The BMG Operations Diagnostic
A fixed-fee assessment that finds where your operation is losing time, margin, and capacity, quantifies what each finding costs, and delivers a prioritized plan to fix it. You can run the plan yourself, or ask BMG to help implement the highest-priority fixes.
Talk through an operating problemWhy is the Diagnostic paid?
Because it produces a standalone decision document, not a sales proposal. The scope is fixed in writing before work begins. The fee is fixed. The work includes direct observation of how your operation actually runs, not just interviews. The deliverable contains findings, the economic impact of each material finding, priorities, named owners, and a 90-day plan. It is built to be useful whether or not you ever hire BMG again.
What gets examined
Work.
How does the work actually flow?
How the work actually moves: process steps, handoffs, queues, rework, exceptions, cycle time. Where does work wait, stall, or get done twice?
People.
Who owns what, and who decides?
Ownership and decision rights. Who owns each outcome, who can actually decide, and where capacity is lost to unclear roles.
Systems.
What talks to what?
The software you own, how much of it is actually used, the manual work happening between tools, and where integration, automation, or AI would pay for itself once the workflow is designed to support it.
Management.
What can leadership see?
What leadership can see and how fast problems surface: metrics, cadence, escalation.
Money.
What is each finding worth?
The economic impact of each material finding: what it costs, what fixing it is worth, at what effort, quantified as rigorously as the available data supports. This lens is what makes the deliverable a decision document.
The same lenses, applied in Brad's operating career
From Brad Berlin's operating career. Not BMG client outcomes.
- Work: as Chief Customer Officer at MyCarrier, Brad worked with the frontline team to trace the customer onboarding workflow end to end, then redesigned it. Onboarding fell from multiple weeks to about 3 to 4 days, and platform utilization rose roughly 40%.
- People: while serving with a larger consulting firm, Brad was part of a team that helped redesign roles, ownership, and incentives across an anonymized carrier division of roughly $150M so that its thirteen offices operated as one business.
- Systems: at MyCarrier, support ran on email queues with day-long waits. Redesigning the workflow and connecting the systems already owned (HubSpot, Jira, Intercom) cut support resolution time from about 26 minutes to about 90 seconds.
- Management: as COO of Freightclaims.com, Brad installed the operating cadence from zero: annual planning, quarterly rhythms, 13-week execution plans, KPI dashboards.
- Money: in the same role, a cost restructuring during a capital-constrained period cut monthly operating expenses 30 to 40%.
Focused or full scope
The focused Operations Diagnostic.
- One workflow or one business area.
- One to two weeks.
- Built for Main Street businesses, and for larger companies that want a limited first engagement on one specific problem.
- Deliverable: a findings map, a quantified opportunity list, and a 90-day fix plan.
The full-scope Operations Diagnostic.
- The whole operation, or several workflows at once.
- Three to five weeks, including on-site observation of the real work.
- Deliverable: everything in the focused Diagnostic at operation scope, plus a sequenced roadmap with an owner and a business case for each initiative, and a measurement baseline for whatever gets fixed next.
What a Diagnostic costs
Most focused Operations Diagnostics for Main Street businesses range from $5,000 to $7,500. Middle-market and enterprise Diagnostics are scoped separately because stakeholder count, locations, data, and cross-functional complexity vary.
The range applies to one defined Main Street operating area, workflow, or constraint. Final scope and fee are agreed in writing before work begins. Phase 2 implementation, delivered as Fix Sprints, is scoped and priced separately.
Larger organizations usually start with a Diagnostic scoped to one named problem; see how BMG works with middle-market companies and how BMG works with enterprise teams.
What actually happens
Frame.
Scope agreed in writing. Baseline data requested: org chart, unit-level financials, systems list, samples of real work.
Observe.
We watch the work happen where it happens. The people doing the work usually know where it slows down, gets repeated, or breaks, and we ask them directly.
Trace.
Workflow maps, handoff analysis, ownership mapping, system utilization.
Quantify.
The economic impact of each material finding, assessed against the available data.
Readout.
Findings presented live to leadership, then delivered as a written report you keep.
Measurement is defined from the start: baseline, target, method, owner, review cadence. If anything gets fixed afterward, the before-and-after comparison is already in place.
What happens next
The Diagnostic can end three ways. You run the 90-day plan yourself; it is built for that. You ask BMG to implement the highest-priority fixes as Fix Sprints, each with its own baseline and measurement. Or the findings show the operation is in better shape than you feared, and the report says so. The Diagnostic has no agenda except the findings.