A consulting engagement is, in many companies, a thing to be managed. Verdure Group has tried to make ours something you simply read. A few of the things people tell us they appreciate.
Return to the homepageA single page brief. Every engagement begins with a one-page scope. You read it in five minutes and sign it before the work starts.
A fixed fee, written down. No hours billed. No clock running on telephone calls. The figure you see is the figure on the invoice.
The same hand throughout. The consultant who answers your first email writes the final document. There is no handover.
A written deliverable. The output is a document, not a slide deck. It reads in one sitting and is meant to be kept.
A clear end date. Engagements close on the date in the brief. We will not write to remind you we are still here.
Discretion, in writing. Director and investor interviews are non-attributed. The final document is shared only with the person who commissioned it.
Each of our principals has spent ten years or more inside the kind of company they now advise. That is who you meet on the first call, and that is who reads the board pack and writes the note. There are no analysts staffed onto your engagement at lower hourly rates.
We use shared document storage hosted in Switzerland, encrypted in transit and at rest. Interview notes are kept in plain text with version history. Where a client uses a particular collaboration suite we adapt to it; we do not insist on a portal of our own.
We answer email in business hours, in full sentences. We do not chase, and we do not nudge. When the brief is signed, the next thing you hear from us is the interview invitation. When the document is written, the next thing you hear is its arrival.
Each engagement carries a published fee — CHF 820, CHF 470 or CHF 340 depending on the work. If the company is unusually large or the calendar is compressed, we tell you in advance what the addition will be. There are no further line items.
Our deliverable is a written document. You can read it in a single sitting and decide, on its merits, what to do. If nothing in it is useful, you have lost a small fixed sum. If something in it changes how a board or a leadership team works, you have a document on the shelf to remind you why.
Nothing disparaging is intended in what follows. Large advisory houses do work that small ones cannot. But the two are different propositions, and it is worth being clear about which one you are buying.
If you need an army of analysts, you should not retain us. If you need someone to sit at a long table, read the board papers, and write a careful note, this is more or less all we do.
The one-page scope you sign is the legal document for the engagement. There is no thicker version in the back. If something is not in the brief, it is not in the work.
Every director, investor and team member is interviewed under the same condition: their name will not appear next to what they said. This is the only way people speak frankly.
In the Operating Review Setup, we facilitate the first two meetings and then hand the chair over. The point is to make us unnecessary, not indispensable.
Tell us what you are weighing. We will read it carefully and write back, usually within two working days.