FAQs
First things first, everything starts with booking an initial video call. That call serves both of us in answering "will we work well together?" and "what are we trying to solve?" questions.
If we're aligned, you'll pay to secure your spot because we're a first-come, first-served company.
From there, we'll send over our pre-visit questionnaire that will be used to tailor the site visit agenda to your operation.
From the time we come on-site to perform the assessment and team interviews, you can expect your action plan to be in-hand within the next two weeks. We strive to turn these around as soon as possible.
At that point, you'll have everything you need to make progress on your own. Or, you can choose to keep working with us in a "done-with-you" format where we become an extension of your team advocating on your behalf.
By the end of our process, you'll get a comprehensive action plan to help move your business forward that you can choose to tackle on your own:
- a set of quick-wins you can jump on right now
- an action plan detailing what we recommend you do over the next 90-days to make the biggest impact
- a longer-term set of suggestions that will likely take you the next several quarters to work through
The intent is to get you moving on your own with recommendations that spell out where to focus so you can move beyond constant fire fighting.
Some possible outcomes may include:
- uncovering new ways to increase delegation
- cleaning up data for accuracy and consistency
- physical changes to streamline the flow of work
- investments in technology to enforce procedure
- getting your teams to agree on rules of engagement
Our goal is to get you some quick-wins to help everyone feel good about tackling improvements that will require more effort and time.
Most advisory and consulting firms are built to serve large companies with massive or complex scaling issues within their distribution networks.
We focus on growth stage businesses with scaling issues that hurt productivity and cause errors that kick profits. In general, this drives the decision to pursue their first Warehouse Management Systems.
We do this with well-defined programs as opposed to a bucket of hours and a fuzzy scope of work. And we price our initial program, Clarity First, to be an easy way to vet whether you want to keep working with us or go another direction after the two-week engagement.
We want to work with people and businesses that value spending the time upfront to avoid mistakes later on.
It's so common to see businesses turn to technology before they are ready to succeed with it.
So, a willingness to carve out time so you can ensure you know what must happen before you approach vendors, is critical for us to work with you effectively.
With consulting, client work is typically custom or whatever you tell them to do. This means there is no set price and quite often the "product" is a bucket of hours. So, most firms hide behind "it depends" and fail to even provide a price range and factors that make it go up or down.
Also, most firms look the same so sharing pricing feels like a liability if competitors can see it. Keeping pricing hidden has more to do with keeping competitors in the dark and their own lack of confidence than it does keeping potential clients guessing.
We charge $10,000 for the initial site, and if other sites make sense to visit and analyze, each additional side is $6,500.
We offer a discount for small companies, check the FAQ for more details on what that means.
Once you've decided to work with us and made your payment to secure your spot in our schedule, we'll send over a pre-visit questionnaire. It is designed to help tailor the site visit to your operation so we focus on what matters to you and remove what doesn't.
The only other bit of pre-work is to ensure your leaders and front-line teams will all be present when we visit. This is to ensure our time together is as productive as possible.
Hourly pricing encourages bad behaviors
Firms want to maximize hours, while clients want to minimize. This means everyone focuses on effort, not outcomes.
Instead, we offer well-defined programs to ensure all our clients are thoroughly focused on results.
We only work with mid-sized businesses given we focus on helping you prepare for your first systems within your warehouse operation.
Most large corporations have matured well beyond this point so their challenges are more focused on shaving milliseconds off of high volume processes or adding automation to new or existing warehouses.
For any companies that are doing less than $20m in annual revenue and occupy a single warehouse under 50k square feet, we discount our Clarity First offer to $7,500.
While our initial Clarity First program typically takes less than two weeks and is designed for you to execute on your own (DIY), many of our clients choose to continue working with us in a "done-with-you" format.
Given our clients are experiencing significant growth, the work involved to build scalable systems typically takes 6-9 months of continuous work.
We help accelerate that work as an extension of your team and advocate on your behalf with vendors and third parties to ensure you can head off issues and see around corners.
We have clients that choose to engage us for multiple years given we are often a more cost effective method than trying to build a larger in-house team.