The Person in the Room

To hire three decades of boardroom experience, the conventional route is a consultancy, and on paper it is a sensible purchase. The brochure carries the credentials, the partner carries the grey hair, and the engagement letter carries a fee that signals seriousness. What the paper does not tell you is how the engagement will actually run, and having spent thirty years around that table, at Goldman Sachs, Citi and Credit Suisse and then in the chairs themselves, I can tell you with some precision.

The person with the experience sells you the work. That is their job, and they are superb at it. Then they leave, and a capable but junior team delivers what was sold, working from the firm's standard framework, because standardisation is how a consultancy scales and scale is how it survives. The framework arrives looking bespoke and is nothing of the sort; your business is fitted to it, not it to your business. The fees, meanwhile, were calibrated for corporates, because corporates are who the model was built to serve, and a growing business pays those rates for a fraction of that attention.

And there is a quieter omission, the one I think matters most. The person running the business, the one every recommendation in the final deck depends on, sits politely outside the scope.

That omission is not an oversight. It is structural. A consultancy is built to examine the machine, and it has no mandate, no method and frankly no appetite for examining the operator, even though every stalled business I have sat inside across three decades stalled at the system of machine and operator together. You can hand a perfect strategy to an unexamined operator and watch it produce the old results in new language, and consultancies do, routinely, at corporate prices.

My workshops are built as the deliberate opposite of that shape, and the differences are simple to state. The person with the experience is the person in the room, for the whole engagement, because the experience is the product and substitution would be quiet fraud. Nothing is standardised, because the work covers the strategy and the person running it, as one system, and no two of those systems are alike. The engagement ends with a written report you keep and act on, with or without me. And the price is fixed and known before we begin, a one-day intensive at £5,000 and a three-day deep dive at £10,000, sized for a growing business rather than a FTSE budget, with no meter running and no land-and-expand.

I am not arguing consultancies have no place. For a corporate needing five hundred pages of market analysis, they are the right tool. But if you are past £15k a month and what you actually need is three decades of operating judgement applied to your specific business and to how you run it, then what matters is not the brochure. It is who turns up, what they look at, and what you hold when they leave.

Before you buy anyone's time, mine included, spend ten free minutes on your own business first. The Entrepreneur Gap scan maps the eight roles your business needs covered and shows where the genuine gaps are, which is exactly what any engagement should be pointed at.

Continue reading: A Sample of One →

Or check your business first: Take the free 10-minute Entrepreneur Gap scan →