Frequently Asked Questions

How is RFD Insight different from other management consulting firms?

• We only provide experienced people with career achievements.
• We provide expertise across all business disciplines with our people willing to work as teams on a fractional time basis.
• We have demonstrated the ability to negotiate price increases to help you raise your prices without losing customers.
• We seek competitive advantages and unique product value rather than reverse engineer you firm to look like your competitors.
• We grow your business rather than slash your employee roster.
• We are fun to work with — especially when you begin to make money.

Do you really think you can save any company?

"No," says Wes Arrington, president of RFD Insight. "It is a tough thing to decide to bring in outside help because global change has wreaked havoc with your business. But you have to act early enough that there is a foundation upon which to build success. We have to turn down companies that have waited too long."

Is there a common story that runs across your clients and prospects?

"Yes," says Lawrence Dolph, RFD Insight Managing Director. "We find that well managed companies are dying because they are not creative. And creative companies are dying because they are not well managed. Keeping a balance is not intuitive and rarely modeled by educators or mentors. But that is exactly what we do."

How do you handle strong personalities and scary arguments between your clients' managers?

"Vigorous and passionate arguments are the foundation of growth," responds RFD Insight's president, Wes Arrington. "But each element of an argument must be supported by data, or by the ability to collect data. In the end, respect for the facts is everything, and business courtesy is the foundation of success."

"Detectives and creative geniuses have hunches," continues RFD Insight's Managing Director, Lawrence Dolph. "We all have to be open to ideas we never imagined, and disciplined enough determine the risk profile through research. If you gather enough data, you begin to see the pattern to the chaos. But there is nothing relaxed about this process. To escape analysis-paralysis, you can’t jog. You have to run."

But talking about support for hunches with data collection is the easy part. The fact is you want strong personalities who will research and argue their cases with vigor and passion. Conflict is the best engine of product success. So you must cultivate the skills to facilitate the expression of conflict but also to manage it.

We believe that this can best be learned by observing it in practice—how to be nurturing and encouraging, how to be just and merciful, how to be strong and decisive after a long-running battle of passions, and how to begin the process again to renew your company and its products.

In the end, the CEO must be — or become — the pilot of a high performance combat aircraft who can take the scary dynamics of the organization and find its second fighting envelop to out dogfight anyone who challenges it.

We do this every day. And RFD Insight can teach you how to fly this high, as well.

Why do there only seem to be a handful of well-run companies?

Management is like sausage making without having the opportunity to sit down and eat a tasty breakfast. Sure, business is war, but think of the combatants as dueling incompetents. Things go wrong all the time. You don't have to be perfect, to win, but you do have to be better than the other guy. The best production system on earth is only fractionally better than the average systems, but the difference in market share, profits and return on capital is huge.

Have you ever had to fire people in behalf of a client?

Yes.

Have you ever had clients succeed and grow profitability without firing anyone?

Yes.

In the end, why should a business hire consultants?

"Good question," says RFD Insight chief Wes Arrington. "To get an independent, experienced assessment of the business and its prospects in a world that's moving much faster than when the business was started, and to inject the skills and the knowhow into the company to run at the front of the pack. Also, it is very difficult to change a company from inside the company (some experts say it's impossible), so hiring an outside perspective is the first step of improving the business. Others will tell you what you want to hear — we'll tell you what you need to know."