Independent consultant · Gauteng
Most businesses are losing money in a place nobody has measured.
I spend two weeks inside a business finding out where, and what it costs per year in rands. Fixed fee, one document, no retainer required.
The problem
The expensive problems are the invisible ones.
Every business has bottlenecks nobody has counted. A quote that takes four days to go out. Hours spent every week on work no client pays for. Enquiries that go cold because nobody got to them in time.
None of it appears on a P&L. There is no line item for the deal you lost because you were slow, or for the afternoon someone spent rekeying the same figures into a second system. The cost is real and it recurs every month, but nobody logs it, so nobody sees it.
That is exactly why these problems persist. Anything measured eventually gets managed. Anything unmeasured just quietly carries on costing money, year after year, until somebody goes looking for it.
The audit
Two weeks inside the business. One document at the end.
I come in, work out where the money is going, and put a rand figure on each of it. What you do with that afterwards is entirely your call.
Inside the business
Interviews with you and with the people actually doing the work, because they are the ones who know where it snags. Plus whatever data already exists: your systems, your spreadsheets, your inbox. Nothing new needs building for me to look at it.
Analysis and writing
I work out what each bottleneck actually costs, in rands per year, and what it would take to fix. This is the part that turns a list of complaints everybody already had into a number you can make a decision against.
Findings and a presentation
A 10 to 15 page findings document: every bottleneck quantified in rands per year, and recommendations ranked by cost to fix against value recovered. Then 90 minutes together to walk through it properly.
The audit
R35,000 fixedOne price, agreed before I start. It does not move with how long week two takes or how much I find.
- Two weeks, start to finish
- 10 to 15 page findings document
- Every bottleneck costed in rands per year
- Recommendations ranked by cost to fix against value recovered
- 90-minute presentation
The document is yours. If you want to take the findings and act on them with your own people, that is a perfectly good outcome and I would rather you did that than pay me to do something you can already do yourselves.
There is no retainer attached to this, nothing to opt out of, and no assumption that it leads anywhere else. Plenty of audits should end at the document.
What comes after
Optional. Quoted separately.
If you want the top findings actually built rather than just written down, that is a separate engagement: implementation. Designing and building the systems that remove the bottlenecks the audit found.
It is priced per engagement, typically R80,000 to R150,000 depending on scope, or on a monthly retainer where the work is genuinely ongoing rather than a fixed build. Either way it is quoted separately, after the audit, once you and I both know what the actual problem is. I would rather scope it against findings than against a guess.
Who this is for
Where I work most.
Not an exhaustive list, and not a rule. These are the two places I have spent the most time and where I can be useful fastest, because I already know what to look for.
Logistics and freight forwarding
Margin here is thin enough that operational drag shows up directly in the numbers, and most of it is sitting in the handoffs between people and systems.
- Quote turnaround
- Capacity utilisation
- Tracking visibility
- Invoicing lag
Professional services firms
When the product is people's time, anything that quietly consumes that time without being billed is a direct cost, and it is almost never tracked.
- Non-billable time
- Document chasing
- Duplicate data entry
- Manual reporting
If you are somewhere else entirely and the description still sounds like your business, it probably is. Ask anyway.
About
One person. That is the whole thing.
I am an independent consultant based in Gauteng. My background is sales, marketing and operations, which is a useful combination for this work: I have sat on the side that generates the demand and on the side that has to deliver it.
There is no team behind me and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You get me, in your business, for two weeks. That is a real constraint on how many of these I can do at once, and it is also the reason the work is consistent.
What I actually do is narrow: find the expensive thing nobody has counted, then build the system that fixes it.