Discovery
A discovery, before anyone commits to a program.
We spend two to three weeks in your business and leave you a findings brief that says what your numbers mean and what to do first. Some clients stop there and act on the brief themselves. The brief is yours either way, and so is the first tool we build while we are in it.
Two to three weeks, on site
What a discovery covers, and what you keep from it.
- 01
A leadership survey across your management team, the results of which are yours
- 02
An assessment of which parts of the operating system exist, which need upgrading and which already work
- 03
Use of time studies for supervisors and mechanics
- 04
A working capital baseline read from your own ledger
- 05
A first tool built on your biggest recurring export
- 06
A findings brief, with what to do first
From one discovery
Numbers like these are the reason the routines go in before anything else.
What a discovery found at a heavy gauge thermoforming manufacturer, before its 39 week program.
46%
of leaders disagreed on both the goals and the strategies of their own business.
27%
of production elements of the operating system did not exist, and 60% needed upgrade.
79%
of maintenance elements did not exist at all.
10%
of shift leads’ time observed supervising, and 30% observed idle.
0%
planned wrench time for mechanics, with 64% of their work reactive.
$12M
of working capital tied up, $6M of it recoverable.
A discovery that stopped there
Three weeks on site, and the client kept the brief.
A natural snack manufacturer, about $109M revenue. The question was one of amount: how much cash is available, what a year of operations work is worth, and which item to do first.
Three weeks identified $9M to $15M of cash availability and set out a 12 month operations agenda worth $6M to $11M of EBITDA. All of it identified. None of it banked.
Identified, not yet banked
$9M to $15M
Cash availability identified in the business during the three week discovery.
$6M to $11M
of EBITDA, the value of the 12 month operations agenda set out in the findings brief.
20 days
Cycle improvement observed in the cash conversion cycle, the days between paying for materials and collecting from customers.
Questions before you hire us
The six questions every buyer asks us first.
01What does a discovery actually cover?
The list at the top of this page is what the three weeks contain. What is worth knowing here is what a discovery tends to find. On one of them, 46% of leaders disagreed on both the goals and the strategies of their own business, and the mechanics were running at 0% planned wrench time with 64% of their work reactive. Numbers like those are the reason the routines go in before anything else. You end with a findings brief that says what your numbers mean and what to do first, and it is yours whether or not we go further.
02Will our people actually use it?
That is the whole job. Roles get written as behaviors rather than paragraphs, every manager gets a personal coach, and each workshop carries an assignment to be done on the floor that week. We run the routines beside your managers before we ask them to run them alone, and we do not count an element as installed until they run it without us in the room.
03Who validates the savings?
Your finance team. Savings are tracked weekly against an agreed baseline, line by line of expense, and your finance people validate the file. We report value in three separate layers and never add them together. If a figure was modeled or identified rather than banked, we label it that way on the page and in the report.
04What happens when you leave?
We do not close on a hope. Three things have to be true first: your team runs the weekly review unaided, a sustainability audit is in place to score the system and force corrective action, and the procedures are loaded into your own document system. The tools, the guides and the standards stay with you.
05How is our data handled if you use AI?
Under a written data handling brief agreed with you before any analysis starts. Your tools read the exports your systems already produce, parse them in your browser on your machine, and save to your shared folder. Nothing is uploaded. AI is used to analyze your data and build your tooling within that brief, and the tooling it produces is yours to keep.
06How do the fees work?
Discovery is a fixed scope of 2 to 3 weeks. A program runs 7 to 40 weeks depending on the size of the business and how many areas go in at once. Guaranteed savings structures are available, with fees tied to the results your business actually realizes. A tooling retainer is available after the program for a standing build and refresh cadence. We will quote your business after a conversation about it, not before.
Next step
Bring us one question about your business.
Ask the question you would ask a peer who had already done this, and one of the three of us will answer it.