Advisory & organisational support
Clear thinking about your operations
SB Consultancy Services Ltd is an independent consultancy registered in Harrow. Organisations and private clients bring questions about how their work is arranged, and receive a considered, written answer with the reasoning left in.
The pages below set out the kinds of work the practice takes on, the shapes an engagement can hold, and the rhythm of a week once one is underway.
Advice earns its keep when the reader can see how it was reached. Whatever leaves this practice arrives with the working attached — what was read, who was asked, what was weighed, and where the judgement finally settled.
A house rule at Greenfield Way
01 · The work
Advisory areas
Six settled kinds of work. Each one ends in something written that stands on its own, so the value survives the goodbye and can be handed to whoever must act on it next.
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01
Service reviews
One service, examined without hurry: what it costs, what it produces, and where the effort actually goes. The result is a written account of the distance between the service as designed and the service as run.
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02
Process mapping
A piece of work is traced end to end — logged when it first lands on a desk, signed away when it goes out of the door — with a note of every hand it passes through. The finished map tends to explain delays that had long been blamed on the wrong step.
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03
Governance support
Steady help with the machinery of decisions: terms of reference, minutes that record the why, papers short enough to be read in full. Sound governance is mostly sound record-keeping, done on time.
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04
Supplier & contract reviews
A close reading of what has been agreed, what is arriving against it, and how the arrangement would end if it had to. Renewal dates concentrate the mind; looking well before them is cheaper.
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05
Reporting design
A report should let a busy reader decide something before the coffee cools. Reporting is stripped back to the few figures and sentences a decision genuinely turns on, and the rest is archived in peace.
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06
Change support
When a way of working must move, the order of the steps matters as much as the destination — and so do the words used to explain them. Most change comes apart in the explaining, and the explaining can be designed.
If the question in front of you sits across two of these, that is normal — most do. Name the itch in a sentence and the practice will place it, or say honestly that it belongs somewhere else.
02 · Before you write
Find the shape of an engagement
Four short questions, then a suggestion drawn from the three shapes the practice works in — with a pre-addressed note to send. Read it as a guide, not a quotation; the conversation can overrule it.
The four questions
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How large is the organisation?
- A private client or a sole trader
- A small team under one roof
- An organisation with several functions
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What kind of question is it?
- One decision or document to test
- A process or service that misbehaves
- A pattern we keep circling back to
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What timeframe feels right?
- Weeks, with a view at the end
- A season, with room to do it properly
- Open ended, with no fixed close
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How should the practice work with you?
- Look at it, write it up, hand it back
- Alongside our own people, in the room
- On call as questions come up
The three shapes
- A short review
- A bounded question, a few weeks of looking, and a written note at the end that stands on its own. Suits a single decision, document or service that wants testing.
- Working alongside
- A defined stretch spent inside your own working rhythm — present at the meetings, reading as things happen, advising while the work moves. Suits a process or structure mid-reshape.
- Standing advisory
- A light, continuing arrangement: papers read before they are discussed, a reasoned view when a question lands. Suits an organisation that wants a second mind within reach, without a project attached.
The shapes shade into one another in real life — a short review sometimes earns a second act, and a standing arrangement often began as a single bounded question. Send your four answers to clients@sbconsultancy.work and the reply will say which shape the practice would suggest, and why.
03 · Once underway
The rhythm of a working week
The middle week of an engagement, sketched in honest caricature. Hover, tap or arrow across the days — every real week bends the sketch to fit the work.
- Monday Reading — the papers, the figures, and the file that only surfaced late the week before.
- Tuesday Conversations with the people who run the thing daily, in their own words and at their own desks.
- Wednesday Walking the process end to end, noting where the tidy version and the real one part company.
- Thursday Drafting — findings set down in plain sentences, each one tied to something actually seen.
- Friday Sitting down with you to test the week’s reading aloud, before any of it hardens into a report.
The strip above is a posture, not a promise. Some weeks are all reading; some are all conversation; the best of them close with a shorter report than anyone expected, because the answer turned out to be simple once it was found.
What an engagement leaves behind
The report
Written for the people who must act on it, with the evidence pinned to each finding and doubt marked as doubt.
The working papers
Maps, notes and figures gathered along the way, tidied and handed across with the report itself.
The standing offer
Questions about the contents are answered after the close, without a fresh piece of work being opened.
04 · The habit of mind
How we think
Every organisation runs on two versions of itself. There is the written one — the chart, the procedure file, the contract schedule — and there is the lived one, held in the habits of the people who make the thing go. Both are real. Advice that only reads the paper misses half the picture; advice that only listens to the corridor misses the other half. The work of this practice is holding the two up to the light together and describing, precisely, where they part.
Findings are written in plain sentences because plain sentences force honest thought. A conclusion that hides behind jargon has usually stopped being a conclusion at all. So everything is set down in words the busiest person in the building could act on, with the evidence pinned to each point, and any matter of genuine doubt marked as exactly that — doubt, in so many words.
Independence here is a practical arrangement, and a simple one: the advice itself is the whole of what the practice sells. When a recommendation says stop, spend, wait or simplify, it can be weighed on its reasoning alone — which is the only weight advice should ever be asked to carry. Where a matter belongs to another profession, legal or accounting or any regulated field, the honest move is a referral, and that is the move made.
05 · Correspondence
Write to the practice
Send an outline of the situation and what has prompted you to look at it now. A paragraph is plenty; the useful detail surfaces in conversation. If the question would sit better elsewhere, the reply will say so plainly, and early.
Letters reach the registered office set out opposite; email is read sooner. Either way, the first reply restates what the practice understood you to be asking, so any misreading dies young and cheaply.
Enquiries are handled in confidence whether or not they lead to an engagement.
Registered details
SB CONSULTANCY SERVICES LTD
19 Greenfield WayHarrow
Middlesex
HA2 6HU
United Kingdom