Value Creation & Operating Improvement — Kittery Point, Maine
Whether you own the company or run it, the problem is usually the same: it has outgrown the way it's run, nobody quite owns the broken part, and the reporting can't settle the argument. We find what's actually wrong, price it in EBITDA, and run the program that fixes it.
Does this sound familiar
These are the situations we get called into — by sponsors, by boards, and by the executives running the company. If one of them is yours, a short conversation is usually enough to know whether an assessment is worth it.
What's actually going on
You have a good one. Most of what's holding it back are decisions that were right at half the size — the informal handoff that worked with nine people, the report that answered the question when there was one product line. The company grew past them.
That is also why the team can't see them. They aren't looking at a broken thing; they're looking at the thing that worked.
Meanwhile the company is staffed to run itself. It isn't staffed to rebuild itself while it runs — and the one person senior enough to do it is usually running the function under review.
How we work
Everyone screens on time and price, so here they are. Many take over after the design and run the program with their own team — that's a good outcome, and it's how this is meant to work.
2–4 weeks · fixed price
What's wrong, what it's worth in EBITDA to fix, and whether the current team can execute it. Every finding carries a business case with the arithmetic shown.
For any company behind plan
8–20 weeks
The target operating model and the costed plan — organisation, processes, and the technology that genuinely earns its place — ready for your team to pick up or to put in front of a vendor.
When you need a costed plan to act on
16–50 weeks
The program delivered. We select and manage the vendors and hold the roadmap — we don't staff the work with our own people and bill you for the hours.
When the team doesn't have the capacity to run it
How we think
A company is a system of interconnected parts, and any one of them can strengthen the whole or quietly hold it back. How you go looking for the one that matters is the whole discipline.
We identify specific improvements and target specific results. Every recommendation carries a business case saying what it is worth and how you will know whether it worked — which also means we can tell you when something isn't worth doing.
The constraint is rarely where the noise is. Finding the real one means holding the whole system and its individual parts in view at once, and that takes people who have run these functions before — which is why the work is done by people with twenty and thirty years behind them, not a team learning on your money.
Financial performance is the one measure every function shares, which makes it the fairest referee of whether a change actually helped. It is also the natural place to organise improvements that cross functional boundaries — the work that otherwise falls between departments and belongs to nobody.
Think of a symphony orchestra: each player performing their part from the same score. Your processes are that score, and the board and the chief executive are the conductor — tying every part together and blending it into a single, beautiful whole.
Why us
We manage the implementers; we don't sell their hours. There is no incentive for us to recommend a bigger program than the company needs — and the numbers below show what that looks like in practice.
The person you meet is the person doing it. Every consultant has at least twenty years of experience and most have more than thirty. No partner who appears monthly above a team learning your business on your money.
Pragmatic solutions the company can actually implement, not a binder describing a company it isn't. Every recommendation carries the business case that justifies it.
The work can be taken incrementally, so improvements start paying before the program ends rather than after it. Programs frequently pay for themselves inside the engagement.
Proof
The numbers below are the client's, not ours — what the work was worth to the company.
Finance was the bottleneck. The assessment identified about $20M in working capital improvement and more than $3M of improved annual spend. We are currently running the program that implements it, at a fee of roughly 5% of the program budget.
Business case, planning, and implementation support. The new company was designed for efficiency from the first day rather than inheriting its parent's way of working, and delivered 35% better EBITDA than it had achieved under its former owner.
The real constraint wasn't price. It was an inability to work inside the customer's design process quickly enough. The target model streamlined the front end of sourcing using automation and AI, and the resulting performance drove a valuation increase of close to $1B.
Automation had stalled and insurer customers were losing patience. The assessment found a great deal of manual work senior management didn't know was there. A target model built on automation and AI replaced it, producing a 70% improvement in bad and fraudulent claims identified and more than $1B of additional market value.
Let's talk
A short conversation is usually enough to know whether an assessment is worth it. No pitch, no obligation.
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