How it works

Where does the business genuinely stand?

The first step is an honest picture, with everyone’s assumptions set aside, including yours. Corefield looks at the business the way a buyer’s diligence team would: the people who do the work are interviewed in confidence, the records are examined, and the work is observed as it actually happens rather than as it is described.

This is usually the hardest step emotionally. Owners tend to guess well on the things they look at every day and poorly on the things only they ever handle. Everything is scored on evidence, so the picture is one a third party could check.

Where do you actually want to get to?

Before anything is fixed, the destination is set. Sell to a third party, hand over to family, put a manager in and keep the income, or keep going by choice: each needs something slightly different from the business, on a different timeline.

This step also asks what must be protected — your people, your customers, the name on the trucks — and what you need financially. Many owners discover here that they don’t want to sell at all. They want to stop being indispensable.

How is the distance closed?

The gap between where the business stands and where you want it to be is closed in a program of nine to eighteen months. Three things make it work:

• Your people do the work. Corefield designs the target, sequences the work, puts the mechanisms in place and holds everyone to dates. Procedures written by an outsider are procedures staff ignore.
• The slowest things start first. Work is ordered by how long it takes, not by how alarming it looks. A second licence holder’s exam schedule or a customer’s relationship moving to a new person cannot be rushed, so they begin in the first weeks.
• Every target is specific. Not “improve documentation,” but “by month nine, three named people can each price a non-standard job unsupervised, and have done so.”

How do you know it worked?

With proof, not a promise. The program ends with the Three-Week Test: you leave for three weeks, unreachable, while the business runs and everything is logged. Then the business is scored again on the same evidence standard.

The result can be turned into a Record: an evidence file a buyer, a lender’s credit committee or a broker can verify for themselves.

What principles guide the work?

Five rules apply at every stage, to every client.

1. What matters most comes first. Most businesses have a few dozen pieces of knowledge that would really hurt to lose, and hundreds that wouldn’t. The program works on the few.
2. Evidence, not assertion. Something is true only when it can be demonstrated, produced or observed.
3. The lowest number governs. The average is reassuring; the weakest area is what a buyer prices.
4. Longest lead time starts first. Sequence by how long things take, not by how severe they look.
5. The people who do the work write it down. That is the only documentation that gets used.

What does the owner have to do?

Less than most owners fear, but some of it is uncomfortable. You agree to be measured honestly. You let your managers be interviewed without you in the room. You keep the commitments you make in the program, and when the time comes, you leave for three weeks and don’t call in.

The hardest thing to hand over is usually pricing, because it feels like the last thing that makes an owner necessary. That is normal, and it is handled gently and last.

What stays the same?

Your business keeps its people, its name and its way of serving customers. The program changes where the knowledge lives, not who you are. It is also designed so that Corefield steps back on a schedule and never becomes the business’s new dependency.

How long does it take?

• The Check: about fifteen minutes.
• The Review: about three weeks.
• The Blueprint: about five to six weeks.
• The Crossing: nine to eighteen months.
• The Record: about a week, once the work is done.

Some items take longer than any program, because they run on someone else’s timetable. A second qualified holder for a trade licence can take one to four years, which is why it is always started first.