Emerald Elephant Solutions BV
Management Control
Your management does the work. What does not come with it is the proof that it went as agreed.
What we promise
At the start the goals are recorded and frozen. From then on you know each month where it stands, weighed and interpreted goal by goal. And at the close of every cycle there is one file covering the whole period.
And you can look in between
A personal link shows where things stand at that moment: the goals, the open risks and issues, the decisions, and your own reports to read back. Here too there is nothing to log in to.
What you expect from your management
Three things, and they do not sit with the same party. This whole offer rests on that split.
| What you expect | What it is | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| That the business runs | Steering, taking decisions, being there through the day | your management |
| That you know where it stands | The position every month, and being able to show it to a third party | us |
| That something is left when someone moves on | The goals, the registers, the decisions and the account | us |
The first line is your management: on the payroll, hired in, or ours as an interim. Who sits in those chairs changes nothing about the two lines below it, and that is the point: the roles turn over, the registers and the history stay.
The reason an interim was needed is usually that someone moved on. This layer is the insurance against the next time.
And who is "we"?
One manager on our side, the same one throughout, who has held a role like yours themselves. That is not incidental. Someone who has sat in that chair knows which question to ask in the monthly conversation, recognises an answer that is too good, and needs an hour where an outsider would need three.
That is also where the interpretation comes from. A system can measure; weighing what a figure means takes someone who knows the work. Ideally the same person stays with your organisation for the whole term.
What is included
- A fixed point of contact on our side who has held such a role themselves
- The goal session: agreeing the goals, recording them and freezing them
- A conversation every month in which we collect the position
- The registers: risks, issues, actions and decisions
- A weighing and an interpretation for every goal
- Signals the moment something deviates
- The documents out of our system, at any time
- The account at the close of every cycle
What stays outside it
- The work itself, which your management does
- A faster cadence than monthly
- The field of work as a separate line item
Weighing and interpreting is part of the base and not a rung above it. A variant that only reports what goes wrong would stay silent at the moment it matters, and a manager who has just started is precisely the one who needs someone to say that it is running off course.
The other two boundaries are just as deliberate. In a role someone holds themselves, nothing measurable changes in a fortnight, so reporting more often would sell volume without substance. The cadence that does matter is not faster but higher, and that is the supervisory line below. And finance, facilities, board or change is where we are at home, not what we deliver: the control layer is identical whichever role it concerns, and that is precisely its strength.
The account
Who will you have to show, later on, that it went as agreed? Your bank, your buyer, your board or the body that granted your subsidy. And yourself: keeping an overview of a role you do not hold yourself, and seeing what came of what was agreed, is just as good an answer. If there really is nobody, yourself included, you do not need this layer. That is an honest conversation and not a missed opportunity.
If there is somebody, this is the document it is all about. It holds the goals with their outcome, the decisions taken during the period and who took them, the registers as they stand at that moment, and advice on what comes next.
Every monthly report rests on a frozen snapshot with its own fingerprint, so the whole period can be reconstructed afterwards. The document is built out of that series, which is why it takes days and not weeks. You choose the window yourself: per goal, per quarter, per year or per financial year.
It is part of the package and not a separate product. An account that carries its own price is struck off by exactly the person who needs it most.
One boundary, and we would rather name it ourselves: this is a management account and not a set of financial statements. It carries no audit opinion and we do not promise one. What it is: a reconstructable record of what was agreed, what came of it, and who decided what.
What we ask of you
Someone in your management who feeds us, and someone who reads the report and acts on it. They may be the same person. Without those two roles there is nothing to measure against and nobody to report to.
Along the way, this is all we ask further, and each time at the moment it arises:
- Agree and freeze the goals at the start, in a single session
- One hour of conversation a month about where things stand
- Confirm a decision as we have written it down
- Approve or reject a proposal to change the goals, with change management and always by you
Not another new system
No account, no password, no system to learn. Everything you or your people need to do arrives as a personal link by e-mail. You click it, you fill it in, and you are done.
That is not a simplification but a choice, and it is the objection we hear most often. Your management is there to manage, not to keep records, and a system they do not use produces figures nobody can rely on. So we collect the position in a conversation and enter it ourselves. If someone on your side does want to work in the environment themselves, we set that up. Then it is a choice and not a condition.
The link you receive is in your name and travels over an encrypted connection. It opens exactly one thing, it expires on its own, and we can revoke it at any moment. We do not keep it either: our records hold an unreadable imprint and not the link, so not even we can repeat it back. Losing one means a new one, and that is exactly the intent.
The package
One package and no ladder. Every engagement has a conversation up front, and a shelf with three names suggests a choice that is not there. The price below is for one source: one point of contact within your management feeding us.
Management Control
monthly
from
€ 2,500
per month
Report lines: 1
For proportion: the alternative is a salaried person who keeps the registers and reports monthly. Such a role costs EUR 7,000 to 9,000 a month all in, so this layer is about a third of that, with the system, the method and the frozen snapshots included. In fairness: that person does more than we deliver. And in practice the alternative is usually not that role, but that it does not happen at all.
More than one source
If more people feed in, an amount is added for every extra source. That is not a module but the way the base scales: the conversation is the work, and it scales with the number of people we speak to. The goals themselves do not: whether they cover one department or the whole company, weighing eight goals is not twice the work of weighing four.
The modules
Two, both per month and alongside the package. Amounts apply to the Compact band.
| Price | |
|---|---|
| Supervisory line A quarterly report to the board, the bank or the shareholder, at their level and in their language. A different audience reads something other than the owner who walks the floor every week. | € 625 per month |
| Scope and change management We run the change and decision process: the proposals, the decision list, and formally re-agreeing goals. | € 1,250 per month |
Why not every engagement costs the same
Beyond the number of sources, how complicated the organisation underneath is counts too: how many entities there are, how many sets of books, and how many client organisations need not agree with one another. The factor applies to every monthly amount above.
| Weighing | Factor | |
|---|---|---|
| Compact | One entity, one client organisation, one set of books | × 1 |
| Standard | Several sites or entities, or a team spread across locations and contracts | × 1.5 |
| Large | A group structure, or several client organisations that need not agree with one another | × 2 |
At the intake we settle the band, in consultation with you and with the reason stated. It is a weighing and not a lookup table, and it can go down as well. A second layer at the same organisation weighs lower, for instance, because the setup is already there. The number of audiences does not count towards it: that is the supervisory line above, and letting it weigh twice would have you pay twice for the same thing.
Minimum term
Six months, because the value is in the series. The goal session sits at the start and the first account at the close of the first cycle; in between, what makes that document possible builds up. Controlling a single period tells you nothing. The comparison between periods is where the insight lives.
If your question runs shorter, just say so. Then we work out together what fits your situation and what actually helps you. The monthly documents and the registers are worth something over a shorter period too; it is the account that needs the series, because it compares periods with one another.
Where do you stand?
Someone is leaving and the overview goes with them
A controller, an operations manager, someone who kept it running for years. The role can be handed over; what sat around it usually cannot, because it was never written down.
Role handover →Someone will look back, and then what is on the table counts
A buyer, an investor, a new shareholder. The financial picture is in the annual accounts, and that is the easy half. The other half is how the business was actually run, and that usually sits in people's heads.
Sale or investment →A board or a financier has arrived
A supervisory board, a bank with covenants, an investor with a seat, a grant body that wants to see something every quarter. From that moment on you are accounting for yourself structurally, and that is a different thing from giving the occasional presentation.
Board or financier →Your organisation grew and your overview did not
There was a time when you knew everything because you were there for everything. Now there are managers, and you hear what they consider important enough to tell you. Usually they are right. You just hear it once it has happened, and not while it could still be steered.
Your own overview →