Engagements
Three shapes of work. One consultant on each.
We are deliberately bad at the long menu. Everything we have learned to do well fits into three engagements, and most clients need them in a particular order.
The order matters more than people expect. Roughly seven in ten clients arrive asking for the third thing — a new appraisal system, usually in October, usually because the last cycle ended in arguments. We start with the first thing anyway, because designing a rating scale before you know which four managers are generating the disputes produces a beautiful instrument aimed at the wrong problem.
Occasionally we skip the diagnostic. If you have credible exit data, a founder who is already specific about what is broken, and fewer than eighty people, six weeks of interviews would tell you what you already know. We will say so and quote for the work that matters instead.
Six weeks
The culture diagnostic
Interviews, exit transcripts, HRMS data and two appraisal cycles read end to end. Ends in four findings, named.
Ten to fourteen weeks
Manager craft
In-person cohorts of twelve to twenty, practising the conversations that currently get escalated.
Eight to twelve weeks
Performance systems
Ratings, calibration governance, competency rewrites and the paperwork that survives a dispute.
How the work is run
The same six commitments on every account.
One consultant, one client
The person in your first meeting runs the engagement to handover. Nobody is being trained on your account, and nobody is splitting attention across three logos.
Fixed fee, stated in the proposal
Priced by engagement, not by day rate or headcount. Scope changes are re-quoted in writing before any additional work starts. No change-order drip.
On site, mostly
Two to three days a week in your office in Baner, Kharadi, Hinjewadi or Chakan. Culture work done entirely over video calls produces observations about video calls.
Raw material stays with you
Interview notes are anonymised and destroyed at handover. Frameworks, facilitator guides, calibration templates and the recording of every session are yours, editable, with no licence attached.
A named owner for everything
Every recommendation leaves with a person's name and a date against it. If nobody in your company will own a change, we do not write it down as one.
Ninety-day check, included
One day, three months after handover, at no cost. We look at whether the thing is still being used. Roughly a third of the time it is not, and that day is how we learn why.
Sequence
What a full year usually looks like.
A typical client engages us three times across a financial year, not continuously. Diagnostic in the April–June quarter, when the previous appraisal cycle is fresh and nobody is mid-cycle. Manager craft cohorts through the monsoon and into September, because that is the only stretch of the Indian calendar with no cycle, no Diwali and no board offsite in it. Performance system work between October and December, so the redesigned cycle is agreed and communicated well before January calibration.
Between those blocks we are not on your payroll. We are also not available on two days' notice, which is the honest cost of the one-client rule.
If we cannot describe the change in one sentence a line manager would recognise, we have not finished the work.
Handover is a two-hour session with the founder or CHRO and the managers who have to live with the outcome, not a document emailed on a Friday. We read the findings out. People argue. Things get amended in the room. Then it is signed off by a person, on a date, and we leave.