The 90-day sprint
Most of it is fixed before the report would have been written.
Most engagements begin with an intensive ninety-day operating sprint. The objective is not to study your business for three months and hand you a presentation — it is to make the business better immediately, while we learn what is really holding it back.
01
See it
How the company actually works.
Not how the org chart says it works, and not how the procedure manual says it works. We talk to owners, leadership, managers and the people closest to the work. We follow processes from beginning to end. We read the financial and operational numbers. We sit in the meetings and watch how decisions actually get made.
- Bottlenecks and repeated problems
- Approvals that exist for no current reason
- Work with no clear owner
- Handoffs where jobs go quiet
- Effort spent producing things nobody reads
- Dependencies on one specific person
02
Fix it
We do not wait ninety days to start.
When we find something small and broken, we fix it that week. An unnecessary approval. A broken handoff. Duplicate data entry. A report nobody reads. A meeting nobody needs. A capable manager carrying responsibility without the authority to act on it. A piece of software being used wrongly. An automation that removes hours.
- Early wins are not a courtesy
- They create momentum and reduce friction
- And they show the organisation we are here to make the work better, not to observe it
03
Build it
Then the deeper blockers become visible.
Once the obvious friction is gone, what is actually limiting the business is much easier to see. That is when we build the operating structure that makes the improvement last. It might be an operating system. It might be fractional operating leadership. It might be a process, or leadership development, or technology, or organisational structure. Usually it is a combination — and we bring the right tool to the problem rather than forcing the problem into a tool we already sell.
And then it keeps going. There is no point at which the company has “completed the system”, because there is no system to complete — only a business that runs better than it did, and people inside it who can now see the next thing.
Whether this is for you
The shape of it, before you call.
Owner-led companies, roughly 25 to 500 people.
Small enough that the owner is still the bottleneck for decisions that should not need them, and large enough that fixing it changes the numbers.
Ninety days, scoped and priced before it starts.
A fixed fee agreed up front, not an hourly retainer that grows to fit the time available. You know what it costs before we begin.
What comes after is decided at the end, not committed to at the start.
The sprint does not exist to sell you the next thing. If the right answer at day ninety is that you no longer need us, that is a good outcome and we will say so.
If we cannot help, we say so in the first conversation.
Not in month four. The problem being outside what we are good at is the cheapest thing either of us can discover early.
One question, first
What keeps you up at night?
We ask every owner this in the first week, and the answer becomes part of the starting point. It is remarkable how often it is not the thing that brought us in — and how often nobody has asked it before.