Written before it is billed
Scope, price, timeline and deliverables are agreed in a document you keep. If the work needs to change, that is a conversation and a revised document, not an adjusted invoice.
How we work
Four stages, published in advance.
You will know what happens, who is doing it, what you receive and how long it takes before anything is signed. No discovery phase that quietly becomes the engagement.
01 · The principle
Nothing about the process should be a surprise.
The uncertainty in a consulting engagement should be about your business, which is genuinely uncertain, and never about the engagement itself. Everything on this page is fixed before we start.
The same people throughout
Whoever sits in your first meeting does your work. There is no pitch team, no handover to a junior you have never met, and no point at which the person who understood your business leaves.
Measured where it counts
Commercial measures are agreed at the outset and reported monthly. Progress is visible in your management accounts rather than in a status report about the engagement.
Designed to hand back
Every model, process and document is built for your team to operate without us. An engagement that leaves behind a dependency has substituted one problem for another.
02 · The four stages
Diagnose, Design, Deploy, Drive.
Most engagements begin at stage one and continue through the others. Some clients stop after Design, having got what they came for. That is a legitimate outcome and it is priced accordingly.
- 01
Diagnose
A structured review of financial position, market standing and operating model, drawn from your records and from interviews with the people who actually run the business.
- What happens
- We reconcile what your systems contain, interview six to ten people across the business, and assess the market and competitive position against evidence rather than assumption.
- What you receive
- Written findings, a prioritised list of what to fix first, and an explicit statement of what we could not determine and why.
- Duration
- Two weeks
- Basis
- Fixed fee, agreed before we start
- 02
Design
A prioritised plan with named owners, sequenced timelines and a financial case for each move, so the board is approving on evidence rather than on confidence.
- What happens
- Options are developed and tested against the numbers. The ones we reject are written down with the reasoning, so the decision can be revisited later without starting again.
- What you receive
- A costed plan, a ninety-day execution sequence with named owners, and the measures against which progress will be reported.
- Duration
- Two to four weeks
- Basis
- Fixed price against a written scope
- 03
Deploy
We work alongside your team through implementation, holding the cadence, unblocking decisions and absorbing the work your people genuinely cannot take on.
- What happens
- A fortnightly working rhythm with the owners of each workstream, and a monthly session with the leadership team on progress, obstacles and required decisions.
- What you receive
- Ninety-day cycles that finish, documented processes, and a named adviser reachable between meetings.
- Duration
- Ongoing, in ninety-day cycles
- Basis
- Monthly retainer, one month’s notice
- 04
Drive
Monthly reporting against agreed measures, with the plan adjusted to what the data actually shows rather than to what it originally assumed.
- What happens
- Results are reviewed against the measures set in Design. Where reality has diverged from the plan, the plan changes and the reason is recorded.
- What you receive
- A monthly review, a reforecast, and a standing invitation to end the arrangement when it has stopped earning its fee.
- Duration
- Ongoing
- Basis
- Monthly retainer, one month’s notice
03 · Before stage one
What the first conversation is actually like.
People are often unsure what they are agreeing to when they book an introductory consultation, so it is worth being specific. It is a conversation. Nothing is sold in it.
04 · The other half of the arrangement
What we need from you.
Engagements fail for predictable reasons, and most of them are on this list. Saying so at the outset is more useful than discovering it in month four.
Access to the real numbers
Including the ones that are embarrassing. We have seen worse, we are not there to judge, and a diagnosis built on a partial picture is worth very little to either of us.
Time from the people who decide
A few hours a fortnight from the leadership team during the active phases. Where that genuinely is not available, we would rather narrow the scope than pretend it is.
Permission to say uncomfortable things
Some of what we find will concern how the business is currently run. An adviser who only tells you what is welcome is an expensive form of agreement.
A decision when one is asked for
Recommendations arrive with an owner and a date. Deferred decisions are the most common cause of a plan losing its cadence, and the cost of deferral is rarely visible until later.
05 · Start the conversation
Tell us what is actually holding the business back.
An introductory consultation is a straightforward conversation about your position and your priorities. No charge, no proposal deck, and no obligation to go further.
- What to expect
- Forty-five minutes with a senior adviser, followed by a short written summary of what we heard.
- What to bring
- Your last set of management accounts, if you have them. If you do not, that is already useful to know.
Vader Barclay ConsultingManagement · Accountancy · Marketing