Driven by a playbook?
or by experience?
I offer retained counsel. Much like a TVR, it is direct and unfiltered: no committee, nothing off the shelf, nothing fitted between you and a plain reading of the decision. And like a TVR, it is kept deliberately rare. I do not take two clients in the same field who might one day compete.
Personal counsel tailored to you.
Twenty-five years of running things. I drew up the plan, negotiated the contract, took people on, let the wrong supplier go, then explained the lot to a chairman who had never built anything himself. Every side of the table.
Your own people cannot give you that, and it is not their fault. Each is expert in one slice of the business and answerable for that slice alone, which is exactly why none of them can read the whole of it. I can, because I have done all of it.
I've also been wrong, in every one of those jobs, and have had to live with it. Counsel is what that leaves behind. The rest is just opinion.
The tailored counsel
consultancy can never be.
Every consultancy in the country offers you a playbooked counsel. What it delivers is a job of work. People assemble, the playbook comes out, findings are presented, and the relationship is over the moment the invoice clears. The work can be perfectly good. But it is rented by the project and metered by the hour, and what you rent by the project was never counsel.
Counsel is the older arrangement, and a plainer one. Churchill kept Lord Cherwell at his shoulder through the war. Roosevelt had Harry Hopkins down the corridor. Marcus Aurelius credited Junius Rusticus with most of the sense he ever showed. One person, kept close, with nothing to sell next quarter and no one to satisfy but the principal. The truth, in private, with the dressing left off.
That is the arrangement here. One judgement, kept on retainer and wired straight to the decision, with no layer in the way. The same unfiltered connection a TVR keeps to the road, pointed at the call you actually have to make.
The first conversation is without charge.
Sixty minutes. Bring the decision you have been turning over since spring. Leave with a clear view of it, and an honest opinion on what it is worth getting right. No follow-up sales call. That is not how this works.
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In the words of others.
Initials, mostly. The people who vouch for my work would rather not be paraded, and the discretion that covers my work covers them just the same.
“He doesn't dress it up as something magical. What he does is consistently good, and reliable. I would work with him again, and I generally avoid doing that.”
“I trust David implicitly. We use him for any key project, and to sense-check thinking and direction.”
“He consistently delivered top-quality work for tough taskmasters and demonstrated a breadth of strengths.”
“A can-do, no-nonsense attitude, and the knack of getting to the heart of the matter when every second counts.”
“An exceptionally broad skill set. He works at every level, from the strategy down to rolling his sleeves up.”