Mid-market organisations are offered either the strategy house that leaves before implementation, or the systems integrator that implements without strategy. The value dies in the handoff between them.
We hold the whole arc: diagnosis, strategy, architecture and implementation oversight. We also publish the evidence base we work from, so a client can audit the thinking before paying for any of it.
Every engagement letter cites them. Clients are invited to hold us to the text.
We are paid for judgment, not for options papers. Every engagement ends with what we would do, and why.
A recommendation without a number and a baseline is an opinion. Ours come priced and verifiable.
Three commitments or fewer per phase. Clients argue with this more than anything else we ask for, and we hold it anyway, because the programmes in our dataset that carried more than five at once did not deliver.
An outcome is delivered when it passes audit against the month-0 baseline. Not when the steering deck says it is.
Our frameworks and research are public. A method that only works when we are in the room is not a method.
No leverage pyramid. The people who diagnose are the people who deliver.
Every engagement runs on the operating model we publish: a controlled draw for diagnosis and loading, a deliberate hold while the commitments are tested under review, then a full-force release with oversight. Outcomes are reviewed weekly against a verified baseline. We maintain the stop list as carefully as the commitment list.
The diagnostic takes six weeks. A partner runs it. We will need the management accounts, the board papers and time with the people who actually make the decisions, and if we cannot get to those people we will tell you and stop rather than guess.
The operating modelThe partners spent their careers inside the problem. They led operations in mid-market groups and ran transformation programmes as clients of the major consultancies. What those years taught is the reason the firm exists. The recommendation was rarely the constraint. The follow-through was.
A partner leads every diagnostic and chairs the outcome review of every active engagement. No work is handed down a pyramid.
Markham owns strategy, architecture and oversight. HolisticAutomation, the group's engineering arm, owns systems delivery. One partner stays accountable from the first diagnosis through to a running system, so there is no handoff and nothing to arbitrate between advisor and integrator.
Over the next decade we intend to hold the definitive outcome dataset for mid-market transformation, and to keep publishing it, so the standard of evidence in this industry rises whether or not anyone hires us.
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