The questions founders ask us most, answered directly.
A managing partner with 20+ years of CEO-level experience, supported by an executive assistant, spends two intensive days on-site with your leadership team. It's not interviews and a survey — it's a structured process designed to surface how decisions actually get made, where they stall, and what's really constraining growth. You get a full report afterward, reviewed by two additional senior partners from our other offices before it reaches you.
No. The diagnosis is delivered to stand on its own. If it surfaces work worth doing, we'll propose an implementation program scoped specifically to your business, but that's a separate decision.
We build an implementation program prioritized by ROI, focused on the two or three changes that will move the business most, not a sprawling multi-year roadmap. We work with people across levels of your organization to find out what they're actually motivated to change, and build the plan around that.
We don't lead with a framework and diagnose second. We diagnose first, so the program we build is shaped around your specific business, not a standard package. We don't run open-ended engagements with no connection to results — a meaningful part of our compensation is tied to the outcomes we actually deliver, so we're financially exposed to the same results you are.
A managing partner personally leads the diagnosis. Every one of us has 20+ years of experience at CEO level. The resulting report is drafted by the partner and support staff, then reviewed by two other senior partners from our global offices before you see it.
Founders of family-run businesses with $20–500 million in annual revenue and more than 200 employees — companies that have outgrown what the founder or family can run by instinct alone, but haven't yet built the leadership structure to operate independently of them.
That's likely, and it's the point. The diagnosis is built to give you an honest, clear-eyed picture of what's actually holding the business back, even when that's uncomfortable. We'd rather you know now than find out later, at a higher cost.
It's two days, not a project that adds to your plate long-term. And the fact that you're stretched thin is often exactly the symptom the diagnosis is designed to address.
Because the implementation program isn't built around an external model — it's built around what your own team is already motivated to change. Change that comes from your people, not from an imported playbook, is what actually survives past the engagement.
That's usually because the plan came from outside, not from your own team. We build the implementation around what your people are already motivated to change. That's why it survives past the first quarter.
That's exactly why we start with a diagnosis instead of a template. We're not proposing anything until we've seen your business specifically.
You don't have to open anything you're not ready to. The diagnosis follows what the organization is willing to work on. We're not there to force a conversation you're not ready for.
The best time to do this is before it's forced on you. Every founder who waits for the crisis ends up making the same decisions with fewer options and less time.
You can try, but anyone inside the business, or close to the founder, has a hard time being fully honest about where the founder is the bottleneck. That's the one thing an outside, structured diagnosis gives you that internal trust can't.
The honest answer: there's no guarantee you'll like everything the diagnosis surfaces. It's built to tell the truth about what's actually constraining the business, not to be comfortable — that can mean hearing that the bottleneck is the founder, that a leadership gap has been quietly absorbed rather than fixed, or that a process everyone assumed was working isn't. There's also a follow-through risk worth naming honestly: the diagnosis only creates value if the organization acts on what it finds. If the appetite to actually change isn't there, an accurate report doesn't do much good sitting in a drawer. We'd say the risk of a clear-eyed, peer-reviewed diagnosis is smaller than the risk of continuing to run the business on instinct for another few years without ever finding out what's actually holding it back.
Reach out directly and we'll get back to you shortly.
AIM