing a bigger word.

Only the top of the org chart gets interviewed. Everyone describes their job as it is supposed to work, not as it runs. "Every order goes into the system" describes the orders the system can take — the ones it cannot handle, a part shipment say, get written in a duplicate book in somebody's drawer instead. The way through is to stop asking and start looking — show me the last five orders you processed — and that single habit changes more of the final report than any interview does.

Nobody owns it once we leave. The phases are right, the numbers are right, and then whatever is urgent that week overtakes them one at a time. A phase with no owner stalls every phase sequenced behind it, so a plan without named owners, a fixed review meeting and a date is a document rather than a programme — and it gets abandoned without anyone deciding to abandon it.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

Do you sell or resell any of the software you recommend?: No. We take no fee, commission or referral from any vendor, and that is written into the engagement. The whole value of this work is that the person doing it has nothing of their own to sell, and the moment that stops being true the report is worth nothing to you.
Can you look at just one part of the business instead of all of it?: Yes, and it is often the better purchase. Scoping a single process — order intake, quoting, dispatch — gives you a plan you can actually start next month, at the bottom of the range rather than the top. Whole-company programmes are worth doing when several departments are already blocked on each other.
Will you also build what you recommend?: We can, and it is quoted separately and decided separately. Keeping the two apart is the point — an assessment written by someone who already knows they want the build contract is not an assessment.
How many of our people will you need, and for how long?: Between fifteen and forty interviews depending on size, thirty to forty-five minutes each, held individually rather than in groups. We also need a few hours sitting beside people while they do the actual daily task. The number of interviews is written into the contract so neither side is guessing.
What if we already know what we want to buy?: Then say so at the start and we will price the work as a validation rather than an assessment — faster and cheaper, with a written statement of what would have to be true for that choice to be right. What we cannot do is run a full assessment and arrive at a pre-agreed conclusion.
What happens after the report?: A forty-five minute walkthrough where we read it with you and take the objections that never arrive by email, a named owner for each phase, and a follow-up from us at thirty to sixty days to ask what has moved and what is stuck.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Digital transformation consulting All Consulting, Product & Talent services