How many boardrooms have you been in when everyone agrees that you will have to fix the plane whilst in flight, in other words there is no opportunity to step outside the business to look at it holistically and make changes. As a minimum businesses say we need to run the business while we transform the business.

This mantra has been chanted for years like some alter to those hero’s who have tried and failed. The vision of an engineer hanging off the wing in flight is too much to bear.

What it means is the business has to keep trading and paying the bills whilst it goes through a transformation. You have to ask the question are the people conducting the transformation the same people who you would employ to run the transformed entity but how can that be if they were employed to run the current entity which needs transforming including the people.. I would contend that very different mindsets and management skills are required to maximum returns from the current business, compared to creating new business models, these two skills sets are seldom present in the same executives.
True transformation comes from expert unbiased advice but how many consultants give advice and then leave for those same people to transform. So, if the employee model is not great and the consultant model has fatal floors what is the right model to transform.You really need to have your cake and eat it too, you need the wisdom a Consultant can bring from working across multiple industries and you also need the learnings of the people working within the company so how do achieve both.

There is a new option where an external highly specialised consulting team is formed to reflect the transformation needs, it might include specialists in Finance, Digital Transformation, Supply Chain, Sales and many more.
They form an external team who work within the business for a period of time alongside their counterparts, they attend internal meetings and client meeting and they build the plan. That is where a consultant would normally depart but this team stays and implements the plan over what may be up to a three-year period. In essence you get to put the plane in the hanger, assess the repairs and alterations needed and then hand it back to the owner upon completion.

Few people are willing to deliver on their advice but such teams do exist, and yes and we can put you in touch with them.