The question Ruth gets asked most often, usually by people who are already half-convinced they need help, is whether they actually need a consultant at all. It is a fair question. The honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the difference is worth understanding before you spend money finding out. Read more →
Ruth has facilitated a lot of strategy days. The ones that work and the ones that do not have very little to do with the venue, the catering, or the quality of the slides. They have almost everything to do with how the day is structured and what the group is actually trying to decide.
The phrase 'process mapping' tends to make small business owners think of large corporations with dedicated operations teams and expensive software. In practice, the version that is useful for a business of ten to fifty people is much simpler than that, and the value it produces is disproportionate to the effort involved.
Strategy is a word that gets used to mean almost everything: a plan, a direction, a set of priorities, a vision, a competitive position. When a word means everything, it starts to mean nothing. The thing that most small businesses actually lack is not strategy in any of these senses. It is clarity: a shared understanding of what the business is trying to do and why.
A business diagnostic is not an audit. Nobody is looking for things to blame. The goal is to understand how the business actually works, where the friction is, and what is getting in the way of the things you want to do. Getting the most out of it requires a bit of preparation and a willingness to be honest about things that are not working.
Two of the most common types of work at Rapid Badger are the monthly Interim Advisory and the fixed-scope project (a Diagnostic, a Sprint, or a Process Redesign). They are not interchangeable. Choosing the wrong one is a common and avoidable mistake.
Strategy avoidance is one of the most consistent patterns Ruth has observed across seven years of working with small businesses. It is not that founders do not care about the future of their business. It is that the present is so loud and so urgent that the future keeps getting pushed to next quarter, and next quarter never quite arrives.
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