CONTACT US
John.Agnew@MercuryFrontiers.com
Tel: +44 (0) 20 3290 4340
Mercury Frontiers is led by John Agnew who provides consultancy, project management and interim assistance to SMEs, more established private sector companies and larger corporations based on his 10 years experience establishing, funding and growing businesses in challenging and extreme frontier markets. As a frontier Managing Director, John has experienced many of the same challenges that businesses continue to face and offers his experience to directly bolster your team across a wide range of functions. Mercury Frontiers offers a wide spectrum of assistance from strategic and positioning advisory down to on the ground, hands on project and crisis management and interim management.
We hate consultants
They are not bad people but the incentive model is structurally flawed.
Consultants want to spend as long as possible trying to solve your problem and then telling you it is too hard to solve, or it can only be solved by them. They are paid by the day so are incentivised to make problems big and fix things slowly, if at all.
I have spent my whole career solving problems at every level quickly and effectively, not dragging out solutions to maximise fees. We don’t charge on a day rate and specifically want our incentives to be aligned with yours.
The best way to do this is a fixed fee – you tell us the problem you need fixing and the value of doing so and we can charge some of that to you on success. We are happy to work this way if you have specific known challenges but the more common reality is that people need help diagnosing and then solving.
So most of our work is done on a subscription basis – you pay for regular input and we promise to deliver 5x the cost we charge. Otherwise, you can and should terminate the arrangement asap. This way our incentives are totally aligned – your cost to try is £0 as the first session is free, and your cost to continue is one month of your subscription. We have to add value to you as fast as possible and as regularly as possible to keep you on board.
We don't require any on-going commitment but can offer one for those who have already seen the value and want further cost-savings.
Lastly, we won’t drag our feet or give you a huge sales pitch. The first (free) session will get right into it so that we can give you something actionable in that first hour as our proof of value add. We don’t write long reports but we will give you action items in every meeting so you can get cracking.