BPI + AI consulting post-mortem

Oct 2026 - 32 min read
ES: personal post-mortem, anecdotal and intentionally non-neutral, based on ~1 year of consulting work rather than public data

TL;DR

A year as a consultant taught me that companies don't buy solved problems: they buy the illusion of solving them. Nobody measures time saved, so nobody can tell a good consultant from a bad one. Trust goes to who speaks German or has no shame. I had neither.

Why I did it

While I was letting my research contract run out, I was looking for alternatives.
Thinking about how to turn my skills into a job, I thought of PKM.
Around that time I taught a researcher to use Obsidian for work, and Notion to the president of Pride Bolzano to organize the city's first pride (which, in his words, wouldn't have been possible without it).
But it didn't look like a good direction: the PKM market is saturated, and above all, making YouTube videos to sell courses is not “my calling”...

Around then I read a book that influenced me a lot: Come Up for Air.
It's about company organization, specifically communication and project management.
It struck me because its approach to managing a company’s knowledge base and communication flows is the same one I use for my PKM and my information flows.
I thought: maybe not Obsidian courses, but maybe something in consulting...

Right after, I read another book: The Power of Business Process Improvement.
In the book, the author explains Business Process Improvement (BPI) by applying it to a problematic process.
A step-by-step, analytical, pragmatic method that reminded me of the other book, but applied to business processes. The first thing I did after finishing the book was test my understanding: I successfully applied it to my meal prepping, taking the process from ~3h30min down to ~1h.
A great success both in BPI terms and because I hate cooking.
I also tried applying it to the research project, discussing it with the other researchers... and that's how I discovered their allergy to anything organizational (except the one who uses Obsidian, xoxo to him).

From those books I understood two things:

So I looked for jobs in processes and operations, and got hired as an intern at a multinational's large manufacturing plant to do operational excellence.
A young, naive me believed I could solve problems in a corporation, oh-oh-oh![Read this].
While I wanted to become the Bottleneck Destroyer, my supervisor wanted to turn me into a white collar who speaks corporate jargon.
Nope, not gonna happen.

After a month I quit and went to help my friend with his business, where I finally had free rein to solve every problem the way I wanted.
And it worked well![Read this].
This approach really made things better, and it was proof that I could bring value to a company.

On top of that, in those months YouTube made Rory Sutherland popular, and he became one of the most influential people in my life.
Besides being charmed by his British accent, I read Alchemy, where he perfectly explains my philosophy of consulting:

Quote

Although bees have an efficient way of communicating about the direction of reliable food sources, the waggle dance, a significant proportion of the hive seems to ignore it altogether and journeys off at random.
In the short term, the hive would be better off if all bees followed the waggle dance, and for a time this random behaviour baffled scientists, who wondered why 20 million years of bee evolution had not enforced a greater level of behavioural compliance.
However, without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in ‘a local maximum’.
They would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death.
So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food.

— Adapted from Alchemy (2019)

EXACTLY what I wanted to do in that corporation, and EXACTLY what I did in my friend's business.
Like the rogue bees, it's my unusual perspective (mathematician, PKM nerd, organizational optimization maniac...) that generates value in business problem solving.
And the corporate experience proved it[Read this]: I was the only one proposing solutions that were neither “manager-style” (read: corporate bullshit) nor “operator-style”...
But I was sent to translate slides (with two degrees in mathematics).

carl feynman (@carl_feynman) on X: “My dad (Richard Feynman) had a side hustle doing industrial consulting. He'd spend a few hours visiting a company, talking to the engineers, looking at stuff, and then maybe have a good suggestion. Sometimes he would bring his son along. I only recall one of his suggestions, but it made the company he was consulting for way better off, so I guess his exorbitant consulting fees were worth it. We could have been wealthier if he had done it systematically, but he didn't want to be organized about looking for jobs, so it just happened when someone asked.” quoting EtherDais (@EtherDais): “We need more mercenary polymaths”.
(Not comparing myself to Feynman, eh... it just inspired me)

I had validated the idea with my friend, so at that point the plan was simple: find companies with problems, explain how I could help them, solve them.
Clear. Easy. Profit.

And that was just the first step!
I wanted to build a team with mixed expertise, able to help companies with their strangest and most specific problems.
Not theoretical academics, but generalists I'd hire with one test: take them into a random shop and ask “Find me all the problems in this shop”.
A perfect business model to expose myself to ever-new problems and improve the service (and feed my deviant passions).
In practice, a technology translation service for companies: turning problems into technological and organizational solutions, using whatever technology is needed (including AI when useful).
Doing real Operations Research with a clear operating philosophy, to prove that real consulting can be done[Not seagull consulting] and that not all consulting has to suck.

This is what I had in mind:

Jeffrey Cooper

An unassuming, fastidious man, Cooper had been hired in 1972 by the Massachusetts General Hospital to work on developing machines for anesthesiology researchers.
He spent hours in the operating room observing the anesthesiologists, and one of the first things he noticed was how poorly the machines were designed.
For example, a clockwise turn of a dial decreased the concentration of potent anesthetics in about half the machines but increased the concentration in the other half.
He decided to borrow a technique called “critical incident analysis” (which had been used to analyze mishaps in aviation) in an effort to learn how equipment might be contributing to errors in anesthesia.

The result was the first in-depth scientific look at errors in medicine.
Contrary to the prevailing assumption that the start of anesthesia was the most dangerous part, anesthesiologists learned that incidents tended to occur in the middle of anesthesia, when vigilance waned.

It all worked.
Manufacturers began redesigning their machines with fallible human beings in mind.
Dials were standardized to turn in a uniform direction; locks were put in to prevent accidental administration of more than one anesthetic gas; controls were changed so that oxygen delivery could not be turned down to zero.

— Adapted from Complications (2008), on Cooper's Preventable Anesthesia Mishaps

Like a true enthusiast, I went down every rabbit hole and wrote everything down in Obsidian.
And then I realized it didn't work...

What I built

I used the 6 months working with my friend to explore different technical approaches: make.com, n8n, Google Apps Script, fly.io, Claude Code, Codex...
After one word-of-mouth client, I understood that the standard way to land clients is going to events, getting known in the scene, and then running workshops.
So I did, and that's when I first smelled the rot.

By chance I met a consultant who was doing well and needed help, so we started collaborating.
He's German-speaking, so he had no trouble getting clients (see later), so much so that he couldn't serve them all.
I helped him for a few months, leaving marketing and acquisition to him (which is why I never built a website or did any marketing).
I later found out he's one of those technically illiterate proto-consultants who talk shit behind your back.

But it was useful: thanks to him I discovered important behind-the-scenes stuff, understood how companies work, the secrets of the big local agencies...
In a way, it's also thanks to him that I got out of this sea of diarrhea.

When I worked with my friend Luca, we made a list of all the problems and set priorities.
These are the projects we did[From Writing coach post-mortem, with a different rationale]:

Paid projects with other companies:

What worked

The BPI approach really worked
Both the analysis and the delivery (when they let me finish it...) really made things better.
Identifying the bottlenecks, naming the causes, and setting the priorities helped companies understand their problems, figure out how to move, and discover operational details they didn't know about.
The implementations (again: when I managed to finish them) made things noticeably better.

Working with small teams or the self-employed
When the team had real incentives to get results out of me quickly, the collaboration got better.
The companies that didn't give a damn (the ones that wanted to “invest in digitalization”) made the collaboration hell and the results worse.
This got me thinking about who the target of this product could be (see later)

Why did it fail?

Now the fun part of the post.

├─ (European) companies don't want their problems solved

Like every self-employed person, I love shit-talking about corporate.
But I noticed I love shit-talking about plenty of companies that don't look corporate at all.
My shit-talking needed a more precise definition.

In my corporate experience I quoted a Ribbonfarm post: “Organizations don't suffer pathologies, they are intrinsically pathological constructs”.
Working as a consultant, I found out that the pathology I experienced in corporate doesn't exist ONLY in huge companies: headcount isn't the differentiator.
The cause is a work philosophy I named “Job Illusionism”: pretending to work.

Pathological means “in abnormal conditions”.
Normally, a business should create value to generate revenue.
But as Rory Sutherland says: in a company, the employees' main job is ass covering, revenue generation comes second[See defensive decision making].

The natural consequence of the “It's not my responsibility” philosophy is the measurability fetish[see McNamara fallacy], which serves two purposes:

Employees spend their energy creating the illusion that getting a number on the measurability dashboard takes exactly the 8 contractual hours (so they don't have to take on more responsibility).
The white collars' job is to convince everyone that a dashboard full of made-up numbers is a reliable way to control the company, and to get angry when the numbers turn red.

Consulting that REALLY identifies and solves problems would destroy the balance of this ecosystem.
On one side, removing a bottleneck forces employees to find new forms of job illusionism.
On the other, for the white collar it's a responsibility, and one that challenges his authority as supreme controller of the dashboard.
And we all know how the responsibility game works: if the consultant gets results, he takes the credit; if not, whoever hired him takes the blame.

The consultant that companies love is the one who touches neither the employees' work nor the dashboard.
The classic 4h slide workshop, costing €500/1000/2000.
Employees get 4 hours of paid vacation, white collars prove they're “monitoring the digitalization of their staff”.
And then everything goes back to how it was.
Perfect.

Steve Jobs

“In enterprise the people that use the products don't decide for themselves and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused”

— Steve Jobs on the enterprise market

Job Illusionism: pretending to work, to be in control, to earn your salary with commitment...
(Which also explains corporate jargon as a stroke-inspired form of speech illusionism)
A few months ago I wrote about the lack of business proprioception as an explanation for corporate incompetence, but it's only one piece of the puzzle: PRETENDING to solve problems IS the job, and the first step to NOT solving problems is NOT knowing which problems exist.
A consultant who DOESN'T solve problems but gives the illusion of doing something worth €5K fits perfectly into the pathological company culture: the opposite is suspicious and unwelcome.

Which explains the state of the consulting market:

To get hired, everything unrelated to the actual consulting matters more.[See Elaboration likelihood model].
In Bolzano-Bozen, the secret is speaking German.
75% of SMEs are German-speaking[Regional Economy] + South Tyrolean German speakers keep Italians at arm's length[from my 26 years of experience] + German speakers prefer working with German speakers[Cultural Proximity and the Formation of Lending Relationships] => if you speak German, you get hired even if you have no idea what you're doing.

All in all, I bet it's a European problem (with N=1 province).
Corporate Europe is different from corporate America: here, profits come after employees' comfort.
Employees don't want a career, they want the comfort of a job rooted in the culture of the posto fisso, the job for life.
Which would be fine if the balance didn't lean a bit too much toward workers and a bit too little toward the company (clashing with revenue generation).
In practice, a consultant who solves problems is a threat to the foundations of European workplace tranquility.

Consulting only works in an ecosystem where:

Here, culturally, the second piece is missing.
The problem isn't that companies reject the model.
They're structurally incompatible with it.
They're not in a hurry.
They don't want to be in a hurry.
Hurry is bad.

(Which explains why I waited almost 2 months for access to a company's database...)

Why hurry is suspicious

Italy is a low trust, relationship-first society: a culture where trust isn't earned with proof or skills, but with time and relationships.
That's why in Bolzano, speaking German opens doors before anything else.

├─ BPI: when time is NOT money

There are 2 ways to increase profits:

And nobody thinks they can save €120K in a year by cutting 10h/month of work for 20 people paid €50/h gross.

In the BPI book I mentioned, the author explains how to calculate the cost savings of an improved process.
And boy, is it non-trivial.
Not difficult, but counterintuitive.

The real problem is accounting: there's no line item for time gains.
Eliminating inefficiencies creates time, and time has no direct financial impact on a spreadsheet.
That means that after a problem is solved, the measurability dashboard doesn't change and the white collar wonders if it was really worth it.

On cost savings in the books

Actually, not all cost savings show up in the books.
Susan Page distinguishes two types:
- Hard: headcount reduction
- Soft: time saved by a process

The opening example of €120K saved with BPI?
Soft savings: no one will ever see them.

But it's worse than that.
Solving problems creates time, which means that the real gain depends on how the company uses that new time.
Which is impossible to put in the books, and, applying Parkinson's Law to the office: ALL tasks ALWAYS fill the 8 contractual working hours.

For a pathological company, process optimization is worth nothing.
In European comfort, nobody has the problem of “too many things to do and too little time”.
The options are “do it in 10h, plus 5h of slacking off” or “do it in 15h, with some swearing”.

Truest of the stories

My first automation sped up a company's bookkeeping.
Despite clearing a 3-month backlog, we struggled to agree on a price... because the process is handled by one employee who does only that.
From the owners' perspective the company didn't change, because being up to date with the books (despite being a legal requirement!) is just an operational detail: it doesn't increase revenue.

Then there are the problems a company doesn't know it has[U-U quadrant], or the need it doesn't know about.[A company's wants are not always its needs]
“How can a problem we didn't know we had improve my company? It's always worked!” say the bosses of the worst-managed companies I've ever seen.
On top of that: the worse a company is managed, the less aware it is of what good organization can do.
And the more used it is to doing things badly, or “however they turn out”.
And the less likely it is to measure its processes properly, to verify improvements or reallocate the saved time intelligently.
And so on...

In short, this consulting approach selects companies that don't recognize the need for the service, can't measure its effectiveness, and don't know how to use the results.[Inverse care law].

How did the ecosystem respond?
With what I did in corporate: operational excellence, the illusion of operational improvement, operations corporate jargon, the McKinsey bullshit.
It has everything companies need:

All tailored to job illusionism: perfectly understandable to whoever buys, apparently measurable to whoever measures, clearly controllable to whoever controls, easy to nod along to when reading the financial statements.

The emptiness of Operational Excellence

Watch this: What are the five basic elements of operational excellence?

If nobody can measure the gains, nobody can compete on results.
No company goes around telling another “the consultant who saved me 10h more than the other one!”
Which is why:

├─ AI is the worst commodity

Every company wants AI to “speed up”, “digitalize”, and other meaningless words.
And as you can imagine, they know nothing about it.
I even met a head of digitalization who had never touched an AI tool.
But you know, I had to eat too.
So to stay sellable without betraying my professional ethics, I positioned myself like this: I offer to bring AI into the company, and if it's not needed, I solve the problem without it (which is most of the time).

The second part didn't really affect the result: the magic word was “AI”.
Managers even nodded when I presented plans for projects without it.
I mean of course: these people don't know anything, they can barely tell a script from a Google Sheet.
To them, one consultant is as good as another.
That's why this kind of consulting is a commodity for all practical purposes.

So now the problem becomes: how do you sell this commodity?
As Hormozi says: When you're selling a commodity, you're sowing seeds of doubt against the competition.
What he suggests is to play on:

But a nasty mix of European-style work, AI ignorance, and Italian traditionalism makes ALL of it useless.

Talking to managers and consultants, I found out that companies are so used to waiting that it's no longer a problem.
6 months is the same as 1 year when the work is done by an outsider.
SMEs have no “pressing quarterly results to hit” anyway, and in 6-12-24 months they'll still be there, in their safe jobs.
Hence speed is not a metric for comparison.
Quite the opposite: tell them you're fast and they'll suspect they're about to get screwed.

On risk, it's hilarious.
NOBODY knows what's going on in the AI world, most don't trust it and can't say why, and then 1-2 people in every office are completely AI-pilled.
The main source of information for SMEs is Copilot updates, sometimes someone scrolling Instagram sees something about Palantir, and someone quotes numbers on AI-caused unemployment...
And of course nobody knows anything about legal matters, GDPR or the EU AI Act, because as usual “It's not my responsibility”.
So even mentioning GDPR is NOT an advantage: it sounds like an infomercial buzzword.

True story

Once an employee stopped me during a break to tell me he was glad I was working for them because I'm a mathematician.
When I asked what he meant, he said that as a mathematician I could explain to him what Palantir does.
No fucking clue what he meant.

Another true story

A marketing manager at a clothing brand spent €8,000 on a green screen to make 2 seconds of animation for an ad that didn't work.
She explained: “We didn't use AI because, I don't know, I don't like it much”
This is the situation: rather than use AI for a little 1-hour job and a handful of tokens, these people throw away €8,000 because “I don't know, I don't trust AI”

On ease of use, there's a cooperation problem and a matter of work traditions.
I've already discussed the cooperation problem: people in companies don't really work.
Building a tool that solves problems and is simple to use requires the employees' collaboration: they have to explain the problem, I have to understand how technical they are (to build a tool that fits their skills), they have to explain the priorities of their tasks...
A collaboration that's IMPOSSIBLE to get, and its lack ALWAYS caused delays and problems.
On top of that, they're used to not having easy-to-use tools, because “it's work, suffering is expected”
Hence the “personalized easy-to-use tool” feature gets the reply: “Who cares. Everyone says that and then they suck, and we survived anyway”

Again a true story!?

I had to automate a task that edits .csv and .xls files: simple stuff.
According to the boss it was the priority, because it cost the employee a lot of time.
The employee never told me anything, never sent a screen recording, never sent a file, I literally saw nothing of his process...
I don't even know if it's true and exists.
For weeks I asked for updates while working on the company's other priorities.
For weeks.

European workplace tranquility, ignorant skepticism, and the philosophy of “🤷” make Bolzano's companies converge on the same non-solution: unearned trust (or the illusion of reliability).
It comes in two flavors:

And, well, I'm neither of those.

Lots of true stories

I talked to two fresh graduates from a big IT company.
The company charges €50-60K to build from scratch AI tools that already exist, taking 6 months and fresh graduates paid peanuts.
We're talking about projects that already exist as open source, with a license that allows this use, that would take, like, a couple of weeks to set up.

├─ The Italian incentive system

In recent years, European and Italian funds have been allocated for the digitalization of companies.
Where I live, such funds cover 40% to 100% of the cost of “AI adoption projects”[Promozione della digitalizzazione delle microimprese, Progetti di innovazione].

In Italy, when funds and incentives show up, the usual happens:

For anyone fluent in economics it's obvious: game theory 101.
But with 26 years of experience as an Italian plus some time abroad, I find that here these dynamics are... “dirtier”, worse than in other countries.
Here the shortcut radar comes preinstalled in people's brains, especially for turning public money into cash.
The same thing happened with the building bonuses[Frodi per 15 miliardi], with training incentives[Finti crediti per la formazione, sequestrati 660mila euro], and with the PNRR funds[Italy has most recovery fund fraud cases in EU]...

Italy is dirty.
Business has gotten so used to it that it no longer recognizes clean: playing clean is hard mode and sadly nobody dreams of a better business ecosystem.
Everyone lives on guard, playing by the rule “Screw or be screwed”[The Juicer Business philosophy].
No surprise, then, that incentives spawn lots of consultants playing the traditional Italian entrepreneur: costs a lot, does little, zero impact.
And no surprise that a fairly priced, fast, efficient consultant is rejected by the system...

True story

Let's say that you have a €20K voucher, free money from the State
How would you use it?
Perhaps to improve your company?
Well, in Italy a company paid a guy I know €20K on the spot for 100h of workshops, without knowing the topics, fully covered by incentives.
Because that's how the system works: consultants have never “solved problems”, their workshops have become company traditions

I AM a whiny bitch

“Why don't you use traditions to make money then?”
You're picturing “100h of workshops for €20K” the wrong way.
It's 100h of people doing sudoku in the back row because they don't give a fuck
It's 100h of pain in the ass, explaining what an agent is to someone who doesn't care and will never use one.
It's 100h of overpaid employee work.
I don't want that kind of money, I wanted to, you know, help companies
100h of serious work would be AMAZING, but that's not what these are

Of course: the system works as intended.
Companies are happy to throw money at useless workshops, and consultants are happy to make €200/h with an improvised presentation.
My point is: I don't like this system, I don't want to work in this system.
This system can take companies and consultants and shove them up its ass.

└─ Execution vs business model

Sharran Srivatsaa makes a good point: one of the most common mistakes people make when they quit a venture too early is not figuring out whether the problem is the business model or the execution.
If a comparable company is making the same model work, the problem is execution.

In this case... it's a matter of perspective...?

Are there “AI automation problem solving” consultancies that work?
Sure!
Ever since Claude Code came out, they've been popping up everywhere, copying from YouTube videos.
But is it the same business model?
Not really...

They're “consultants”, but they don't solve problems.
Their business model runs on information asymmetry: the company doesn't know its €20K solution is junk vibecoded in 20 minutes.
That's the Juicer Business model, not what I wanted to build.

My goal was to maximize value for the company by solving its problems.
Not to squeeze it for as much money as I could.
The two are different in practice and, above all, ethically.
Every consultant in the “true stories” is someone I met, and none of them has any scruples.
They're fine with (their words) “improvising workshops, they don't understand anything anyway” or “knocking out a little script with Claude Code, that'll do for them”.
Their mission is to fill their pockets and run.

I have yet to come across a clean, working version of this business model: the one I wanted to build.
Shamelessness is a competitive advantage my model didn’t have.

I know this approach to operational improvement works well in-house, because I talked to the head of an in-house AI implementation group at a large company.
It works so well that over the last 2-3 years the team has grown to about ten people.
No surprise there, since it fixes what's wrong with the consulting model:

So the idea works as a department, not as a consulting model.
Or at least not in this market.

That said, on the execution side, more leverage would have helped me compete against those who play the squeeze game:

It's not just a headcount problem

I've seen founders my age running companies with 5-10 employees.
And there's no way around it: they run the same Italian-style squeeze model.
My point is: it's not ONLY about firepower.
With 4 or 5 of us we might have made more money, but building something this new in Italy still wouldn't have been easy without the squeezing part.

In short, my ambitions turned out to be bigger than my ability to pull them off.
This is a business model in a hostile environment (job illusionism) that's also hard to run (new problems with every client).
Creating a new kind of consulting, and getting a market like this to see its value, is not easy.
Let alone on my own.

Why I quit

Out of disgust.

I'm disgusted by those companies that hire those consultants (basically my “bosses”).
I'm disgusted by the other consultants (basically my “colleagues”).
I'm disgusted that European incentives end up like this.
I'm disgusted by the Italian way of working.
I'm disgusted by German-speaking favoritism.
I'm disgusted by everything I touched, saw, heard.

Adapting to this meant becoming part of the disgust: unacceptable.
I would have felt like I was robbing companies, making money by taking them for fools, wrecking my reputation.
Like becoming Microsoft when I wanted to become Steam.
Like making a deal with Moloch, for fuck's sake.

Even when it works, it disgusts me...

The head of the in-house department I mentioned works for a BIG, well-known company.
ALLEGEDLY, they also use AI for dynamic pricing, based on data about the client company's purchasing manager, the financial health of his company, past purchases...
I pointed out: “I'm sorry, but you can't (fucking) use that data that way”[For my fellow Europeans: Art. 22 GDPR, Art. 6 GDPR]
His prompt reply: “But we don't AUTOMATE it: the seller can decide whether to use this strategy or not”
Which, under the WP251 Guidelines, is considered a “token gesture” and doesn't count.

I do not like this shit. I do NOT like this.

Some people draw strength from disgust[What a great FUCKING post]
But my naive, ethics-driven ass didn't.
I'll save the “economic violence”[READ THAT POST] for better days.

By the numbers

What I would have done differently

What annoys me most is that it took me about a year to figure out it doesn't work.
(Truth is, I took it easy: the plan was to start another project a few months later, on a pinkie promise from other people... didn't go well.)
Even with the long Italian bureaucratic waits, I feel like I could have squeezed all of this into 6 months.

Given how ambitious the project was, the change with the most impact would have been a team to share vision, professional ethics, and support with.

Remark

A friend told me that, if I wanted, I could work at the electrical distribution company he works for, with the idea of building tools for that kind of company.
It happened when I had already declared this project dead, so I didn't even consider it.
But above all: I do NOT have a team to build an enterprise tool.
And I don't know anyone to do this with: my university colleagues now have the worst jobs in banks and corporate, and I'm sure as hell not asking the other consultants for a hand.
I LACKED FIREPOWER

I should have defined a better target: more agile, less old, more open to the collaborative relationship my consulting needs.
Maybe startups, maybe tiny companies, maybe single teams, maybe one specific sector...
Since it works in-house, maybe get hired by a startup to manage fast growth.
Clearly, the typical consulting acquisition journey (workshop at a training institution, specific workshop, implementation) doesn't select the right target.

I should have aimed for a painkiller product: generic “problem solving” is clearly a multivitamin (“What problems? My company works great!”).
An interesting direction is the one I encountered in a workshop with ~10 C-levels of a company: their problems are specific (producing one particular type of report), expensive, urgent.
(Operators' problems, alas, interest nobody...)

I should have made the service and its results easier to understand.
If you got this far and still haven't figured out what I was doing... yeah, exactly.
I saw versatility as an advantage, but it doesn't help anyone understand the product.
When I helped my friend, being a generalist worked: there was trust, I had control over timing, costs and decision making, and I knew which solution would turn things around.
But with companies, what works is “I'll do X, you'll gain Y, it costs €Z” (OBVIOUSLY)
A good example to learn from is Nick Sonnenberg, author of Come Up for Air: he sells the solution (method + implementation) to a clear problem (messy company communication).
Companies understand the problem, know they have it, want a solution, and buy.

The same goes for comparability: nobody has ever said “Company X has fewer generic problems than company Y. That's thanks to the consulting of...”.
Nobody even brags about their company's operations: you'll never hear a C-level say “You know we just fixed a bottleneck?” (unless he's Elon Musk, of course).
But I can easily picture two C-levels having a drink and saying “My company now has a new communication system. Everything is well managed and AI helps us split up the tasks...”, and the other replying “Oh cool, how did you implement it?”.
Comparability looks like a good test for whether a product can be sold.

Remark

Despite a couple of swears, I might come across as someone calm and analytical about this topic
BUT I AM NOT
The disgust and dysfunction of what I saw, along with my own naivety, drive me crazy and piss me off (at myself too)
It took a big effort to sit down and analyze everything calmly, realizing that maybe some HR person will read this post, so it's better not to fill it with (too many) swear words

What I am taking away

It was an idealistic attempt to turn a passion (obsession) into a business.
The work was solid, while the selling was naive: generic, unpackaged, no leverage behind it.
Sold like that, it could at best have ended up as what the proto-consultants I met are doing.
So for now, my obsession with organization and my analytical approach to business are co-founder traits, not a product.
Productizing them is a different project.

On the “business management” side, one thing is crystal clear: corporate rules give corporate results.
An outside consultant can't fix a pathological company's problems if the company isn't ready to change the rules it runs on.

The most important and powerful lesson from this experience: if random guys manage to sell something they have NO experience in and NO understanding of, and make money from it, then so can I.
Maybe what makes it easy for them is having no scruples and no shame, but that can't become my excuse.
If the incompetent can sell, so can I.[See Brand Storyfication].

One thing I like about this kind of project is that it's not really a failure the way getting fired from a job would be.
I now have a much deeper and clearer understanding of this attempt, and that stays.
If tomorrow I run into the right situation, the right people, the right moment...
I can reopen this project and avoid every mistake I made.
That's real compounding.

Would I do it again?

Yes, but shorter.

This project mattered because it made me crash into how the world really works.
It is not enough:

The world is an extremely complex system where many other things have to happen to make a business work.

Yes, yes: “Every motivational TikTok with slowed-down background music tells you that!”
Right
But it's one of those things people (or at least I) have to experience firsthand.