The method: floor first, two numbers, automate last. Operionis

I’m not a consultant and this isn’t a framework I license. It’s the sequence I run on every mandate, and none of it is mine. I’ll tell you exactly where it comes from.

The sequence

Go to the floor before the data.

Day one is where the work happens: delivery calls, handoffs, the queue. Taiichi Ohno drew a chalk circle on the Toyota floor and made managers stand in it until they saw the waste themselves. Same discipline, your floor.

The Two-Number Read.

Cycle time versus touch time on your core unit of work. Eighteen days of elapsed time around six to eight hours of actual work is not a maturity score; it’s a number a board acts on, and it prices the fix.

Find the queue.

The oldest pile in the business marks the constraint. Goldratt wrote that logic forty years ago. It still decides where the money is.

Read the incentives before judging the people.

The margin leak I find most often in PE-backed services is a comp plan paying for the wrong thing. Check the incentive problem and the profile problem, in that order.

Simplify before you accelerate. Automate last.

Question, delete, simplify, accelerate, then automate. No tool gets bought for a process that shouldn’t exist.

Where it comes from

Ohno. Goldratt. The discipline of people who fixed factories before software was an excuse. In 2026 a former Tesla president, Jon McNeill, published The Algorithm: the same floor-first discipline, the same automate-last rule, now with a name on the cover. So the method has a name and a book. I’ve been running it for twenty years, on PE-backed mandates today. The book is proof it scales. The floor is where I learned it.

Why I show up this way

I’ve held the P&L. I’ve run delivery across seven countries for a PE-backed group, stabilised a company through a growth spike as interim ops director, and turned a €27M project cash-positive in ten months. I’ve also seen what kills companies: not bad strategy, but execution debt nobody wanted to name. I name it. That’s the job.