The question I hear most often when a CFO or board chair first contacts us is not about our methodology or our credentials. It is about the size of the commitment.
They have usually been through a consulting engagement before. It started with a large scope of work, a retainer, and a timeline measured in months. By the time findings arrived, the business had changed, the budget was spent, and the recommendations were delivered in a deck that sat on a server somewhere. That experience makes CFOs cautious. Rightly so.
Our entry point is designed specifically to remove that barrier. It is called the Data Diagnostic, and it is structured to answer one question before any larger commitment is made: is there a number in your data worth finding?
What the Data Diagnostic actually is
The Data Diagnostic is a fixed-fee engagement. The fee is $20,000 to $50,000 CAD, agreed in writing before work begins, with no variations and no overruns. You send us one operational data set. We do not need it cleaned or structured. We work with raw data. We model the data over two to three weeks and deliver one written memo. That memo names the dollar figure, where it sits in your data, the simulation evidence behind it, and the recommended next step.
If the data does not show an actionable finding, we tell you so directly. You owe nothing further. The risk on the engagement sits with us, not with you.
Why fixed fee matters
Most advisory engagements are billed by the hour or by the month. That structure creates a misalignment: the advisor has no incentive to finish quickly, and the client has no certainty about cost. A fixed fee changes both of those things. More importantly, it forces discipline on our side. We cannot add hours to cover for analysis that did not pan out. We have to find the number, or tell you there is not one.
What completed Diagnostics have found
An oil and gas distributor gave us a single inventory and procurement export. Before a single process changed, we identified $68 million per year in savings — excess inventory, purchase orders against items already at ten-month supply, and obsolete stock never written off.
A cross-border fuel distributor with rail operations was running rail car utilisation at 17 percent. Six months of transaction data produced a finding of $10 million or more per year — confirmed before a single car moved.
A national 3PL gave us 39,000 truck movement records. LTL consolidation and intermodal shift produced a freight cost reduction of more than 50 percent, validated before a single route changed.
In every case, the Diagnostic fee was recovered in the first finding.
Who the Diagnostic is built for
CFOs, board chairs, and operators who have a sense that there is a number their data is not showing them — but who cannot justify a large advisory commitment without evidence the number exists.
To scope a Data Diagnostic, contact amadden@ajmsolutions.ca. The scoping conversation is 30 minutes and costs nothing.
Arthur Madden is a CPA CMA MBA ICD.D and founding partner of AJM Solutions Inc., based in Calgary.
Related: What I look for in the first data export — the specific signals that appear in the first pass of any engagement. And the financial data your reports were never designed to show — step three, where the largest gaps are found.