Privately and PE-owned, €50–250m revenue, ready to change.

Why We Don’t Provide a List of Our Clients

Most consultants feel they have to prove their worth by displaying the names and logos of the clients they have worked with. When you are young and inexperienced, that seems terribly important—a shortcut to credibility.

These days, we neither compile such lists nor provide them.

Not because we have nothing to show, but because a list is a lazy shortcut that tells you surprisingly little.

Here is why.

First—the past is a different country.

Those were different times, market conditions and technologies. That train has already left the station.

What worked for one company ten years ago may be completely irrelevant—or even misleading—when applied to the problem you are facing today.

Think about it: three years ago, AI was a curiosity. One year ago, it was a different beast entirely. COVID permanently rewired how teams communicate and collaborate. Data protection regulations have multiplied. The telecom boom of 1994 taught a generation about fiber optics and deregulation—but it won’t help you with 5G network slicing or edge computing.

Applying a 2018 leadership framework to a remote, AI-anxious workforce in 2026 is not experience.

Second—it may have very little to do with your reality.

Time changes the relevance of past experience. Context limits its transferability even further.

It may have been a different industry, country, company size, market position or stage of development. One company may struggle because skilled people are scarce; another may have plenty of people but no demand. The same solution will not produce the same result in both.

And there is another problem with impressive client lists: what does “worked with” actually mean?

We have seen people deliver a single lecture at one Coca-Cola branch—and Coca-Cola then takes its place of honour on their client list.

Some consultants display more than 100 impressive names. We once saw a list containing 1,000.

How is that possible?

Quite easily. You deliver one open lecture and, instead of reporting the number of participants, add the logo of every organisation represented in the room.

Now consider the arithmetic.

A real transformation project that delivers significant results can take anywhere from one to three years. So if an individual consultant claims to have personally led major transformations for 100 clients, either the claim is creative—or their consulting career began with teaching people how to hunt mammoths.

An audit firm is different. It can serve hundreds of clients because it has an army of people checking spreadsheets.

But one person?

Over a long career, a consultant can accumulate experience across many industries, countries and types of problems.

So if I gave you a list of logos, what would it actually prove?

Third—real competitive advantage is rarely advertised.

When clients create a genuine competitive advantage with our help, they usually do not want their competitors to know how it was achieved.

And something curious happens over time.

Even employees who opposed the transformation—or merely watched it from the sidelines—eventually begin selling themselves as part of its success.

They know the magic words: TPS, TOC Lean, Agile, PM BOK, Kaizen, Kanban, and even Mizusumashi. They can use this “magic” vocabulary to advance their careers in other organisations—without ever having to prove that they personally delivered any results.

But knowing the magic words is not the same as knowing how to make the magic work.

A client logo tells you nothing about whether the consultant was the architect of the transformation, supported one small part of it—or simply happened to be in the room.

Fourth—you live here and now.

Your company, your people, your competitors and your customers exist in today’s reality—not in somebody else’s case study.

Napoleon’s past victories established his reputation. They did not win Waterloo for him.

Business is no different.

A client list could tell you where we have been. It would tell you surprisingly little about whether we understand where you are—or whether we can solve your problem today.

To be clear, we are not asking you to trust us blindly.

We have published articles based on cases from our past—anonymised to protect our clients, but detailed enough to reveal how we think and work.

Fifth—let’s talk about your real fear, which is valid.

We understand why you want a list.

You want to reduce the risk of hiring consultants who are better at selling themselves than delivering results. You want evidence that we have navigated comparable complexity and will not waste your time and budget.

Show us your challenge—and judge us by the questions we ask.
Just remember: we are choosing too and don’t accept all the clients.