A structured look across the eight areas, the numbers, the commercial management, the operations, that decide what your business is worth and how much it leans on you. On evidence, not a hunch, and it ends with a plan you can act on.
No open-ended engagement. A clear start, a clear finish, and something in your hands at the end.
One structured pass across the eight areas, built on your real numbers and a straight conversation, not a questionnaire left with you.
The one thing holding the business back, named on evidence, with the two or three that matter next behind it.
A prioritised plan, ranked by what moves the numbers most, so you know exactly what to do first and why.
One honest pass across the whole business. Together these decide what it's worth and how much it depends on you.
Where the money actually comes from, and where it quietly leaks.
Whether you're charging what the work is worth, and what a small change would do.
How predictable the next sale is, and where deals quietly stall.
Concentration risk, who's worth keeping, and who's costing you.
How work flows from won to delivered, and where it jams.
How much still runs through you, and what that's costing.
What's measured, what's stuck in someone's head, and what's guessed.
What a buyer sees, and the one thing that would worry them.
The findings written plainly, then turned into a ranked list of moves, hardest-hitting first. You leave knowing the one thing to fix, what it's worth fixing, and the order to do it in. If you want help delivering it, that's Stage 2, but you're never locked in.
No procurement process and no proposal theatre. You should be able to picture the whole transaction before you commit to it.
You tell me what is heavy about running the business. I tell you honestly whether the diagnostic would help. If it would not, I say so, and that is the end of it.
What I will look at, what you get back, the fee, and the dates. One page, plain English, and a mutual non-disclosure agreement alongside it before any of your numbers move.
The whole read is mine. There is no team, nothing is subcontracted, and no junior is learning on your business.
The read on an acquired business became the due diligence nobody had done, and the plan that turned it round.
Read the case study →Reading the contract nobody had read reframed the real problem in under four weeks, off the wrong track.
Read the case study →Eight areas get scored because someone has actually worked in all eight. Not studied them, implemented them, and lived with the consequences afterwards. That is the difference between a report that lists problems and one that knows which problem is causing the others.
Subsea engineering. Led a £1.2m qualification programme as client-facing lead, commissioned a multi-million-pound test facility, and established another overseas.
Took a loss-making business, bought out of distress, to roughly £100k of profit in about five months. The case study.
Built the sales and marketing strategy for an engineering consultancy and opened a nuclear and oil-and-gas pipeline. Later led market entry into hydrogen, sustainable fuels and major rail infrastructure.
Implemented document control, project controls, planning, permits and a bespoke change-management system across a multi-billion-pound programme, plus reporting dashboards and AI governance. The case study.
Ran post-acquisition integration when one engineering group was bought by another, and has since done the same work for owner-led businesses. The case study.
Full profit-and-loss ownership of a property business with £350k of investor funding raised. Built daily cashflow and monthly reporting for a multi-brand group, from a standing start. The case study.
The person who can read a set of accounts, name the constraint, and then go and build the fix is rarer than any CV makes it look.
None of this is a framework bought off a shelf. The method is the small-business version of a system built for a multi-billion-pound engineering programme: a change-management spine, document control, a coding structure, and reporting that told the truth early enough to act on. It has a serial number on it.
Which is also why the honest answer sometimes is that you do not need this. On one engagement the right advice was to stop investing and close the business. That is a case study too.
Book the 15-minute call and I'll tell you honestly whether the diagnostic would help. If it wouldn't, I'll say so.