Clarity about how your company works
You feel like the story you’re getting isn’t reality.
“Ben’s not only brilliant — he bends the laws of physics somehow. He’s also a net negative as a manager. Everyone tiptoes around him.”
“This place runs because a couple of people in the back office remember where the bodies are buried. If one of them leaves, all hell will break loose. And Kathy is 73.”
▻ You’re growing, but profits aren’t.
▻ You have to cut back, but don’t know where.
▻ You’re acquiring something and want to know what you’re actually buying.
▻ Something feels off and you can’t name it.
“Dave built the culture here. But it isn’t Dave’s culture anymore — it belongs to everyone. You feel it the minute you walk in.”
“We have polite meetings. But slow decisions. Or no decisions.”
Most companies run on an informal reality disguised as a formal structure. Workarounds, personal dependencies, and how things actually get done.
“People don’t quit the company. They quit the one person nobody will name.”
“Ted would rather have growth take care of rising costs than lay people off.”
“Getting construction jobs gets us year-round service contracts covering the entire building envelope. Predictable income.”
The org chart is what you know. The informal structure is what you need to know.
“We keep telling the branches to refer trust business. Then we measure them on deposits and give them no credit for the referral. So they don’t refer. Of course they don’t.”
“The people here want to do the right thing. Sometimes they don’t know what the right thing to do is — but they always want to do it.”
“We haven’t opened a new account in this region in four years. Gary works the shows. Gary has the relationships. When Gary leaves, so does the business — and frankly, it’s already starting to show.”
“With Nancy and Bernie, it’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get. They’re direct, open and honest.”
“Manufacturing Engineering and Design Engineering had a pow-wow to develop Design-for-Manufacturability standards on those two products. That was six years ago. Those products are now 27% of our sales and we’re still paying for it.”
“Strategy? Ask six people in this building and you’ll get six answers. Three of them are on the board.”
The Organizational Profile replaces assumptions with an unfiltered read on how the business actually operates.
How it works.
I conduct individual interviews across the organization — senior management, mid-level managers, supervisors, functional leaders, and line personnel. I’m the one who talks to Sue on the floor or Jack in the field.
Confidentiality produces candor.
Comments are not attributed to the people who make them. People say things to an outside party that they will not say upstairs.
What we provide: A written report in two sections. Along with informal follow-up meetings with owners, acquirers, or management as needed.
Straight talk on what is genuinely strong, where the real load-bearing structure is, and what has been going on while nobody was watching which I consolidate in the Summary & Conclusions section.
Unfiltered Comments: Unattributed, unaltered, unedited, and often contradictory. A clear view of what everyone feels is going on. Exactly as heard. We’ve been told that the Comments from the Staff section has revealed their organization’s unknown inner beliefs, inner workings, informal power structures and unknown vulnerabilities.
I started developing these to do retained search right. Now clients ask for the Profile on its own: Before an acquisition, before scaling, before a restructuring, or simply because they want to know what is actually true.
… Excerpts from some SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONS sections.
Pre-acquisition: A Consumer Products Client
The partner and licensee network is the asset — and it cannot survive a standard integration plan. The company has spent twenty years building relationships that competitors cannot replicate. Prospective partners seek them out. The culture is genuine and the product line has real market pull. The one thing that cannot survive absorption into a larger operating model is the thing that makes the company valuable: sixty-odd licensing agreements built on personal trust and a reputation for giving partners more creative latitude than anyone else in the category. Everything else is absorbable. That part is not.
Holding Company Evaluating Its Portfolio Company
The financial position is strong and the market opportunity is real — but the company cannot agree on what business it is actually in. No debt, strong cash, sound EBITDA. A surge in cold storage construction — pharmaceutical distribution and last-mile grocery — is creating demand for specialty insulated panel installation that the company is uniquely positioned to serve. A pipeline of small acquisition targets — aging owners, no succession, willing to sell at nominal cost — is sitting largely untouched. The owners have built genuine core values that their people actually believe in. Ask them what business they are in, though, and you will get a different answer from every person in the room. That has been true for over five years and it is starting to cost them.
Manufacturer of Complex Engineered Products
The operation runs well on most product lines. The problem is limited and specific, yet costly. The people work hard and the technical staff is strong — forty engineers in a company this size is unusual. However, three product families share the same documentation breakdown between manufacturing engineering and operations. They represent 17% of sales and reportedly 70% of the scrap. The foundation is sound. The damage is specific and locatable.
… Examples of COMMENTS FROM THE STAFF sections.
“The business was selling technical credibility to customers while improvising too much internally.”
“The patient ratios are better here. They’re not trying to make a profit. That changes everything about how you practice.”
“After eight months of me being here, neither of them had ever asked to see the numbers. Zero interest in it when I brought it up.”
“The edge is credibility. People renew because they trust the judgment, not because of one hot tip.”
“No services need to be added to get to $30 million. The relationships are already there.”
“Danielle is a low-ego CEO. She’s not a control freak. But she will dive in whenever needed.”
“Margins get better as the years go on. We can charge more as the years go on.”
“We import 36% of our finished goods from China. Janice has been to China once. AND she’s in charge of product design.”
“Volunteers will do a lot here if you give them a lane and get out of their way.”
“The previous CFO was a stay-in-his-office type. Every two or three weeks Burt would get him back on track, and then he’d veer off again.”
“Joanne has been with the company for over 30 years. She’s a treasure trove of information.”
“The leakage was real. Referrals were leaving because the relationships and the operating follow-through were not strong enough to hold them.”
“We’ve been going after too many programs we were never going to win.”
“The major issue is not care quality but the number of weak handoffs between front desk, clinic, unit leadership, and billing.”