Process behind Advisory services and solutions

First contact

Someone from your firm will use one of the contact forms on this website to get in touch. We will get back to you within 1—2 business day(s). On the off chance of technical issues with contact form, if we haven’t replied, please send your request to "contact [[-@-]] awezzom (dot) com"

Discovery conversation

We will schedule a brief conversation over the phone with someone from your management team. This should be a decision maker. Ideally, this is a director, partner, principal or a senior manager at the firm. Someone with on-the-spot decision-making authority.

During this conversation we will try to understand your current situation and see if there’s a fit between what you want and what we can do.

Paid diagnostics

This is a paid engagement. Fee — 2,000 USD. If we’ve decided to move further, we will issue an invoice for this amount. Payable upfront.

After receipt of payment in full, we will send you a signed NDA, a contract, list of materials to prepare (e.g., list of employees, roles, revenue, number of clients, gross/net profits), and survey(s). We will also schedule a diagnostics session which is typically 1—3 hours long.

During diagnostics, based on data received from you, we will ask clarifying questions to better understand your situation.

If at this point either of us decides not to move forward, we will refund you the fee for diagnostics. The refund typically occurs within 2—3 business weeks.

Hypothesis

We will analyze the information received from you thus far. Typically within one business week, we will get back to you with hypotheses and proposed next steps.

Choosing approach

Typical management solutions can be found here. There are multiple variables that will determine which of these packages or advisory services are the right fit for your firm at this moment in time.

Making payments

From this point onward all work will be invoiced up-front and will be non-refundable. You will select one of the proposed combinations of advisory services, and make a full prepayment.

We will move on schedule. Please make sure you have allocated sufficient resources (time, funds, people, etc.).

There are several reasons why we charge up front. First, we can’t afford to provide you with candid advice knowing that if you don’t like what you hear you might decide to revisit contractual obligations. Second, participants commit to workshops and homework better, knowing they’ve already paid. Third, this is a laborous business — while you provide us with more information about your firm, as we move from one module to another, there is an invisible process behind the scenes of altering any upcoming workshops, interviews and surveys.

Travel

Many of our advisory services require office visits and face-to-face conversations. Travel expenses are reimbursed separately and are exempt from Satisfaction Guarantee refund policy.

Who should participate

We expect key decision maker participation. Please refer to specific advisory services and modules.

Your homework

Most of the workshops have homework with a due date — typically two days prior to the next workshop. It usually takes an hour to complete homework assignments.

Some of the assignments are instrumental to upcoming modules. If the homework isn’t submitted on time by all participants, we’d have to postpone commencement of the next steps.

Please make sure participants are on-board and understand the importance of the upcoming work.

Our recommendations

When the expected outcome of our involvement is recommendations provision, after the last module of the last workshop we will require ~2—4 weeks to digest the data and produce concise, to-the-point suggestions.

Formal written reports are typically 60—120 pages long and are outside of the main scope of our engagements. The fee for such reports starts at 5,000 USD and goes up.

We don’t recommend including an executive summary into the scope if the intention is to skim through the report, and put it on the farthest shelf to collect dust.

Creating deliverables

If specific deliverables such as branding or website are part of the selected solution, the work will begin after you make a decision based on our recommendations.

Each of the deliverables have a built-in process to them. We do not allow our clients to change it frequently, wihtout prior thoughtful discussion with all stakeholders.

Final steps of the process

We will check in with you on your progress twice during the next six months. We will answer your teams’ questions and make further recommendations for adjustments where necessary. Such check-in happens via email correspondence or brief phone calls.

Beyond this, your key people will be getting insights via email from us if they subscribe on this website. We will announce about upcoming seminars, new management tools and models, as well as deliver fresh articles on the subject of management for professional services firms.

Additional information

Refunds

We provide an unconditional Satisfaction Guarantee. If, for whatever reason, you are not 100% satisfied, we will adjust the fee for the amount you feel is fair, or refund your firm in full.

No strings attached. We will only require you to provide feedback on where our consulting services fell short. Refer to our Refund policy page for more details.

Retainers

We can discuss retainer fees. Typically, these are available to long-standing clients.

Training

Because most training (by anyone) doesn’t work as intended — only a fraction gets actually put into practice — to make training investment worthwhile, we provide training exclusively under special conditions. Reach out to discuss in detail.