Company
Every engagement starts with diagnosis, not a proposal. We spend the first two weeks establishing what is actually wrong, because fixing the wrong constraint is the expensive mistake, and you keep those findings whether or not you continue with us.
What that means in practice
The pattern we avoid
A proposal is written before anyone understands the problem, the work is delivered against that proposal, and six months later the commercial result has not moved because the original diagnosis was wrong.
What we do instead
Each one exists because of a specific way engagements go wrong, and each is written into the proposal rather than left as intent.
We work in the other order. Diagnosis first, scoped proposal second. That means our first deliverable is usually a document telling you what is broken, including the parts we are not the right people to fix.
How Discovery RunsEvery proposal says what is out of scope as explicitly as what is in it. Naming the boundary early removes the most common source of disappointment in an engagement, and it is the fastest way to tell whether a supplier actually understands the work.
How Engagements Are ScopedWe report against agreed commercial measures (enquiries, response times, hours removed) rather than against activity. A monthly report full of impressions and rankings that avoids the commercial question is a way of not being accountable.
What We Report Against
Discovery is scoped and priced on its own, so continuing is a decision made with the diagnosis in hand rather than a commitment made before it.
The method above only helps once it is pointed at a real problem. Describe what is not working and we will tell you which of the four layers we would look at first — and whether it is work we should be doing at all.
