One focused session to find where cash is stuck and profit is leaking.

A fixed fee agreed in writing before we start — ask on the discovery call and you get a figure, not a range. What you get is one focused working session going through the business together, a clear picture of where cash is getting stuck, the profit leaks identified in plain terms, and practical actions you can start on immediately. There is no retainer and no ongoing commitment attached to it. If the answer turns out to be that you need ongoing reporting or a forecast rather than a one-off session, we will tell you that rather than sell you both.

Four places, in roughly this order of frequency. Pricing that has not moved while costs have — the most common and the least popular finding. Gross margin drifting by product, job or customer, invisible in a blended figure. Overheads that accumulated one subscription and one service contract at a time and nobody has audited in three years. And discounting or scope creep on delivery that never makes it onto an invoice. None of these is exotic and all of them are hard to see from inside the business, which is the entire reason an outside pair of eyes is worth an afternoon.

In the working capital cycle rather than the profit and loss. Typically: invoices raised days or weeks after the work is done, payment terms nobody enforces, aged debt that has quietly become normal, stock or work in progress sitting longer than it needs to, and supplier terms that are worse than they should be because nobody has asked. A profitable business can have several months of profit sitting in debtors and stock. Freeing part of that is usually faster and less painful than borrowing, and it does not need anyone's approval.

Your last set of accounts, current-year figures if you have them, and an aged debtors list. If you can add a breakdown of sales by product, service or customer, the session gets considerably sharper, because most of the interesting findings are hidden inside blended averages. If the bookkeeping is badly behind, say so when booking — the session can still work from the last filed accounts and your knowledge of the business, but you should know that the findings will be directional rather than precise, and that fixing the records may be the first real action.

This is a single diagnostic session with no retainer behind it. Management accounts and cashflow and budgeting are ongoing services that keep the picture current month after month. The one-off session suits owners who suspect the business should be more profitable than it is and want to know where the problem sits before committing to anything. Some people take the session, act on the findings themselves and never need more. Others discover the reason nobody spotted it earlier is that nothing is being measured monthly, and that leads somewhere else.

Then you have a well-run business and a written confirmation of it, which is worth something on its own — it stops you chasing a problem that is not there and redirects attention to growth instead. It is uncommon but it happens, usually in businesses where the owner already watches margin closely and the real constraint is capacity or demand rather than leakage. What we will not do is manufacture findings to justify the fee. If the honest answer is that the numbers are fine and the issue is somewhere else entirely, that is what you will hear.