Engagements
A fixed scope, a fixed fee, and a finding at the end.
We price against the executive appointment you would otherwise make, because that is the decision this work replaces. You know the cost and the end date before we start.
01 / Four ways to engage us
What you buy, and what closes it.
Preliminary report
90 minutes with the executive who would sponsor the work, and a written position at the end of it.
If this does not look like an alignment problem, the report says so and the matter ends there.
Black box review
The full investigation and the intervention that closes it. 12–16 weeks, priced by how many defences are in scope.
Rising to US$250,000 for a multinational group or a regulator.
Realignment
The fix on its own, where a sound investigation already exists and the business has not been able to act on it.
We check the existing findings before acting on them. If the diagnosis is wrong, the fix will be wrong too, and you will have spent the budget and the goodwill finding that out.
Register oversight
Quarterly re-scoring of the alignment register, reported straight to the board rather than through the executives it measures.
Available once an investigation has produced the register. We do not sell it on its own.
02 / Why we price it this way
Compare us to the hire you would otherwise make.
Every one of these roles is capable. Every one of them reports into the hierarchy being examined, and that is the structural reason none of them can produce the finding.
| The hire | Cost a year | Why it cannot produce the finding |
|---|---|---|
| Chief Risk Officer | US$150,000 to US$300,000 | Measures compliance against policy, not the distance between what leadership believes and what is actually true |
| Transformation Director | US$120,000 to US$220,000 | Owns delivery of the strategy being examined, and reports on milestones rather than on assumptions |
| Head of Organisational Development | US$130,000 to US$250,000 | Has the people skills without the mandate to investigate or the language to put a number on it for the board |
| Strategy consultancy | US$300,000 upward | Examines the document and the operating model, not what the team actually believed when it acted |
A permanent hire is an expensive way to fix a temporary problem.
03 / Is this us
One question decides whether we are the right firm.
Does somebody else's ability to operate depend on you? If it does, the cost of a misaligned leadership team is carried by people who are not even your customers.
Where we have worked
- Telecommunications
- Energy
- Mining
- Logistics
- Infrastructure
- Construction
- Banking
- State-owned enterprises
The method transfers to
- Ports and terminals
- Rail and freight
- Water and sanitation
- Payments and mobile money
- Data centres and cloud
- Downstream fuel
The second list is where the method works, rather than where we have worked. The test is the same in all of them.
Sector is the easy part. What actually decides whether an investigation is worth running is the condition you are in.
The condition is there
The condition is not
04 / Four things we agree first
Before a fee is quoted.
- Somebody senior enough to act on the finding is sponsoring the work.
- Blame sits outside the terms of reference, in writing.
- No restructuring during the first phase, because it changes the evidence.
- You get the whole findings report, including the parts that were uncomfortable to write.
We do not quote day rates. A day is not the thing being bought.
05 / Start here
The first call costs nothing.
90 minutes, questions rather than a presentation, and a written position on whether an investigation is warranted.