Three months, six months, and a conversation every week.

Every engagement runs in that order, because we cannot usefully change anything until we know what is actually holding the company back. The finding out has a name and a fixed fee. What follows it is three or six months of work with a conversation every week.

Most advisory is a conversation and a document. Ours is a conversation, a document, and then one of us in the detail with your team until the thing actually works. We are accountable for whether it lands, not for whether the recommendation was interesting.

It is not a seat to be filled. We are not waiting to be told what to do next, and we will disagree with you in front of your team when it matters. That is a fair part of what you are paying for.

There is no version of this where we tell you in advance.

Until we have looked properly we do not know whether the constraint is your price, your positioning, the way you decide what to build, or the fact that every decision still goes through one person.

A firm that can hand you a deliverables list before it has met you is selling you a process, and the process is not the thing that helps. What we can tell you is the shape of it.

The agreement

Three months or six. Long enough to change something and finish it, short enough that you are never locked into a firm that has stopped being useful. We would rather you renewed because it worked.

The week

A standing conversation, every week, with whoever the decision belongs to. Between those we are in the documents, in the numbers, and in whichever of your meetings the work actually lives in.

What arrives in a given month

That depends entirely on the company and on what it is trying to do that month. Any firm that can tell you in advance is selling you a process rather than an outcome. What is constant is that something moves, and that you can see what moved.

Who is on it

Both of us to some degree, weighted to whoever the work needs. You are never handed to somebody you have not met.

What we usually end up running.

Some of it is advice. A good deal of it is us running a piece of the business until it works and your team can run it without us.

Pricing and packaging, from the decision through to the day it changes on the website.

A go to market that works without the founder in every conversation.

The product decision process, so the roadmap comes from evidence rather than from the last meeting anybody had.

The money. Allocation, runway, unit economics and contribution margin, in a state that survives a raise.

Board reporting that answers the questions the board is actually asking.

A first market entry, from choosing the beachhead through to the first ten customers.

Ground Truth.

Ground Truth is a complete commercial analysis of the business. Strategy, proposition, pricing, product, customers, go to market, money and how decisions actually get made, looked at from the inside and the outside at once. It is written up properly and then argued through with you, and it carries a fixed fee agreed before we start.

It happens at the beginning of every engagement, because nothing after it is worth much without it. Some companies buy it on its own, take it away and run the whole thing themselves, and we are entirely happy when that is how it goes. There is nothing at the end of it you have to buy.

What Ground Truth involves

How the fee works.

It depends on the length of the agreement and how much of us it needs, so we agree it in writing before anything starts and it doesn't move afterwards.

There is no rate card, no hourly rate and no tier table. Ask in the first conversation and you will get a straight number.

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