Every engagement follows the same six steps, whether it's a freight agreement or a leadership bench. The order matters: most consulting fails because it jumps to solutions before anyone has quantified the problem.
Understand what is actually happening, not what people assume is happening. In freight that means reading the agreements, the invoices, and the shipping profile rather than the summary someone prepared. In leadership it means talking to the people around the problem, not only the person who called me.
Put a number on it. What is this costing you a year, in dollars, in service failures, in turnover? A problem without a number attached never gets prioritized and never gets funded.
Most organizations have more problems than capacity. I'll tell you which two or three actually move the number, and which ones you can live with for another year. Saying what not to do is usually the more valuable half.
I work the plan with your team rather than handing over a document. That means sitting in the carrier negotiation, building the bid, or running the sessions — not writing a recommendation and leaving you to implement it.
Verify the result against the baseline we agreed at the start. Savings that can't be measured aren't savings, they're assertions. This is also why the baseline gets defined in writing before any work begins.
Stay involved where ongoing expertise creates value, and step back where it doesn't. Some engagements end at step five and should. Others turn into a standing relationship because the problem is continuous rather than one-time.
A lot of consulting starts at step four. Someone arrives with a solution they already sell, finds a place to apply it, and calls that an engagement. It's efficient for the consultant and expensive for the client.
I'd rather find out first whether the problem is worth solving. Sometimes the answer is that your freight agreement is already competitive and the money is somewhere else entirely — in packaging, in classification, or in who owns transportation internally. That's a useful finding even though it doesn't sell you a bigger project.
It also explains why the two practices sit under one roof. Freight problems are almost never only freight problems. A carrier agreement that's costing you money usually has a matching gap in who's managing it and how. Working through diagnosis honestly means being willing to name that, whichever direction it points.
Your first conversation isn't a sales pitch — it's a working session. Tell me what's happening and I'll help you work out whether the problem is worth solving, what it's likely costing you, and whether I'm the right person to fix it.
Keith Street · 706-424-4311 · keith@keithstreetadvisory.com