Find it. Fix it. Or don't pay.
Every business has one constraint holding it back. We identify yours in weeks, not months. You only pay if we deliver.
Fixed fee, fixed timeline. Two to four weeks for a clear diagnosis.
You carry zero risk. Pay only when you agree the work was delivered as promised.
No dependency. We build your capability, not a recurring consulting bill.
Unless you agree that what was promised was what was delivered, there is no charge.
Most consultants hedge their bets and shift risk to the customer. We invert that. Before work begins, we agree in writing on what "delivered" means. If we do not meet that standard, you owe nothing.
We qualify carefully.
We analyze your business before the first meeting. If it is not a fit, we say so.
The methodology works.
Thirty years of constraint analysis with the Theory of Constraints. Defensible logic, not opinions.
AI-assisted analysis.
We compress timelines with tools we have built, so the economics work even if a prospect occasionally declines to pay.
Find It. Fix It.
Both services follow the same structure: a fixed-fee diagnostic phase, then implementation priced at a fraction of the value it creates. You only pay if we deliver.
Constraint Analysis
The Problem
Your organization is stuck. You have invested in improvement projects, hired consultants, reorganized teams. Nothing sticks. The system is not performing and you cannot pinpoint why.
What We Do
We identify the single constraint limiting your system, the one thing that, once addressed, moves everything else. Then we help you fix it.
You Get
A focused report identifying the constraint, the evidence, the estimated impact of addressing it, and a recommended direction. Delivered in a working session.
Timeline
2 to 4 weeks
Investment
$15,000 fixed for the diagnosis. Implementation priced at 10-15% of the estimated value of the fix.
Offer Analysis
The Problem
Your website gets traffic but the phone does not ring. Your marketing looks right. Your service is good. But prospects cannot tell you apart from three other firms, so they choose on price or convenience.
What We Do
We diagnose why your offer is invisible and build one that makes the right client feel foolish saying no. Then we help you deploy it across your website, sales process, and referral language.
You Get
An analysis identifying the core customer frustration your industry has accepted as normal, the hidden conflict in the market, and a proposed offer that resolves it.
Timeline
2 to 4 weeks
Investment
$15,000 fixed for the diagnosis. Implementation priced at 10-15% of estimated revenue impact.
In their own words
I brought John Sambrook onto a risky and highly political project that had far-reaching consequences within our company. As the second software engineer on the team, me being the first, John found solutions to difficult problems, problems I could not have solved without him, thwarting doom over and over again. He produced documentation and code at a professional level I have rarely seen elsewhere in my thirty years of software engineering. The project was so successful, the team was spun off as its own company, which now employs 700 people.
I've run enough companies to know the difference between "competitive" and unfair. At Applied Microsystems, we had an unfair advantage—and one of the clearest examples came from John Sambrook and the outstanding engineers he assembled and led. John's group built our symbolic debugger and intelligent trace disassembler. Other tools could show you pieces—addresses, disassembly, maybe a shaky stack trace. John's team built a reconstruction engine that turned raw trace data into a coherent, source-correlated story of what the target processor actually did, even with interrupts, optimized code, and messy control flow. Hewlett-Packard was a giant competitor—great people, huge resources—but that kind of deep, reality-faithful tooling is hard for big organizations to justify and harder to execute. HP could sell tools. We could deliver the truth. And customers felt that immediately when they hit the hard bugs.
Start with a Conversation
No pitch, no obligation. A practical thirty-minute discussion about what is actually blocking progress in your organization. If it is not a fit, we will tell you.
Common Sense Systems, Inc. | Kirkland, WA | Serving organizations of all sizes across industries