Design the system
The work your client’s people carry gets designed as a system: the calls they make, the criteria behind them, and how much each seat can really hold.
For Exit Planners
You found the detractor and put a price on it. This one is about the finding that doesn’t move.
Recognition
What to listen for
You hear it at the reassessment, usually as the reason one driver is still where it started while the others came up. A few things worth listening for:
- “The new GM is great. He still checks the big ones with me.”
- “I can’t be gone more than a week. Things pile up.”
- “If Dave ever left, nobody could price the big jobs.”
- “Can’t we just get an AI to take some of this off my plate?”
- “We hired two managers. Everything still comes back to me.”
None of those mean the plan is wrong. They’re what it sounds like when the business leans on one or two people, the owner or someone it can’t lose, and they show up in the scores that won’t come up.
Two questions that sort it
Not every overload is a design problem. To tell, think about the person everything runs through and ask two questions.
Would someone just as good be any less buried?
If they’d cope, it was the person or the fit, and that has a people fix. If they’d be buried by month two, the problem is the work.
Has more help ever made the pile smaller?
A hire, a new tool, AI? If it all got absorbed and the same people are still buried, the problem is the work, and that’s what I fix.
What I do about it
If the work is the problem
There’s something I can do about that, and it isn’t a tool your client bolts on.
The reason that work stalls is specific to how their business runs. Sometimes it’s a call only one person knows how to make: which exceptions get routed where, what “done right” means when nobody is checking. Sometimes it’s more volume than one seat was ever built for, or every part of the business landing on the same person at once.
Nobody designed that work. It grew up around the people doing it, which is why it can’t move to anyone else.
That kind of work has to be redesigned around the one business it lives in.
See one working
Try it on a client you have in mind
That isn’t a claim you should take on faith, so here’s one running.
Tarvi handles the day-to-day operations inside Admentus, my own business, in a system I designed and own. It is the small version of what I just described, grounded in how this business actually works, so when you describe a client it is reasoning against something rather than improvising.
Tarvi is also one agent. What a client gets is several, each with a defined role inside work that was designed first, with people checking where checking matters.
Try it yourself. Describe the situation you’re looking at in your own words. There’s no form and nothing to sign up for.
The order matters more than the tooling does. Here’s the clearest example I know.
Detroit, 1906
What is this business worth?
Henry Ford never had an advisor like you. You’re the one part of this I’m making up. The rest happened.
It’s 1906, and your client knows exactly who he is selling to. Build a car for ordinary people instead of the wealthy, and get the price low enough that they can actually buy one. It isn’t a vague target, and he didn’t arrive at it comfortably. He fought his own financial backer over it, and in 1906 he bought the backer out.
He’s right, and this year it’s working. The Model N sells for $500 and becomes the best-selling car in America.
Then you sit down to work out what the company is actually worth, and you ask the question your work always comes back to. What happens to this business when his best men aren’t in the room?
The answer nobody likes
You both reach for what you know
Before you put a number on anything you go look at the shop, because that’s the job. Cars are built one at a time at fixed stands. The parts are getting closer to identical but aren’t there yet, so a fitter still files and adjusts each one until it seats, and every man has his own way of making them meet. The shop turns out a few dozen cars a day.
So you do what your discipline does, and it’s the right call. Put a leadership team over the floor. Keep the best fitters, because the business can’t afford to lose them. Ford does what an owner does, and hires more men.
Watch what the hiring actually buys him. Every man he takes on learns the job from the men already there, so the work stays exactly the shape it was, with more hands on it. A buyer looking at that shop would be paying for the few men who know how.
From where you stand you can see the whole thing at once: a company whose value goes home with a few people every night.
So you say it out loud. Every car in that shop is still fitted by hand, by men who each do it their own way. That read is correct, and the last piece of it sits a level below any plan, in how each car actually gets made.
The right order
The car had to change first
While the shop kept hiring, Ford’s engineers spent the next two years making the parts identical, so nothing would need fitting. The Model T arrived in 1908, the first Ford built entirely from interchangeable parts and designed from the start to be manufactured instead of fitted by feel. A part went in because it was made to go in, not because a skilled man made it go in.
Only then did the moving line work, and it didn’t arrive until 1913, five years after the car it was built for. The method came second because it had to. Run a moving line on hand-fitted parts and all you get is chaos moving faster.
What the best of those men knew moved out of their hands and into the fixtures, the gauges and the dies. A new man could do the work in his first week, and the company stopped depending on who happened to be at the bench.
Nobody could have drawn that up in 1906. It took Ford years and a different car to get there, and the line came later still.
Your client’s people own it
The people it used to run through own that system, and the work stops funneling through them.
Then it scales
A new hire can step into a system that was designed, and AI agents can run the repeatable part of it, so the people it grew up around stop being the ceiling.
Design first, method second. Most firms try it in the other order.
Where I come in
You already did the hard part
Ford’s story only goes this far. He had years. Your client has a date in mind and one detractor that hasn’t moved since the first assessment.
You gave them a real read on what the business is worth and why. Most owners never get that, or get it too late to act on.
You’ll know the client I mean. The other drivers are coming up, and the business still leans on the same one or two people.
What’s left is in how the work gets done. The calls that run the business still go through one or two people, because the work grew up around them instead of being designed. A stronger leadership team is the right move, and the new GM still needs those calls, which have never been anywhere but in the heads of the people who make them.
It shows up wherever the judgment is: pricing the big job, or deciding which customer to take. The GM can run everything else, and those still wait on the same one or two people.
A buyer inherits every one of those calls. Nobody designed the work, so they land on the new owner, and that comes off the price.
You can see that from where you sit. It’s the work itself that has to be redesigned.
The method
What I actually do
I take one business system, the one those calls actually run through, and map how it works today under real load. Then I redesign it so it no longer runs through any one or two people, and AI agents run the repeatable part of it. The people it used to run through own the system instead of being it.
Your assessment has already put a number on the detractor. I start from your number rather than re-arguing it. The work takes 8 to 16 weeks, which is why it belongs years before a sale.
This fits firms roughly $3M to $50M in revenue, profitable, with a real operation already running and one clear place it’s constrained. One system per engagement, not the whole company at once.
It’s the wrong call for a business still finding its footing, for a team that can’t agree on who decides, or for an owner who won’t look past the tool they’ve already picked. And if what we find is a quick fix rather than a redesign, I say so, and that’s where it ends.
See the full methodFor you
What referring gets you
There’s no fee and no kickback here. Nothing changes hands, so there’s nothing about the introduction that could look wrong to your client later if it ever came up.
What you get is a way to move the one detractor that hasn’t budged, while your engagement carries on. The introduction doesn’t replace anything you’re doing.
I’m glad to go the other direction too. When an owner is thinking about an exit, even years out, I send them to you. And if you just want somebody to sanity-check a client situation before you decide it’s even worth an introduction, call me for that.
Next steps
When you’re ready to introduce us
However you make the introduction, it goes the same way from there. I follow up once and don’t chase. If it isn’t a fit, I say so early. The diagnostic is the entire ask: two hours, $2,500, credited in full toward the engagement if they move forward within 14 days.
Send them the short version
One page written for the owner. Reading it commits them to nothing.
See the one-pager