Begin with a conversation

I work with anyone who carries a decision, at any level, in any kind of organization, and with the people who advise them, formally or informally. Most are owners and managing partners of small and mid-sized companies, country leaders and division heads inside larger organizations, NGO leaders, and senior government officials. What they share is a decision that will not wait and a situation where the usual moves have stopped working. If you run a team and answer for its results, the case stories on this site are the fastest way to recognize your own situation. If your problem is a technical one with one right answer, a specialist in that field will serve you better than I will.

Growth that has slowed. A transformation that changed nothing. Owners in conflict while the business burns energy. Demand rising faster than people and skills. Big clients slipping away while costs rise. Funding squeezed and reporting eating the real work. Everything around the business turning political. The case stories show each of these, sector by sector. Some problems have a right answer that experts can find. Others show their answer only after you try something small and watch what happens. My work is the second kind, where the situation, the people and the market all move at once.

Nobody but us. Our conversations stay between you and me. I do not name my clients, and the case stories on this site are anonymized to sector level; the sector stays only because a story without it would help no one. I handle personal data under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). What you tell me serves your mandate and nothing else. I never confirm or deny who my clients are.

You will always know your business better than I will. What I bring from outside is distance: I see the habits you stopped seeing, and I have watched the same kind of situation resolve itself in other sectors. The work starts from your knowledge of your business and my knowledge of how organizations move, and the two meet in the first weeks. Each case story ran inside a different sector, and the people inside each one said the work fit their reality.

The fee is a baseline monthly retainer, with top-ups when the mandate needs more: interviews, analysis, documentation, design, interventions, extra meetings. You always know before a top-up happens, and before anything starts you know the fee, what it covers and when it is paid. Compare the fee with the cost of the problem staying where it is, in money, in time and in the people it burns. If I cannot see a return worth your money, I will say so before we start.

We agree on a mandate: the result we are after and the way we work toward it. We start from the situation as it is, take small steps that can be undone if they miss, and watch what each step teaches us. You always know what happens next and why. I do not count hours; the mandate holds the result, the pace and the risk. Most mandates run from a few months to about four years. A first mandate can be as short as three months. Some long mandates grow into something more, and a few end with a seat at the board table. The ten things you can expect to see in the first months are listed on the Services page.

A first call is a working conversation of about 30 minutes, on Zoom, and it is free. You describe the situation, I ask questions, and by the end we both know whether working together makes sense. If it does, I send you a short written proposal for a mandate. If it does not, I say so and, where I can, point you toward someone who fits better. The call commits you to nothing.

I do. The person you speak with on the first call is the person who works with you to the end. There is no handover to a junior team, and no part of your mandate is passed to anyone else.