Hire me the way you’d hire anyone good
Screen, interview, try me on real work, then commit only while it earns its keep. You can stop at any step, and each paid one ends in a written artefact you keep. Start wherever the risk feels right for you.
- A screening call: 30 minutes, no fee. Tell me what’s not moving. I’ll tell you whether there’s a question here worth investigating, and whether I’m the right person to investigate it. No deck.
- A working session: a couple of hours, no fee, no obligation. We run it on your actual value stream instead of hypotheticals. You get a useful read; we both find out whether the problem, the evidence and the mandate justify a next step. You leave with a first read either way, enough to know whether the paid diagnosis below is worth it.
- A two-day trial: USD 5,000, credited. Two days on your queues and your people’s own accounts, ending in a written decision note: what’s constrained, what’s still unknown, and whether to stop, advise, or diagnose. Move to the diagnostic within 30 days and this comes off its fee.
- The diagnostic: USD 35,000, four to six weeks. A first piece of real work together, shaped around your situation and tested against your numbers. Either of us can end it at day 30; you keep everything produced. Unless the evidence supports a worthwhile next step, the default at the end is stop.
- An embedded engagement: for as long as it makes sense. If the diagnostic’s experiment delivers, hands-on redesign on a flat monthly fee, 30-day notice either way. You decide when it stops earning its keep.
The rest of this page is the thinking behind it, then the detail on each step.
If what you need is an operating role, fractional or permanent, I’m open to that too. Say so on the call.
What your numbers decide
Your AI spend is up and your cycle times haven’t moved. We start there—in your queues, your cost-of-delay, where decisions actually route—not in a framework. I carry one prior and I’ll name it so you can hold me to it: the gains tend to land inside a delivery structure designed before these tools existed. We read your numbers together, and they settle it. They show the constraint, price it, or kill the prior, and if they kill it we stop. Nothing gets installed on a hunch, mine or yours.
The two-day trial, in detail
Before I start, you do the staging: line up a handful of interviews across one value stream (an hour each, including the executive who owns it and someone close to the work), send out a short story-prompt survey I’ll hand you, and get me access to your work-tracking tool or a dump of its data. Then we spend up to two full days on it together: I read your queues and your people’s own accounts, run the interviews, and we look at what surfaces side by side. The written decision note at the end says what looks constrained, what’s still unknown, and whether the next step is stop, periodic advisory, or the diagnostic. This is your situation worked on directly, not a workshop with seats; I don’t sell training days, and this doesn’t become one. Already run your own numbers? Bring them: we build on your draft.
The diagnostic, in detail
The clock starts at kickoff, after a short mobilisation gate: interviewees named, the finance session booked, data access agreed, so neither of us pays for scheduling drift. There are no automatic rollovers and no bundled follow-on. We continue only if the experiment’s numbers argue for it.
Who is in the room
Your sponsor (usually the CTO or VPE), one director, the product counterpart, one engineering manager, and someone from finance who can price delay. The CEO joins twice, at kickoff and at the decision review. The two touchpoints are deliberate: the diagnostic also tests whether the CEO engages with the diagnosis, because everything downstream depends on that.
What you get
Built with your people on the value stream you choose, and shaped to what it needs. A typical engagement produces something like:
- A queue and WIP inventory. Where work waits, how long it waits, and what is in flight against what your structure can actually finish.
- Cost of delay, in dollars, on one live initiative. Built with your finance function so the number survives their scrutiny. A number I grade myself doesn’t count, and I won’t ask you to take one to your board.
- A shadow org chart. Where decisions actually route versus the chart on the wall. And, if the data points that way, a redesign hypothesis for one pilot group.
- One falsifiable experiment. Written as: if we change X, we expect Y by date Z, and here is what would prove it wrong.
- A one-page brief for your CEO or board. The constraint, what it costs, and the decision needed, with an owner and a date.
The embedded engagement, in detail
The embedded work is hands-on: four days a week, and I roll out the redesign myself—a LeSS adoption where it fits, a bespoke SDLC where it doesn’t—the way I spent 15 months re-shaping a global firm’s operating model as the sole practitioner across 20+ teams, with tooling I built carrying the mentoring load and the CTO holding the authority the design needed. I will propose it only if three things are true at the end of the diagnostic:
The CEO changed one structure only a CEO owns (an approval threshold, say, or a planning rule the board sees).
- Managers are asking for the time rather than being assigned it.
- Every practice we installed has a named internal owner.
After the trial the engagement simply continues on the same flat fee until either of us ends it on 30 days’ written notice.
What I don’t sell
Training days by the dozen, certification programmes, a coach army, or transformation on a timeline. Where a coaching workstream runs alongside the redesign, it carries process commitments only (cadence, supervision, review); outcome commitments belong to the redesign workstream, where they can be measured. How that coaching runs—method, confidentiality rules, limits—is public at /coaching-practice.
Working from New Zealand; my standard delivery shape overlaps US Pacific business hours Monday to Friday (Here’s the overlap visualised).