Which shape of the work is right for me?

It turns on what’s actually on your desk, whether the problem is yours alone or the business’s, and whether you want a counterpart or a room. Say which when you write. Nobody here benefits from putting you in the wrong one.

Do you take equity in every client?

No, and it’s rare. Where a business is suited to it, we may propose a stake alongside the fee, never instead of it. Where it doesn’t fit, the work runs on the fee and nothing else changes about how it’s done.

What if the business is in trouble rather than stuck?

Then it’s different work under a different agreement. A turnaround starts with a funded diagnosis, because nobody knows how bad it is until they’re inside it, and the scope, the terms, and the expectations all follow what that finds. If the business is in distress and there’s money to establish the fix and to carry it out, say so when you write and we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right call.

Do we have to do a call first?

No. Read this, decide in your own time, and write when you have. Nobody will try to close you on a phone call, because the work doesn’t survive a client who was talked into it.

What’s expected of me?

That you do the work between the sessions, and that you’re willing to hear the accurate thing rather than the comfortable one. Those two are the whole of it, and the second is the one people underestimate.

Business Optimisation

Finding where a business leaks value, and fixing it.

We work with owners, principals, and chief executives whose business already works and often still runs on them or a small group of key ‘irreplaceable’ people.

There’s no definition of optimisation on this page. You’ve read the books. What follows is what the phrase means here, what any of the work is held to, and who it’s for.

What are we actually looking for?

Value leaking in ways nobody owns. It rarely shows up as one number.

A process built for a company half this size and never revisited since. A decision that needs three signatures because of a mistake five years ago that got a control bolted onto it instead of a fix. A customer experience nobody on the leadership team has been through from the outside in a decade. A capable senior person whose real job has quietly become compensating for a system nobody wants to admit is broken. None of it appears on a report. All of it compounds.

Optimisation isn’t cost-cutting. Cost often comes out of the work, but it comes out because something stopped being necessary, not because a number was set in advance. Cutting to a target is how a business books this year’s margin by selling next year’s capability, and that bill always arrives.

Is this one thing you can buy?

No, and you should be wary of a firm that sells you one before it knows your situation.

Business optimisation is what this work is called, not a product with a fixed process on a shelf. The shape it takes is set by what’s actually in front of you. Some of it is one to one with the principal, one issue at a time through to closure: that’s CLEAR-IT™. Some of it is a six-month programme with other operators in the room: that’s The Crucible™. Some of it is a two-hour workshop that turns out to be enough on its own: that’s Built To Own™. Which of those is right depends on what’s actually in front of you. A firm with only one thing to sell will always find that you need its one thing; we start from the problem, not the product.

What doesn’t change is the standard the work is held to, and the stance behind it. Those two are the whole of what we’re promising here.

What standard is a change held to?

Total QX™, the framework the firm reads a business through. It treats a company as one connected system rather than a stack of departments, because your customers, your people, and you never experience the departments. You experience the whole thing: the promise kept or broken, the handover that’s clean or clumsy.

It runs on one test, and the test is blunt. A change has to be good for the customer, good for the people delivering it, and good for the business, all at once. Serve one or two of the three and nothing has been optimised. The cost has been displaced onto whoever wasn’t in the room, and it comes back later with interest. Refusing that trade is the reason the work still holds a year after we’ve gone. Read how the framework works.

What’s the stance?

Counsel and a stake in the outcome where the business is suited to one. Not an SOP, not every client, and not from the outset. It’s a conversation that can be opened at any time when the time is right.

What this means is that where a business is suited, we may propose taking a stake alongside the fee. Not instead of it.

The stake is a filter rather than an offer. It goes where the business has the structural drivers to produce a real return, and where the principal genuinely wants peer challenge embedded, not a circle of ‘yes-men’. If that appetite for challenge isn’t there, and the principal prefers yes-men, we usually won’t engage at all. When we make an exception, the work runs on a fee, with the rules of engagement clear from the outset.

There’s no version of this where a stake gets taken in everything that walks through the door, because equity in a business we can’t influence is a lottery ticket, not an investment.

The reason it exists is simple enough. An adviser on a retainer is paid for the months. An adviser holding a stake is paid for what the business is worth at the end. Those two people give different advice, and you can tell which one you’re dealing with by what happens after the engagement is over.

Who is this for, and who is it not for?

For owners, principals, and chief executives of businesses that already work and still run on one person or a handful of people that ‘are’ the business. Usually people who’ve been round the circuit. They’ve had the consultants who produced slides that moved nothing, a peer group too facilitated to say anything hard, the headline names read and shelved.

Not for anyone who wants motivation, a community, or a document. And not for a principal who wants to be agreed with all of the time, because the one thing guaranteed here is that at some point we’ll tell you something you didn’t want to hear, and the engagement is worthless if that’s unwelcome.

Common questions

Which shape of the work is right for me?: It turns on what’s actually on your desk, whether the problem is yours alone or the business’s, and whether you want a counterpart or a room. Say which when you write. Nobody here benefits from putting you in the wrong one.
Do you take equity in every client?: No, and it’s rare. Where a business is suited to it, we may propose a stake alongside the fee, never instead of it. Where it doesn’t fit, the work runs on the fee and nothing else changes about how it’s done.
What if the business is in trouble rather than stuck?: Then it’s different work under a different agreement. A turnaround starts with a funded diagnosis, because nobody knows how bad it is until they’re inside it, and the scope, the terms, and the expectations all follow what that finds. If the business is in distress and there’s money to establish the fix and to carry it out, say so when you write and we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right call.
Do we have to do a call first?: No. Read this, decide in your own time, and write when you have. Nobody will try to close you on a phone call, because the work doesn’t survive a client who was talked into it.
What’s expected of me?: That you do the work between the sessions, and that you’re willing to hear the accurate thing rather than the comfortable one. Those two are the whole of it, and the second is the one people underestimate.

If that’s the gap in your business, write. Paul reads it, not an assistant. You’ll have an answer within two working days, and if we’re not the right call we’ll tell you. Nobody will chase you.

Start the conversation.

Manolutions is the advisory practice founded by Paul Lange, based on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. Total QX is his framework, operated through the firm.