Blue-chip consulting method, sized for the middle market — owner-operated businesses under R1bn in revenue. Fixed scope, senior delivery, and work you keep.
The person who decides is in the building. There's no head office to consult, no group function to align, no investment committee to convince. You want an answer you can act on this quarter, not a mandate that takes six months to award.
That's the whole market we serve, and it's why the work looks the way it does.
Founder, owner or MD. A call gets made in one meeting, not carried through three layers of governance.
Distribution, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, franchise networks and field services.
No CFO, or one already stretched across three roles with no capacity to build models.
Growing on the top line, thin or unpredictable at the bottom, and out of easy answers.
The middle market is served badly at both ends — too big for a bookkeeper, too small to be worth a global firm's attention. That gap is the entire practice. Larger corporates and listed groups need a full engagement team on site for months; tell us on the call and we'll introduce you to a firm set up for it.
Businesses climb these in order, and skipping one never holds. Find yours — it tells you what comes next.
You run off the bank balance
Accounts are late. Problems get handled as they land.
You know the total
Monthly accounts arrive and reconcile. Cash still catches you out.
You know the parts
Margin by customer, product and site is clear. What to do about it isn't.
The numbers move weekly
Targets are owned. Benefit shows up in the accounts, not in a deck.
The business runs itself
Forecasts hold. Outsiders can interrogate the numbers and they stand.
The bulk of what we do, and the entry point to everything else. Six analyses run in parallel off data you already have. Each one produces a specific artefact, not an observation.
Revenue and cost traced to the customer, product, job or site that caused it, with overheads allocated to the work that drives them.
Produces · every line in the business ranked from best margin to worst
Capacity, cycle times, utilisation, changeovers and the queue in front of each step, modelled end to end to find what actually caps output.
Produces · the bottleneck named, and what an hour of it is worth
Planned and unplanned downtime, rework and scrap built into a loss tree, split by cause and by owner rather than by department.
Produces · a ranked loss tree with the recoverable share sized
Last year to this year pulled apart into the three things that moved it, with discount leakage measured by customer and by rep.
Produces · a margin bridge and a rebuilt discount grid
Debtor days, creditor days and stock cover modelled off actual behaviour, not policy, and translated into the cash each one ties up.
Produces · a rolling 13-week forecast your team updates
Every fix the analyses surface, costed against doing nothing, with the effort, the risk and the assumption behind the number written down.
Produces · a numbered action list with rand value, owner and date
Runs off exports you already have — trial balance, sales ledger at line level, payroll, stock, age analyses, and whatever operational records exist. Messy is expected. If the data can't carry a model we'll say so on the call rather than take the engagement.
Six hours of your time in total — two for handover and the walk of the operation, one mid-point call to agree what gets modelled, one validation session with your operators, and two for the decision session where you sign the list. Everything else happens off your desk.
A part-time PMO that runs the action list to completion. One tracker, one meeting, one baseline, and benefit reconciled to the accounts rather than claimed on a slide.
From around month six your finance or ops lead runs the tracker, chairs the meeting and writes the report, with us in the room rather than at the front of it. If we're still running it in year two, something has gone wrong.
The engagement delivers a number. What stays behind is the machinery that keeps delivering it — the plan, the tracker, the reconciliation and the model, all built from your data and handed over unlocked. The examples below are from a distribution business.
Each is a fixed scope with a fixed fee, agreed in writing before any work begins. Every one ends with a model you keep, unlocked, and a walkthrough recorded for your team.
Start here
3–4 weeks · 6 hours of your time
Where profit is made and lost, what's capping throughput, and what each fix is worth. Everything else follows from this.
After the diagnostic
3 to 6 months · one to two days a week
The action list run to completion, with benefit reconciled to the accounts rather than claimed on a slide.
Under pressure
12 weeks · intensive
For an operation losing money, in covenant breach, or heading there. Cash first, then structure, then discipline.
Buying a business and need the numbers stress-tested before you commit. Entering a new region, channel or product line and need the case built properly. Raising debt or equity and need a forecast that survives questioning. We build the model and sit with you through the interrogation — the transaction itself stays with your corporate finance adviser, auditor or attorney.
The point isn't a project that finishes. It's that eighteen months later the tracker is in your budget cycle, the meeting is in your calendar, and someone in your business owns it. That transition is designed in from day one.
Every initiative that clears its gate goes into next year's budget as a committed number, in the cost centre that owns it. That is what stops a saving being celebrated twice and delivered once.
The weekly review moves into your management calendar and merges with the meetings you already hold. New initiatives enter through the same tracker rather than starting a parallel process.
From around month six the finance or ops lead runs the cadence and we sit in it. The role is theirs before we step back, and it is written into their objectives.
The same model is used for the annual budget, the capex case and the monthly review, so one set of assumptions runs the business instead of three that disagree.
After handover we stay on the inside of the rhythm rather than dropping to a monthly catch-up. We sit in the delivery meeting, keep the model current through your budget and forecast cycles, size new initiatives as they come up, and hold the benefit reconciliation honest against the accounts. Scoped by days per month, reviewed every quarter, and structured so it can be reduced as your team takes more of it.
A diagnostic regularly lands on something discipline can't solve — a report rebuilt by hand every Monday, a schedule set on instinct, a process that only works because one person remembers it. That work goes to Da-rter, and we stay on the numbers.
Da-rter builds operational systems into established mid-market businesses — taking the day-to-day work off paper, running the repetitive parts automatically, and putting live numbers in front of the people who need them.
Which manual process is worth automating and which is cheaper left alone. Nothing gets built before it has a number against it and a payback we both believe.
Reporting that assembles itself, workflows that run without chasing, and agents that act inside rules you set and can audit.
Two separate companies, engaged separately, invoiced separately. We'll make the introduction and stay on the numbers side. You're never obliged to use them, and we'll work alongside whichever provider you already have.
These engagements ran inside operations many times the size of the businesses we work with now. The numbers were bigger. The analysis, the models and the delivery discipline are exactly the same ones you get.
$100m+
Throughput improvement identified across the three largest sites. A complete bottleneck model for each site showed the cap sat in two upstream steps, not where management had been spending.
What we did: end-to-end bottleneck model per site, debottlenecking plan for the two capped processes.
$53m
Annual recurring benefit from a full production and engineering reset — shift structure redesigned, spares readiness fixed, and mean time to repair cut by putting workshops closer to the work.
What we did: shift redesign, spares readiness, satellite workshops, live performance reporting.
80 days
Commissioning pulled forward by 80 days, worth $50m, by shortening the critical path, tracking every long-lead item live, and managing contractor readiness before crews mobilised.
What we did: critical-path reduction, live materials tracker, contractor readiness gates.
+19%
Nineteen percent more volume dispatched within four weeks. Reporting and a management operating system were built at every level of the organisation, and loading time per load fell 12%.
What we did: KPI tree by level, review cadence, loading-time analysis, live reporting.
$11m
Annual recurring cost taken out of offshore logistics and warehouse operations, with a live model tracking where every item physically sat so material stopped being lost and reordered.
What we did: logistics planning redesign, warehouse operating model, live material tracking.
$37m
Improvement initiatives sized by modelling plant and upstream performance together, which isolated the downtime and cycle-time losses actually worth chasing from the ones that looked bad but cost little.
What we did: integrated performance model, loss tree by cause, initiative sizing.
19% → 27%
Expansion IRR lifted from 19% to 27% and over $10m identified to keep both sites operating, through a full asset-life model built across every revenue and cost lever.
What we did: full asset-life model, six IRR scenarios, sensitivity to yield and market price.
NPV +
A fleet automation programme that modelled NPV-negative was restructured into a positive case by scenario-modelling a phased replacement rather than a single switch-over.
What we did: NPV model off asset-level metrics, automated versus manned scenarios, phased roadmap.
Full P&L
Margin, cost and pricing built from scratch for a fast-growing consumer business — the effect of every pricing experiment on volume and margin, margin by region and category, and true stock cost on a moving-average FIFO basis.
What we did: margin model, pricing experiment framework, FIFO stock costing, product recommender.
Client names withheld. Figures are as identified or realised on the engagement. The same methods, sized for the middle market.
Middle-market businesses normally get the junior end of a consulting firm. Here you get people who have sat in executive seats, carried a P&L, and delivered improvement inside operations far larger than yours.
People who have held executive and general management roles and carried responsibility for a profit and loss account, not only advised on one.
Commerce, engineering, finance and analytics backgrounds, with postgraduate and international executive education behind them.
Over $1bn in improvement identified across large operations, and more than $150m converted into realised, recurring annual benefit.
Dozens of two to five week diagnostics run across sectors, sizing the value pool and building the roadmap to capture it.
Excel, Python, SQL and Power BI. Every model built from your data rather than dropped in from a template, and unlocked when you get it.
Continuous improvement, cost reduction, turnarounds, procurement and supply chain, maintenance and digitisation.
Your accountant reports what happened, correctly and after the fact. That's a different job. This is about what to do next — which customers to keep, what to charge, where the operation is capped, whether the new site pays for itself. Most clients keep their accountant and use the model alongside them.
Most owners recognise themselves within about ten seconds. If you're between two, we work it out on the call — it usually comes down to whether cash still surprises you, and whether anyone owns a number.
The models, the constraint analysis and the operating rhythm are the same tools global consultancies build for their largest clients. What changes for the middle market is the delivery: senior people on the work from day one, no eight-week mobilisation, no bloated deck, a fixed scope, and a model you own at the end.
Each package is a fixed fee, quoted after a 30-minute call once the scope is clear, and agreed in writing before any work starts. If the scope changes the price changes before the work does, never after. Overruns are our risk, not yours.
Very. Exports from Xero, Sage, Pastel, QuickBooks, a job card system or a pile of spreadsheets all work. If the data can't support a model we'll tell you on the call rather than take the engagement.
Both, depending on the package. The Diagnostic ends with a model and a numbered action list. The Delivery PMO and Turnaround packages carry through to execution — owner and date on every line, weekly meeting chaired, benefit reconciled to the accounts each month.
Updates the tracker, chases the lines that haven't moved, chairs a sixty-minute meeting on the same day each week, escalates blockers to whoever can clear them, and reconciles claimed benefit against the actual accounts monthly. It is administrative work done properly, which is why most improvement programmes fail without it.
No. If you have one, they run it and we build the tracker, fix the baseline and set the cadence with them. Where there isn't one, we hold the role temporarily and hand it to a named person in your team before we leave.
No. We build the forecast and the numbers pack and sit with you through the questions. The transaction belongs with a corporate finance adviser, and we'll introduce you to one. We don't take success fees or equity.
Then you'll know early rather than late. The first three weeks establish whether the business can be stabilised on the cash available. If it can't, we'll say so and help you understand what the realistic options are — that's a more useful answer than twelve weeks of effort.
Tell us which stage sounds like you and bring one question your current numbers can't answer. No cost, no pitch deck. By the end you'll know which package fits, roughly what it would find, and what it costs.
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