Business performance and development consulting
Most performance problems get diagnosed by whoever is selling the solution. We start with your numbers and your market, name the real constraint, and stay until the change is running.
Recognise any of this
None of these are unusual. What is unusual is knowing which one you actually have before you spend money on the answer.
Turnover is up. Profit is flat.
The growth is being absorbed somewhere between the sale and the bank.
Marketing spend keeps rising. Performance doesn’t move.
Activity is being measured. Contribution is not.
Your best-selling line may not be your best business.
Volume and margin rarely sit in the same place, and nobody has checked.
Prices were set years ago and adjusted by habit.
Value delivered and value captured have quietly drifted apart.
You grew, then it stopped.
The route that built the business has run out, and no next one exists yet.
Everything still runs through you.
Performance is capped by one person’s calendar, not by the market.
Every supplier recommends their own speciality.
Four plausible answers, and no way to rank them by what they are worth.
The plan exists. Nothing has moved.
A decision was made but never converted into roles, sequence and measurement.
Each of these needs a different intervention, and several get worse if you guess. Knowing which one you have is the problem worth solving first.
How we read a business
Four movements, always in this order. The order is the product — most suppliers start at the fourth and assume the first three were done.
What do the economics actually say?
Select a movement to see what it reads and what it produces.
Where most engagements start
Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed duration. It answers one question properly, instead of committing you to an open-ended engagement before anyone has evidence.
You get a short written diagnosis, a ranked shortlist of constraints with an indicative value against each, and a costed recommendation on what to do next — including, where it is the honest answer, that you should do nothing, or something that earns us no further fee.
Scope and price are set against your business, in the consultation. We do not publish a number that would be wrong for most people reading this page.
What you can buy
An answer, a plan, a build, and continuing judgement. Most companies start with the first and stop whenever it stops being worth it.
Performance isn’t what it should be. We don’t agree on why, and every supplier who walks in recommends their own speciality.
In weeks, not months, an evidenced answer to one question: what is actually constraining performance, what it is worth to fix, and in what order.
We know what the constraint is. We don’t yet know what to do about it, what it’s worth, or what it will take.
A decided direction with the business case behind it: what changes, why, what it is expected to be worth, what it requires, and in what sequence.
We have the decision. Nothing has changed, because nobody owns making it happen and the suppliers are pulling in different directions.
The change made operational — whether it is a price change, a repositioning, a new sales model, a marketing rebuild, an organisational change, a process or a system — under one accountable direction.
We need senior judgement available continuously — someone who already knows our numbers and our market and can be in the decisions as they happen.
A defined rhythm of senior advisory: performance reviewed against the case, decisions tested before they are made, and course corrections taken early.
How we work
No gating and no email capture. If you want to run this yourself, the method is here to be used — giving it away is rather the point.
01
What do the economics of this business actually say, and what does its market actually allow?
An evidenced read of performance — margin, mix, pricing, customer and segment economics, cost-to-serve — set against market, competitive and customer reality.
02
Where is value or performance being constrained, and what is that constraint worth?
A named constraint and a ranked shortlist, each with an indicative value. Everything else is explicitly deferred.
03
What has to change, why, in what order, and what is it worth doing?
A decided direction with the business case, the sequence and the assumptions written down and testable.
04
How does that change become operational in this business?
The change running — whether it is pricing, proposition, portfolio, sales, marketing, organisation, process, technology or orchestrated specialist execution.
05
Can the client run, measure and improve this without us?
Documentation, training, a review rhythm, performance measured against the case — and FiMa’s exit.
Each stage commits more than the last. Nothing is decided before the evidence supports it.
What we look at
Which ones a piece of work uses is decided by the diagnosis, not by choosing from a list. They are published so the breadth behind a two-person firm is visible.
What it covers
Revenue quality and mix; margin and contribution by product, service, customer and segment; pricing and discounting; cost-to-serve; acquisition economics; commercial efficiency; capacity economics; investment allocation; break-even; forecasting; unit economics.
What it is not
Not bookkeeping, accounting, tax, audit, statutory reporting, regulated financial advice or investment advice.
We look at contribution by product and by customer. Not as a finance exercise — because it usually explains a commercial decision that has been made on instinct for years.
Why this is different
We have no client logos, no metrics and no awards to argue with. Everything below is structural — true because of how the firm is built, not because of what it has achieved.
We do not sell a channel, so we are structurally able to conclude that the answer is pricing, portfolio, organisation — or nothing at all.
The answer usually lives in the gap between what an accountant can see and what an agency can see. We work in that gap deliberately.
No delivery layer and no account manager. Your counterpart is a principal, from the first email to the handover.
Handover is a stage with artefacts and a date. Success is what you can do after we leave, not how long we stay.
You think we’re a marketing agency.
Marketing is one possible answer among several, chosen only when the evidence points there. We don’t buy media, run ad accounts or produce creative — specialists do that, to our brief.
Who you deal with
There is no layer between you and the people doing the thinking. When execution needs craft, we bring specialists we have chosen, brief them ourselves, and stay accountable for the result.
CEO
Commercial strategy, positioning, and the direction an engagement takes.
CFO
Business economics, margin, and the numbers behind a business case.
Ventures
Alongside the advisory work we hold ventures of our own. It is why the advice is written by people carrying commercial risk rather than commenting on it.
45 minutes with a principal. No deck, no pitch. If we’re not the right answer, we’ll say so.
