Do you really turn work down?

Yes, and usually on the first call. Declining early costs a client a conversation; accepting badly scoped work costs them a quarter and a budget line they cannot defend.

What if we disagree with your assessment?

We write the reason down and you are free to take it elsewhere. Several clients have come back six months later with the missing owner in place, and that engagement worked.

Will you sign an outcome-based contract?

Only where the baseline was measured by you, the metric is instrumented before we start, and the workflow change is inside your control. Otherwise the incentive rewards optimistic measurement rather than good work.

How we work

What we decline

A firm that will take any engagement cannot be trusted with a difficult one. This is the work we turn down, written plainly enough that you can hold us to it.

Test us with your scope

Decided: Usually on the first call
Cost to you: One conversation, rather than one quarter

Declined

Programmes with no named executive owner

A steering committee is not an owner. If nobody's name goes against the gap, nothing closes and the engagement becomes a documentation exercise.

Declined

Pilots with no baseline and no stop condition

Without a measured before, any after is a story. Without a stop condition, the pilot becomes permanent and consumes the budget the production system needed.

Declined

Benchmarking to justify a decision already made

If the vendor has been chosen and the analysis is wanted as cover, we are the wrong firm. We will say the same thing in the report that we said in the room.

Declined

Agents with unattended write access to a system of record

We will not ship an autonomous path into core banking, an EMR, or an ERP without a human gate, regardless of how the requirement is worded.

Declined

Retrieval over data we are told not to classify

If we cannot establish what a corpus contains and who may see it, we cannot inherit permissions, and an assistant that leaks entitlements is worse than no assistant.

Declined

Seat-based staffing

We do not sell developers by the month. Engagements are scoped to an outcome and a duration, because that is the only shape a client can judge.

Declined

Claims we cannot substantiate

No certification we do not hold, no partner tier we have not earned, no client name we have not been given permission to use, and no metric we modelled rather than measured.

Declined

Twelve-month transformation programmes

Where the first meaningful deliverable lands in month five, the organisation has bought a plan, not a change. We will propose a shorter thing that ends in a decision.

The other side

What we say yes to quickly

These conditions make an engagement worth both parties' time, and they are usually visible within twenty minutes.

One executive who will put their name against the outcome.
A workflow specific enough to describe in two sentences.
Access to the people who actually do the work today.
Willingness to write down the current performance before we change anything.
Acceptance that the answer might be to stop.

FAQ

Questions about the ones we turn down

Do you really turn work down?: Yes, and usually on the first call. Declining early costs a client a conversation; accepting badly scoped work costs them a quarter and a budget line they cannot defend.
What if we disagree with your assessment?: We write the reason down and you are free to take it elsewhere. Several clients have come back six months later with the missing owner in place, and that engagement worked.
Will you sign an outcome-based contract?: Only where the baseline was measured by you, the metric is instrumented before we start, and the workflow change is inside your control. Otherwise the incentive rewards optimistic measurement rather than good work.

Next step

Start with a baseline, not a proposal

Take the NATIVE Audit in fifteen minutes, or book a scoping call and bring the pilots you already have running.

Take the NATIVE Audit Book a scoping call