Is your business desired, or merely tolerated?

Two real engagements. No company names and no figures: that material belongs to them, not to me. What can be told is the shape of the problem, the decision that changed, and the fact that both of them implemented it.

An international fast-food chain, in the Caribbean

The problem. Thirty years of selling, hundreds of employees, a brand that needs no introduction in its country — and the numbers did not add up. It ran full and lost money. The industry whispered the usual recipe: cut prices, more coupons, deliver faster.

What the autopsy found. Its historic promise was the clock. The day you measure your relationship with a customer in minutes, you have already confessed that the only thing that sets you apart is how fast you leave their house. It arrived at the most emotional moment of the day —the shared table— and treated it as a logistics operation. Its enemy was not the competition: it was the indifference it had manufactured itself. It had hostages, not fans.

The decision that changed. Stop buying demand blind. The whole category spends between 8 and 12% of sales on advertising to get a stranger to order for the first time, never knowing who came from which ad. The proposal was to pay that same money to its own customers for every new customer they bring, and only when that customer actually orders. From buying demand blind to buying it by result. Every customer becomes the salesperson.

Afterwards. They implemented it. The numbers are theirs.

A wealth management firm with global families

The problem. A firm with all the capabilities of a great wealth manager, competing in a category where everyone says exactly the same thing. The obvious route was to look slightly better than the firm next door.

What the autopsy found. That its clients' real fear was not portfolio performance. It was continuity: families that lose their wealth between generations when the people, the countries or the rules change. Nobody in the category was looking there, because it is not an investment problem but an institutional one.

The decision that changed. Stop trying to be a better wealth manager and become the institution that keeps a family in charge of itself when everything else changes. Not a better position inside the existing category: a new category, with its own word, its own rituals and its own operating system.

Afterwards. They implemented it, starting with a single-country pilot.

I ask first, I do not pitch. The opening conversation exists to determine whether there is a structural limitation worth an autopsy. If there is not, I say so and we stop.

I work inside the company, not from outside. Interviews with your team, internal data, the real economics of the business. There is no autopsy without access.

I deliver a judgement, not a report. The uncomfortable part gets said. The work does not end in a tidy diagnosis but in a decision somebody has to make.

It ends in a ninety-day proof. Not in a document. A new thesis, narrow, shaped as an experiment that can be won or lost.

I take few mandates a year. Final judgement is not delegated, and depth cannot be manufactured in parallel.