(FAQ)

Straight questions, straight answers.

01How is this different from a normal consultant?

Most consultants sell you a diagnosis, hand over a document, and move on to the next client, leaving you and your team to work out how to actually make the changes stick once the report's been filed away. We do the opposite. We stay in the business as an operating partner, sitting alongside your leadership team through the actual work of changing how you operate, covering the capacity gap that stops good plans turning into real change, and holding the team to account until the new way of working is genuinely embedded rather than just written down. The plan is the easy part. Making it stick is the job.

02What does the workshop cost and how is it structured?

The AI Era Strategy Workshop is a single day with your leadership team, no more than twelve people in the room, run in person across the South West and London with other locations available on request. Before the day itself we run a short situational assessment so the session is calibrated to your business rather than generic. [Insert price] covers the day itself, the pre-work, and the directional roadmap that comes out the other end. It's a fixed fee, not a day rate, because the value isn't the hours in the room, it's the alignment your team leaves with.

03How long does an engagement run?

There's no standard answer, because it depends on what the diagnosis actually finds, but the shape tends to repeat. The Workshop itself is one day. If the team commits to going further, the fixed-scope diagnostic that follows runs [insert typical length], and the operating partner engagement after that is built around the gap it needs to close rather than a fixed term, which means it runs until your leadership can drive the transformation forward without us in the room, not until an arbitrary contract date arrives.

04What if the workshop doesn't lead to further work?

That's a genuinely fine outcome. The Workshop is designed to give your leadership team real alignment and a directional steer in a single day, and for some businesses that's exactly what's needed, nothing more. We're not running a funnel where the day only exists to sell the next stage. If it gives you what you came for and the next move is something your team can take on internally, that's a good day's work and we mean it when we say so.

05Do you work outside manufacturing?

Yes. The method was built and proven inside manufacturing, because that's where the operating experience behind it comes from, but the underlying problem, an owner-managed business stuck in a holding pattern because leadership capacity hasn't kept pace with what the business needs, shows up just as clearly in professional services, outsourcing, franchise operations and most owner-managed businesses in the five to fifty million pound range. The diagnosis changes shape depending on the sector. The method behind it doesn't.

06What does "operating partner" actually mean versus a NED or an interim?

A non-executive director sits on the board and advises from outside the operational detail, which is valuable but limited, they're not in the room when decisions actually get made day to day. An interim steps into a specific role and runs it, which solves a resourcing problem but doesn't necessarily build capability that outlasts their tenure. An operating partner does neither of those exactly. We sit alongside the existing leader rather than replacing them or advising from a distance, covering the capacity gap that's stopping the transformation happening while building the capability in the team so the gap closes permanently rather than needing to be filled again next time something changes. It's a hybrid role built for a specific problem: leadership teams who know what needs to happen but don't have the bandwidth or the technical grounding to make it happen alone.