Commercial strategy
Where next year's growth actually comes from, which of this year's activity is funding it, and what has to stop to pay for the difference.
Typically
Independent advisory
The answer, and the working that got there.
Meridian is a six-person advisory practice for founder-led companies at the point where the next decision is too large to make on instinct. Every engagement is fixed in scope and fixed in fee, and every one ends in a written document you can put in front of a board and defend line by line.
Engagement, standard form
Practice
Four questions we are good at.
We do not have a sector. We have a shape of problem: important, bounded, and currently being argued about with incomplete evidence.
Operating model
How work moves through the company and where it stalls. Usually the answer is a handover nobody owns rather than a person underperforming.
Typically
Pricing & margin
What you charge, what it genuinely costs you to deliver, and the gap between the two once the unbilled hours are counted honestly.
Typically
Transaction readiness
Getting the numbers, the narrative and the paperwork into a state that survives somebody else's scrutiny, well before that scrutiny arrives.
Typically
How we work
Four stages, and you can stop after any of them.
The sequence is the same every time. It is written down here because a firm that will not tell you how it works before you pay is telling you something.
We would rather hand back a fee than hand over a recommendation we cannot show the reasoning for.
Orientation
Half a day
We read what you already have and agree, in one sentence, the question this engagement answers. If we cannot write that sentence, we say so and there is no fee.
Evidence
Two to three weeks
Interviews, numbers, and the parts of the business nobody has written down. We work from your own data rather than a benchmark set you cannot inspect.
Position
One session
We put the recommendation in front of you before it is finished, specifically so you can argue with it while it is still cheap to change.
Handover
One week
A written decision paper, the underlying model with its assumptions exposed, and a fortnight of follow-up questions at no additional charge.
Who we work with
Better to know early.
Most of what makes an engagement work is decided before it starts. So here is the qualification we would otherwise do on a first call, in public.
This tends to go well when
- There is a decision with a date attached to it, not a general sense of unease.
- Somebody senior can give the engagement two hours a week and actually will.
- The company is past its first ten people and the founder still makes most of the calls.
- You want the reasoning written down, not a deck to forward onwards.
This tends to go badly when
- You need extra hands to run the thing we would only be advising on.
- The decision is already made and the engagement exists to endorse it.
- The work needs a team on site for months. We are the wrong shape for that.
- Budget and start date are still unsettled internally. Come back when they are settled.
- Founded
- Size
- Concurrent engagements
- Fees
- Working pattern
Enquiries
Tell us the question first.
The assistant handles the first exchange — what you are facing, roughly when, roughly what budget — so that by the time we speak we are discussing the problem rather than establishing it.
The first exchange is with an assistant rather than a person. It asks what the decision is, what has been budgeted for it and when it needs answering — the same three questions a partner would open with — then routes the enquiry to whoever holds that practice, or says plainly that we are not the right firm.
Enquiries that qualify reach a partner the same working day. Enquiries that do not get told so, with a reason, rather than being left to wait.
Or directly
Meridian Consulting enquiry desk
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