Consulting & AdvisoryFree
Consulting Scan and Teaser Diagnostic
Every observation comes from a register the client can check in five minutes, and every one of them stops at the question it raises.
River works the free public registers before it touches anything the client sent, and comes back with three observations. Each one names the register it came from, states what that register does and does not establish, and stops at the question it raises. Beside the observations sits the one-page teaser, built only from sources that will still be checkable after it has been forwarded to four people the client never mentioned. Nothing in it is a recommendation.
Search the query and page one is marketing advice about lead magnets. Offer a free audit, build a funnel, gate a scorecard, here is a landing page. All of it is about promoting the offer and none of it about what goes inside. That leaves both failure modes intact. Independents either send a forty-page report and give the engagement away, or send a maturity scorecard that could have been written about any company and proves nothing at all.
Built for the independent with an hour of unpaid time and one chance to look like the person who should be doing this properly. What it produces hands straight to the boundary note and then to a proposal, and the questions it left open become the workplan inside the operating diagnostic. Reach for it before a first meeting, in a competitive shortlist, or any time somebody wants proof of capability before there is a contract to protect you.
Where a credible free scan gets its evidence
The credibility test for a free observation is whether the client can verify it themselves in five minutes. That points at the free federal registers rather than at anything resting on your own judgement. OSHA's establishment search returns enforcement inspections by establishment name, office, zip or industry code, filterable by open or closed case and by violation status, all the way back to 1972. Selecting an inspection shows the violation items and each citation in detail.
A register also tells you what it does not establish, and repeating that is what makes a free finding safe to put in writing. OSHA's own note says citation items on an open case are subject to modification by amended citation, settlement or contest, and that similar company names need the address checked. So the observation is that a contested case is open, never that a violation occurred. EDGAR full text search covers every electronic filing since 2001.
Bellhaven Foods, a fictional co-packer on $54m whose owner wanted help with operations and had signed nothing. Fifty-one minutes produced three observations. An open contested inspection the owner did not know was public. A driver out-of-service rate of 22.6 percent against his own claim of 97 percent on-time delivery. And two named customers both disclosing supplier reduction programmes in their own annual reports. Three dropped candidates never made the page, and one of them for a good reason.
How it works
Name the target
The legal entity, the sites, and anything that identifies them in public records.
Set the bound
How much you will give away, because that decides where each observation stops.
Read the three
Each observation with its register, its stated limits, and the question it leaves open.
Swap one out
Ask why a candidate was dropped, or push an observation back for being too generous.
What you get
- Three observations, each sourced to a register the client can re-run themselves
- What each source does not establish, written on the row beside what it does
- Every observation ending at a question, because the answer is the paid engagement
- A one-page teaser resting on public sources only, so forwarding it costs you nothing
- The candidate observations that were dropped, with the reason each one was dropped
- Minutes spent per observation, so the hour stays an hour and not a day
Common questions
How is this not just giving the work away?
Because every observation stops at the question. The scan says a driver out-of-service rate is 22.6 percent while the client claims 97 percent on-time. It does not say which deliveries, what it costs, or what to do. Those three need the delivery schedule and the customer contracts, and those need a contract.
Why only public sources in the teaser?
Because a one-pager gets forwarded. The version that reaches the CFO, the board and a competitor's friend has to survive without you there to explain it, and anything resting on material sent before an engagement letter exists is exposure you took on for free. The longer document can use client material, marked as client material.
Where does the fleet data come from?
The FMCSA company snapshot, which is free, one carrier at a time, and searchable by DOT number, MC number or company name. It returns the roadside out-of-service inspection summary, the crash record and the safety rating. Bellhaven's own trucks carry the number, so the client supplied the lookup without meaning to.
Why exactly three observations?
Because the fourth is where the engagement starts. Three is enough to show the finding was not luck and not enough to constitute a diagnosis. Bellhaven had six candidates and three shipped, and the register of what got cut is part of the deliverable, so the client can see the restraint was deliberate.
One of your candidates was dropped over a name match. Why?
Because the register said to. A permit lapse looked like the client until the entity name turned out to be shared, and OSHA's own guidance warns that different companies have similar names and the address needs checking. An observation about the wrong company, sent free and unprompted, is the worst hour you can spend.
What if the company is private and there is nothing public?
There is almost always something. Fleet, safety, environmental, licensing, permits, federal awards and litigation dockets are all public for private companies. Where a client's customers are public, their filings are searchable even when the client's are not, which is how Bellhaven's biggest commercial risk turned up in somebody else's annual report. Pricing a risk like that against the cover the client already bought is a separate instrument.
What happens after they read it?
Three open questions and a client who now wants them answered, which is the conversation you wanted. Scope the paid work before anything else, and if the market side is what worries them, the belief register is the version that tests what they think they know. Findings then land in a scored pack.
Consulting Scan and Teaser Diagnostic
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