What we do

We help you achieve profitable growth. So we design our projects not only to help you understand more about your current position and prospects, but also to help you put all your knowledge into action quickly. Our approach is practical and action oriented.

In a typical consulting project, the consultant gets all the learning and then tries to transfer it to the client through a report or presentation. This is usually inefficient and where the issue is strategy and all its complexities, it’s ineffective.

There is no process of inquiry for the client to participate in. It builds no momentum towards action. It’s a sterile, theoretical process designed as much to constrain action as it is to ignite it.

This is fine if the issue is ancillary to your strategic success, such as how well you buy office supplies. But for an issue like strategy, that is central to the way your entire organization works, you can’t delegate or subcontract it.

Strategy is your job and we try to help you do it better. What strategy looks like when you really know the industry.

Project design
We acknowledge this in our project design. We put you at the center of the research and decision-making process.

We help you set your ambition for the project. We guide you to the data sources and help you develop the research and analytical methodologies that will give you the kind of deep understanding of your situation that you need for developing strategy. (See The First River Strategy Development Process for an overview of the process.)
We design and facilitate the meetings in which you discuss, analyze and decide on the data. Our facilitation style is robust and work focused. It’s the business question we’re trying to help you answer and we will help you deal with group dynamic issues only to the extent that doing so will help you get to the bottom of the business question. (If you’d like to know more about how we design management meetings and retreats go here.)

You leave one of our strategy projects not only with the what (products, services) and where (customers, regions, sectors) of your strategy, but also the how (cost, quality, speed, performance), when (now, later) and why (more profit, more share, more focus) too.

Implementation starts the moment you leave each of the core meetings during the project. The impact of the project is carried in the thoughts and actions of the managers who participate. We feel that if the project hasn’t impacted their short-term priorities, then we don’t expect it to impact their long-term goals and actions either.

After we’ve completed the assignment, we follow up with you on the agreements that emerge from the final meeting. This is to maintain continuity and to find out whether we were as helpful as we think we were and, if we weren’t, where we could have improved our process.

Fees
The way we contract with you reflects our direct and collaborative approach. We charge a fixed fee for every project based on the number of days we expect to contribute multiplied by a standard billing rate. Our billing rates are competitive with partner level in a big consulting company, only you’re paying us to contribute directly to the project, not manage junior consultants. You’ll know exactly what you’re going to pay at the start.

Expenses are charged in addition at cost. We don’t charge you an ‘administration’ fee on top and we don’t charge you for expenses that we would incur anyway. (Check your next consulting invoice to see if your current consultants do.)

If you would like to know more about us or want to talk about a specific assignment and how we would handle it, call or send us an e-mail.