In a web agency’s annual retrospective, between the developers, the departures and the business of making websites, a consultant gets a thank-you. His name is Alessandro Garuglieri. The agency is Cantiere Creativo. The interesting detail is what the agency chooses to praise: alongside his data analysis, his contribution on the human side. For a practice whose specialties include management control, that is a useful place to begin.
- The work: management planning, control and business organization for small and medium-sized companies.
- The example: a web agency that publicly acknowledged its consultant and later described a three-year planning exercise.
- The takeaway: ask what a management report will help someone decide.
The client who noticed the human part
Consulting can be difficult to describe because the visible artifact is often so ordinary. A spreadsheet. A meeting. A plan. The useful question is what becomes possible after someone has done the work. Can an owner compare options? Can colleagues agree on what matters? Can a business explain its direction without relying on one person to remember everything?
Cantiere Creativo’s review of 2015 offers a small, concrete window. It identifies Garuglieri as an external business consultant while treating him, affectionately, as part of the team. The agency credits him with important analytical work. Then it places particular value on his human contribution. That is the client’s judgment, expressed in its own retrospective, rather than an anonymous testimonial on a sales page.
“Il contributo prezioso è sul piano umano.”
Cantiere Creativo, reflecting on 2015
The phrase means that the valuable contribution is on the human side. It does not tell us how many hours he worked or assign a financial return. It does suggest a useful buying question: when choosing an adviser, what would make the people inside your company glad that person was in the room?
A practice built around management decisions
Consulente di Direzione ed Organizzazione Aziendale is the name attached to the practice’s public company profile. Its Italian description identifies three specialties: planning and management control, business organization, and advice for SMEs. It describes a self-employed practice. The language points to professional advisory work, with the consultant’s expertise as the service being offered.
For a prospective customer, those specialties address related questions. Planning asks where the business intends to go. Management control asks how managers will judge progress. Organization asks how responsibility is arranged. Taken together, they offer a way to discuss a company as a working system rather than a collection of separate departments.
That is also a useful way to understand the market position. A business considering this kind of adviser might otherwise develop the capability internally or seek another independent specialist. The choice concerns the work required and the people available to do it. Buying advice makes sense only when the business has a question that advice can help answer.
Three years, written down
The client relationship has a second public marker. In its review of 2016, published in January 2017, Cantiere Creativo says it prepared a three-year business plan with Garuglieri. The agency names intentions including expanding abroad, continuing investment in DatoCMS and improving project analysis. These were the agency’s ambitions; they should be read as plans rather than achieved results.
A planning horizon described by the client, not a promise of growth.
The distinction matters. A plan gives an organization a proposed direction and a period over which to consider it. It does not make the future obey. The useful reading of this example is that an agency with several competing demands chose to put its intentions into a common planning exercise.
Imagine applying that discipline to a different small business. Hiring someone, developing a new offer and serving existing customers might all be sensible. Writing them into one plan forces a question: can the business support all three at once? The value of the exercise would lie in making that choice clearer. This is an illustrative application, not a reconstruction of Garuglieri’s private client work.
A small exercise worth copying
Here is a practical exercise inspired by the company’s field of work. Choose one recurring management report. Beside it, write the decision it is meant to inform, the person responsible for that decision and the next date on which action is possible. If those spaces are hard to fill, begin the next management conversation there.
For example, a fictional agency wondering whether to accept another project could discuss available capacity before agreeing to a delivery date. The report would have a job: help make a commitment the team can support. No elaborate software purchase is necessary to ask that first question. The exercise is useful precisely because it can be tried in an ordinary meeting.
Who has to use the answer?
Garuglieri’s February 2016 presentation in Lucca describes two ways to provide management-control support: teach people inside the company through their work, or supply an external controller. It also gives management participation a central role in implementation. Those details make the service tangible: capability can be developed inside a business or brought in from outside.
The practical implication is straightforward. Advice needs someone able and willing to use it. A business expecting a report to resolve an unsettled question of responsibility may need to settle that question first. An owner considering consulting can therefore start with a modest brief: name the decision, identify the people involved and agree what a useful answer would enable. A useful first meeting could finish with one agreed question and a date for reviewing the answer. That gives both sides something concrete to work toward. It also gives the buyer a way to judge usefulness without confusing a polished presentation with a decision made. That is a workable beginning for the human side of the numbers.