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We work with you regularly and continuously, insuring that our strategic guidance is suited to the business reality we observe. We also provide the tactical assistance and midcourse corrections needed to optimize the strategies we've agreed on.

What kind of companies can you work with?

Between us we have a mix of strategic, operational, marketing, financial and coaching skills. We've grown small IT professional services companies into unusually profitable niche leaders and helped hardware and software products organizations discover the secret to delivering services profitably. We've built recruiting operations that find and close large numbers of high-quality candidates in "impossible" markets and brought sales and marketing effectiveness to organizations stuck at a plateau. We can also help you fill almost any functional hole in your organization.

What kind of results should I expect?

We base a significant part of our fees on building the value of your enterprise by accelerating top-line and margin growth. For that reason, we're very selective about the engagements we select. If we don't see we can significantly improve your enterprise, we won't make an offer. Neither of us should be interested in settling for minor incremental improvements.

How do I decide whether you can help me or not?

For what we do to succeed, we need to understand you and your business well. In turn, we both need to discover whether the chemistry between us is right. This typically happens gradually over a series of progressive meetings. There's no charge for these introductory sessions and no obligation on your part, or ours, to go forward.

So you're an executive coach?

When that's the best way for us to help you make something happen. Unlike a coach, however, we bring significant relevant experience in running all aspects of small and medium sized IT professional services and staffing firms. A part of our value is knowing when I can get you the most leverage by taking on a task ourselves and when it's best done by you or someone else with our help and support.

You say you do "real work". What kind?

• Marketing - writing and/or designing ways to communicate strategy, positioning and differentiation to clients and employees
• Operations and Financial Analysis - From developing key indicators that keep our eye on what's really important to full blown financial forecasting and planning
• Meeting Facilitation - From getting the most out of a weekly staff meeting to planning and executing a multi-day offsite.
• Organization Design & Interviewing - Defining what exactly we're looking for, strategizing on where we're likely to find someone and helping to make sure we hire the best available
• IT Architecture - Making sure we get the most leverage out of technology without making it a burden
• Staff Development & Coaching - We can help you get more out of your "one on ones" and help other employees improve skills like coaching, interviewing and time/task management.
• Project Management - Often a single difficult hurdle blocks the next stage of development. We can organize and command the resources to get us past the hurdle

What kind of work are you unlikely to do?

We generally won't and shouldn't have direct reports although occasionally we will be the right choice to get a new hire started or monitor a critical probation. Most importantly, we shouldn't be doing anything long term that isn't CEO work (and neither should you!)

What are your strategic biases?

• Simple (but not simplistic) is better than complicated. A useful collorary is "doing one thing really well is immeasurably better than doing two or more things as well as everyone else".
  
• We'd rather sell one item at twice the margin than two at "normal" margins.
  
• Rules can make routine transactions fast, easy and economical.
  
• Unique positioning and memorable branding are requirements for survival. (As Tom Peters once said, "Perception is all there is.")
  
• An in-person meeting is worth many times what a phone call is worth particularly if you're interested in building relationships rather than "doing transactions".
  
• Orders "age badly" so every hour until the close counts.
  
• We'd rather measure and/or analyze than guess - my experience is that what seems to be a reasonable explanation is frequently undercut by data.
  
• Writing down the details of client and employee relationships contemporaneously is vastly superior to claiming to remember them.
  
• Perversely we think that a verbal presentation to clients is much more likely to close than a written one.