- 1. Count your own constraint first
- 2. Log how long a decision takes
- 3. Pull four years of margin by product family
- 4. Write down what actually has to change
- 5. Ask who inside has the standing to change it
- 6. Ask what is genuinely missing
- 7. Scope only what is left
- 8. Decide whether you would still buy it
The most useful hour I ever spent on a consulting decision was the one where I stood at a machine with a clipboard and counted parts, two weeks before a proposal was due to be signed. The proposal described a six-month operational excellence program. The count established that the line was running at roughly the rate the reports claimed, which meant the problem was not on the floor, which meant the six months would have been spent in the wrong building.
That is the entire argument of this article. The anti-consultant position is not that outside help never works. It is that most engagements get scoped before anybody has done the eight things below, and doing them either eliminates the engagement or shrinks it substantially. Neither outcome is bad for you.
1. Count your own constraint first
Stand at whatever operation limits your output and count for an hour, twice, on different shifts. Write down the interruptions separately: changeover, material late, quality check, operator away, machine stopped.
What you are establishing is whether the reported picture and the physical picture agree. If they do, your problem is commercial, structural, or financial, and every operational proposal on your desk is aimed at the wrong thing. If they disagree materially, you have a measurement problem, which is the cheapest thing on this list to fix and which nobody will sell you because there is no engagement in it.
This is the step that most often ends the conversation, and it takes two hours. The full procedure sits in the two-week plant diagnostic if you want the longer version.
One caution about doing it yourself. You will be tempted to count during a period you have chosen, and people will be aware you are there. Both effects push the number toward the reported one, which biases the test toward concluding that everything is fine. Count on an ordinary day, twice, and treat the higher of the two readings as the honest one.
Take the interruption log seriously as its own output. The distribution tells you which department the problem belongs to before you have formed any opinion about it, and it is the single cheapest piece of evidence in this entire list. A line losing most of its available hours to changeover has a scheduling and portfolio problem. One losing them to material arriving late has a planning or supplier problem. Those two situations attract very similar proposals and require completely different work.
2. Log how long a decision takes
For one week, have two or three supervisors keep a list of every decision that leaves the floor: what was asked, who it went to, when an answer came back. Handwritten, informal, not announced as an audit.
Take the median. If it is a day, your decision layer is healthy and whatever is wrong is somewhere else. If it is nine days, you have found the constraint, and it is worth understanding that no external party can fix it, because the queue exists in your own authority structure and only somebody inside it can move a threshold.
No external party can fix a decision queue. It exists inside your own authority structure, and only somebody inside that structure can move a threshold.
This is where a large share of engagements go wrong. A firm brought in to accelerate a business with an eleven-day decision cycle will spend the first two months discovering that, at your expense, and will then recommend that you change it, which you could have done in week one for nothing.
The version of this that catches people out is a median that looks acceptable with a long tail. Nine of ten decisions returning in a day and the tenth taking three weeks is not a healthy layer, because the tenth is reliably the one that mattered. Sort the log by return time and read the slowest three rather than the average.
3. Pull four years of margin by product family
One query, four years, gross margin by family alongside revenue by family. Then recompute the earliest year’s margin using the latest year’s mix.
If the recomputed number lands near today’s actual, mix explains your compression and no cost program will recover it. If it lands near the old actual, mix is not your mechanism and you should look at price or productivity instead. The reading method is in how to read an underperforming P&L.
Nobody needs to be hired for this and an afternoon is enough. It is worth doing before you buy anything because it converts a vague sense that margin is slipping into a specific mechanism, and a specific mechanism is what determines whether you need help at all.
Do the same thing with SKU count and changeover hours if your system holds them. Four years of each, plotted alongside flat revenue, is the clearest picture of complexity accumulation you can produce without any external help at all, and it is frequently the finding that reframes what the engagement should be about.
4. Write down what actually has to change
Three to five items, each one a change rather than an aspiration. Retire these product families. Move the approval threshold to this number. Reprice this segment. Replace this measurement with an hourly one.
The discipline of writing changes rather than objectives is the point. Improve operational performance is not a change, it is a category, and a proposal responding to it will be scoped to cover the category rather than to accomplish anything. A list of five specific changes can be quoted precisely, which is exactly why most buyers never produce one.
If you cannot write the list, that is a legitimate reason to buy help, and it is a narrow and cheap piece of help: an analytical engagement that ends with a finding. It is not a six-month program.
Write it as though somebody who has never seen your business will implement it, because that is precisely what is about to happen. Ambiguity you would resolve intuitively will be resolved by a stranger in whatever direction extends the engagement, and not through bad faith. A firm reading improve throughput on line three has no way to know you meant without capital, and the buffer they price is yours either way.
5. Ask who inside has the standing to change it
Take each item on the list and name the person who could authorize it today. Not who should. Who could, under the authority they currently hold.
Where a name exists for every item, you do not have an authority problem and you should not be buying authority. What you may have is a capacity problem or a willingness problem, and those are different purchases: capacity you can buy cheaply, and willingness you cannot buy at all.
Where no name exists, you have found the one situation in which outside help is genuinely difficult to substitute. That is worth knowing precisely rather than in general, because it tells you which single item on your list is driving the whole engagement.
Capacity you can buy cheaply. Willingness you cannot buy at all. Work out which one you are short of before anybody quotes you.
Watch for the item where the name is technically correct and practically wrong. A general manager who could authorize a product retirement but built the product is a name on paper and a constraint in reality, and pretending otherwise at this stage produces an engagement scoped against an authority that will not be exercised. Mark those items separately.
6. Ask what is genuinely missing
For each item where a name exists but nothing has happened, establish which of three things is actually absent: time, skill, or nerve.
Time is a capacity gap and it is the cheapest to fill. Buy hands, scope it tightly, do not pay an authority premium for people who will be executing your decisions.
Skill is a capability gap. Costing methodology, pricing architecture, network modelling. Buy the specific skill for the specific piece of work and keep the rest inside.
Nerve is the uncomfortable one and it is more common than either. When the honest answer is that the person who could authorize a retirement has been declining to for three years, hiring somebody does not change that person. It adds a party who will discover the same constraint over six months and then leave. The only version that works is one where the authority is explicitly transferred for that decision, in writing, before anybody starts.
There is a fourth thing that is sometimes missing and rarely admitted, which is agreement. Where two people at the top hold different views about what is wrong, no amount of capacity or skill resolves it, and an engagement bought into that disagreement becomes an instrument in it. The right purchase there is narrow and analytical: a finding neither party authored, delivered to both.
7. Scope only what is left
Whatever survived steps one through six is your actual scope, and it will be considerably smaller than the proposal you were about to accept. Write it as a list of named changes with named owners and a date.
Then send that document out for proposals rather than describing your situation and asking firms to propose a solution. The difference in what comes back is substantial, because a firm responding to a defined scope competes on price and approach, while a firm responding to a described situation competes on how comprehensively it can characterize the problem.
Expect resistance to the narrow scope, framed as a concern that the pieces are interconnected and should be addressed together. Sometimes that is true. More often it is a description of how the firm prefers to sell, and you can test it by asking which specific item on your list cannot be done without which other one.
Ask for the team composition in writing as well. A proposal built around one senior operator reads very differently from one built around a senior name and three analysts, and the second is where a fixed fee grows through change orders. Ask who specifically will be in your building, how often, and what happens to the fee if that person becomes unavailable.
8. Decide whether you would still buy it
Look at the surviving scope and ask a final question: if this arrived on your desk today as an internal project with a named owner, would you fund it? If the answer is no, the engagement was never about the work.
That question catches the most expensive failure mode in this whole area, which is buying an engagement to create movement rather than to accomplish something. It is an understandable impulse. Commissioning outside help demonstrates seriousness, resets a stalled conversation, and gives a board something to point at, and all three of those are real benefits that have nothing to do with the deliverable.
Buying an engagement to demonstrate seriousness is a legitimate impulse and an expensive instrument. There are cheaper ways to signal that you have decided to act.
If that is what you want, buy it deliberately and scope it accordingly, and be honest with yourself about which product you are purchasing. What you should not do is buy a six-month program because it felt like the appropriate response to a bad quarter and then judge it on operational results.
Monday morning, do step two. One week of decision logging from two supervisors costs you nothing and it will tell you more about whether you need outside help than any proposal will.
One last thing worth saying to anyone who has read this far and concluded they do need help. Having run the eight steps, you are now a considerably better client than you were, and you will get better work. Firms respond to a defined scope, a named owner, and a buyer who has done their own counting, because those three things make the engagement more likely to succeed and everybody involved knows it.
The anti-consultant position was never that the work has no value. It is that a buyer who has not done the eight steps cannot tell whether it does, and pays for the uncertainty either way.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books: The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Answer this one before you sign anything: of the changes on your list, how many could be authorized today by somebody already in the building? If the answer is most of them, you have a willingness problem rather than a capability one, and no engagement solves that. Send me the list and I will tell you, free, which items genuinely need an outsider.
See also: 12 Questions Before You Hire a Consultant, A Buyer’s Guide to Turnaround Consultants