My first sales job was in a restaurant. Sherman gave it to me. Twelve tables, six wines, three languages, and one rule I still use in every business conversation I have: the close starts five minutes before you sit down.

What he meant was simple. At twelve tables you can't ask every guest forty questions. You read the table before you reach it. Who's celebrating, who's in a hurry, who wants to be told what to drink. You ask two good questions, and you bring the right bottle.

Most business consulting works the opposite way. It asks the forty questions, one billable hour at a time.

The problem with the meter

I'm not accusing consultants of bad faith. Most of them are sharp and mean well. The problem is structural. When you pay by the hour or the day, the person you're paying earns more the longer the problem stays unclear.

Nobody sets out to drag things along. But the incentive leaks in anyway. Discovery phases grow. Workshops beget workshops. The scope quietly expands to fit the budget, and three months in you're holding a very good deck and roughly the same business.

Founders feel this even when they can't articulate it. That's why so many small businesses never hire outside help at all. It isn't the price that scares them. It's the open end. You can plan around €1,500. You can't plan around "let's see how it goes".

What productised means

A productised service is the opposite deal. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed delivery date, all written down before you pay anything. You know exactly what you're buying and when it arrives.

The important shift is who carries the risk. With the meter running, you carry it. If the work takes longer, you pay for longer. With a fixed price, the provider carries it. If they misjudged the problem, that's their time, not your money.

That changes behaviour on both sides. The provider has every reason to get to the answer fast and no reason to stretch. You stop rationing questions because you're worried about the invoice. The whole thing starts to feel less like hiring a supplier and more like buying a product that happens to be made of expertise.

Diagnosis before prescription

Last year I sat in a specialist's office feeling terrible. Before she told me anything, she ran a series of tests. Then she asked one question: "Do you experience a lot of stress in your daily life?" I told her no more than usual. She waited. The real answer came out over the next half hour, and her diagnosis made sense of everything I'd been ignoring for months.

Nobody would accept a doctor who prescribed first and ran tests later. In business we do it constantly. We buy the new software, hire the new person, launch the new campaign, and only afterwards discover the problem was somewhere else.

In my experience, most of the money a small business wastes isn't spent on bad solutions. It's spent solving the wrong problem well.

Most of the money a small business wastes isn't spent on bad solutions. It's spent solving the wrong problem well.

What a good diagnostic should hand you

Whoever you use, a business diagnostic worth paying for should leave you holding four things.

The bottleneck, named. Not a list of twelve issues ranked by colour. The one constraint that, cleared, makes the others easier.

The phase you're actually in. A business in its foundation phase needs different moves from one that's ready to scale, and doing the right work in the wrong phase is the most common reason growth stalls. I wrote about why in Why has my business stopped growing?.

An order. What to do first, what waits, and what to stop doing entirely. The stop list is often worth more than the to-do list.

A date. A plan you can start on Monday, delivered in days, not a quarter.

After working on growth and strategy with thirty-odd companies, I kept seeing the same patterns in different clothes, so I turned them into a method with exactly that shape. The FOG® Diagnostic is €1,495, flat: a 90-minute live session, a written plan three business days later, and one follow-up exchange within fourteen days. No meter anywhere.

When you don't need one

Sometimes the honest answer is that you don't need a diagnostic at all.

If you already know the problem and the fix, just go and do it. If what's slowing you down is a missing spreadsheet or a badly set up inbox, you need an afternoon, not an engagement. And if your strategy is still genuinely undecided, if you haven't settled who you serve, no amount of diagnosis will settle it for you.

A diagnostic earns its fee when the business is working but stuck, when effort is high and results are flat, and when you've stopped being able to tell which of the thirty things on your list matter.

That's the table Sherman would have read in five seconds.

The close starts five minutes before you sit down. So does the fix.