On Monday morning your car starts losing power. It hesitates when you pull away, stalls at junctions and crawls up hills. On Friday you need to drive 400 km to your most important customer. You don’t know what is wrong — so you take the question to seven different kinds of adviser.
1. The top-tier strategy firm. The partner’s first question is whether you should own a car at all. The answer — a beautifully designed Personal Mobility Strategy 2030 comparing leasing, electric, car-sharing and moving closer to the office, with your car in the bottom-left corner of a two-by-two matrix — is due in three weeks. It is an excellent answer to a question you did not ask. Cost: a €25,000 fixed fee, half of it up front. On Friday: the kick-off workshop has happened. You take a taxi.
2. The Big Four firm. A team of six arrives with a 400-point vehicle health assessment. The report runs to 120 pages: emissions compliance, insurance adequacy, the tax treatment of your fuel card, and a colour-coded risk register of 37 findings. The real cause is in there too — finding no. 23, rated amber — but nothing makes it stand out from the other 36. The recommendation is a phased vehicle transformation programme, which the same firm would be pleased to deliver. Your leasing company loves the report. Cost: €17,280. The transformation programme will be quoted separately. On Friday: the car still stalls — but it is the best-documented car in the street.
3. The IT solution adviser. The diagnosis is “lack of visibility”. You get a new on-board computer, a dashboard of 200 live metrics and a smartphone app; linking the app to your calendar is a change request, billed separately. Go-live is celebrated on Thursday. Cost: €12,000 for the implementation, €1,800 for the change request and a €90 monthly subscription. On Friday: the car still stalls, and the app now tells you — in real time and in colour — exactly when.
4. The university professor. The professor listens to the symptoms with genuine interest: your case, he says, is a textbook illustration of classical theory. You receive a two-hour lecture on the thermodynamics of the internal combustion engine and a 60-page opinion with 120 references. The conclusion: “The cause is probably systemic in nature and requires further study.” Cost: €7,500 for the lecture and the opinion. On Friday: the car still stalls — but it will feature in his spring lecture course.
5. The transaction adviser. “Sell it.” Within a week there is a glossy listing — one careful owner — and a buyer. The buyer’s mechanic finds the cause of the fault in ten minutes and takes €2,500 off the price. The adviser’s success fee is paid on completion. Cost: a €1,000 fee — 8% of the €12,500 sale price — plus the €2,500 that went to the buyer. €3,500 in total. On Friday: you no longer have a car problem. You no longer have a car, either.
6. The interim executive. An experienced driver arrives in his own car and takes you to Friday’s meeting. Problem solved — for this week. Three months later he is still on a day rate, and your car is still in the driveway. Cost: €400 a day, with no end in sight. On Friday: you arrive on time. Your car doesn’t, and the arrangement has no end date.
7. The operations expert. The expert starts with one question: where does the flow stop? He tests the fuel supply and within the hour finds the cause: a clogged fuel filter. It is finding no. 23 from the Big Four report — and exactly what the buyer’s mechanic found in ten minutes. Nothing else on the car is holding it back: fix that one part and the car drives; fix anything else and it doesn’t. He replaces the filter and drives the car up the steepest hill in town with you in the passenger seat. His terms were agreed before he opened the bonnet: a fixed €200 for the diagnosis, with the written findings yours to take to any garage; the repair — €50 for the labour plus €40 for the filter — paid only if the car climbs the hill at full power; a twelve-month guarantee. He hands you the old filter and shows you when to change the next one. Cost: €290 in total — €200 for the diagnosis, €50 for the labour and €40 for the filter. On Friday: you drive to your customer.
Conclusions
None of these advisers did bad work; all of them are highly professional. Each answered the question its business model is built to answer, and each would have been the right call for a different problem: the strategy firm if you were genuinely deciding whether to keep a car, the Big Four firm if the leasing company needed an independent inspection, the IT adviser if you genuinely needed a new system, the professor if you were designing a new engine, the transaction adviser if you had already decided to sell, the interim executive if you were short of a driver for a few months. The mistake was buying their answer to your problem.
What this means for business
The same happens in companies.
When a company is late with orders, losing clients or short on cash, a lecture will not fix it. A report will not change a single working day. A new system will not repair a process it was not designed for. Selling the business hands the fix — and the value — to the buyer. A borrowed manager gets you through this week, not the next.
In a company, the filter is rarely worth €40. It is a planning rule, an approval step or a pricing policy, usually worth millions in Throughput or cash — which is why the fee should follow the result, not the hours.
What you need is someone who first finds out what the company must achieve and what is blocking it. They then choose the right tools, implement changes with the team, and verify that the result is real.
What should a real operational expert do?
The work moves through four stages: Flow → Constraint → Financial Logic → Gain — and each stage answers one question.
1. FLOW — Where is the money, and how much? Analyse the business to identify its unrealised potential: additional Throughput, cash that can be released, or profit that can be earned. Estimate the size of that potential and make the assumptions behind the estimate explicit. Do this first.
2. CONSTRAINT — What is holding it back? Identify what currently limits the company’s ability to realise that potential. Distinguish the system constraint from symptoms and local problems, so the team knows where to focus its efforts.
FINANCIAL LOGIC — How will we know the whole business is better?
3. Choose the approach that can realise that potential. It may mean sales and negotiations, making better use of a production bottleneck, or synchronising finance and operations through pricing, inventory decisions, and cash flow. The constraint and the business result required determine the methodology.
4. Agree on system KPIs. Agree on two or three common system KPIs for the team, their starting values, and the improvement the project must deliver. These must show whether the whole business is improving. Departments can report excellent local results while the company continues to struggle.
GAIN — How do we make the result real, and keep it?
5. Build the project plan. Translate the approach into specific actions: what must change, in what sequence, who is responsible, what resources are required, and when results are expected.
6. Provide hands-on help. Join negotiations, work with the production team, train any staff or help them to implement changes wherever the result depends on them. Work alongside managers, resolve obstacles, and adjust the plan based on what actually happens. Help the team build the ability to sustain the result after the project ends.
7. Do it without making you buy yet another software package. A real expert should be able to do all of this using the systems and tools the company already has. If new software is genuinely necessary, they should explain what specific limitation it removes and why the existing tools cannot do the job.
A real expert connects the potential identified in the initial analysis to the decisions and daily work needed to realise it.
Ask your prospective consultant:
“What will you take responsibility for — the training, the report, the tools, or helping our team achieve an agreed business result? And how will we know it worked?”
Listen carefully to the answer: it tells you which of the seven advisers you are about to hire. Our answer is the last one: an agreed business result, measured in your own accounts, with part of our fee tied to it and our terms published before work begins.
At FLOWKNOT we work as operational experts. We do not ask a company to invest in new IT systems or equipment until we have explored every opportunity to improve performance with the tools and the team already in place. The only thing we ask in return is the commitment of the CEO or owner: to implement the agreed changes, and to keep supporting them once they deliver their first results, which is when it is most tempting to move on.
“Advice Is Cheap. Contract for the Result.”