The Consultation: Miss A meets the Fixer
A rooftop bar somewhere above the City of London. The kind of place where the wine list is longer than most people’s CVs. Miss A, fresh off a punishing NHS trust review, is nursing a gin and looking unimpressed with the world. Enter Me, straight from a Bain workshop that ran forty minutes over because nobody in the room could agree on what “synergy” meant.
Miss A: You are late.
Me: I am precise. There is a difference. Lateness is an accident. I was busy making someone’s five year plan fit into eighteen months.
Miss A: Bold claim from a man who cannot find a rooftop bar on time.
Me: I found it. I simply chose to arrive when the room needed me most, which is a skill, by the way. Most consultants show up early and say nothing useful. I show up exactly when the silence gets uncomfortable and hand everyone a plan.
Miss A: So you are a magician now.
Me: No. Magicians rely on tricks. I rely on diagnostics. Give me a broken system, a tired leadership team, and one whiteboard, and I will hand you back a business that actually knows what it is doing with itself.
Miss A: The NHS trust I just left thought they knew what they were doing. Four hundred pages of strategy. Not one person could tell me the point of it.
Me: That is not a strategy, that is a hostage document. Nobody reads it, nobody owns it, and everyone quotes it in meetings to sound serious. I do not write those. I write the one page that survives contact with a Monday morning.
Miss A: One page. How very Bain of you.
Me: One page and a spine. That is the part people forget. Strategy without nerve is just decoration. I do not decorate. I rebuild the plumbing while the building stays open, and I make the people inside believe they could have thought of it themselves.
Miss A: Flattering yourself is not the same as flattering me.
Me: Give it a moment. I am getting there.
Miss A: I am still waiting to hear what you actually do, beneath the confidence.
Me: Fine. Strip away the tailoring and here is the mechanism. Every organisation, every person, is carrying a gap between where they are and where they secretly know they should be. Most people manage that gap with denial, or a new logo, or a consultant who tells them what they want to hear. I close the gap. I find the one constraint actually strangling growth, I remove it, and I build the muscle so it does not grow back.
Miss A: That is either genius or something you read on a plane.
Me: Both. I have read it on several planes, and then I made it true, which is the harder bit. Anyone can quote a framework. I make the framework survive an actual Tuesday, with actual invoices, actual egos, and actual people who liked things the old way.
Miss A: You talk like scaling a business is romantic.
Me: It is. It is the most honest kind of romance there is. You take something small and uncertain, you court it with discipline instead of flowers, and slowly it trusts you enough to grow. People think I sell spreadsheets. I sell permission. Permission to dream bigger than the org chart currently allows.
Miss A: And if I said I did not believe in permission slips.
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Me: Then you have never seen what happens when a tired founder is finally told, by someone with no emotional stake and excellent shoes, that their idea was never the problem. Their operating model was. I say that sentence, and I watch three years of guilt leave the room.
Miss A: You are enjoying this far too much.
Me: I enjoy solving things. It happens to look a great deal like flirting when I do it well.
Miss A: Careful. That line is doing more work than your diagnostics.
Me: It is holding up rather nicely, though, is it not?
Miss A: Tell me something you have actually fixed. Not a metaphor. A fact.
Me: A regional retail chain, eleven sites, losing money at nine of them because everyone was solving the wrong problem beautifully. Leadership was polishing the marketing while the supply chain quietly bled them out.
I did not touch the marketing. I rebuilt the ordering cadence, cut three layers of approval nobody could explain, and within two quarters, six sites were profitable and the other three finally knew why they were not.
Miss A: And the vision part. The dreaming. Where does that fit between spreadsheets and supply chains.
Me: Vision is what you get to have once the operations stop screaming. Nobody dreams clearly while the building is on fire. I put the fire out first. Quietly. Efficiently. Then I hand the founder back a calm afternoon and ask them what they actually wanted before the fire started. That conversation is usually the best one they have had in years.
Miss A: You make putting out fires sound like foreplay.
Me: Everything worth doing well has a bit of foreplay in it. Diagnosis, tension, release. The only difference is I bill for it.
Miss A: And here I thought consultants were dull.
Me: Only the ones without a point of view. I have several. Strong ones. Ask me anything.
Miss A: Fine. What is wrong with me.
Me: Nothing structural. You are simply operating three levels above the support system built around you, which means you are absorbing shocks that should never reach your desk. Classic bottleneck, except the bottleneck is brilliant and exhausted. I would not fix you. I would fix everyone standing between you and your own decisions.
Miss A: (after a pause, and the first real smile of the evening) That is genuinely the most attractive thing anyone has said to me this year.
Me: I told you. Diagnostics. Every time.
Miss A did not hire a consultant that night. She hired a mirror with excellent posture and zero patience for four hundred page documents nobody reads.
The wit was real, the sarcasm was armour, and underneath both sat something rarer than charm: A person who actually knew how to find the one constraint quietly strangling everything else, name it out loud, and remove it before the bill even arrived.
Charisma opens the door. Competence is the only thing that gets invited back. Anyone can talk a good game about scale and vision over cocktails. Very few can walk into someone else’s chaos, find the single wire holding the whole mess together, and cut it without the ceiling coming down. That is the entire trade.
Everything else, the wit, the timing, the perfectly late entrance, is just good marketing for a skill that was never in question.
