Questionbefore solution.
Most consultants arrive with the answer already attached. I arrive with nothing to sell you except finding out what’s actually wrong.
01 / The problem
Everyone diagnoses in their own favour.
Something in your business isn’t working. You can feel it in the numbers, or in the mood of the room, or in the gap between what you planned and what happened. So you call someone.
And here’s the problem. The agency will tell you it’s a marketing problem. The IT firm will tell you it’s a systems problem. The AI vendor will tell you it’s an AI problem. The accountant will tell you it’s a pricing problem. Every one of them is selling the cure they happen to make, which means the diagnosis was written before anyone walked through your door.
Sometimes they’re right. Often they’re expensively wrong, and you find out twelve months and one implementation later.
The first brief is almost never the real problem.
02 / The method
What I actually do.
I work out what’s wrong before anyone starts fixing it.
I come into the business without a product waiting in the truck. I talk to the people doing the work, at every level, because the person on the front counter usually knows the answer and has never been asked. I read the systems and whether anyone trusts the data in them. I look at the culture, the technology, the marketing, the money, and the way decisions actually get made when nobody is watching.
Then I design against what I found. Not against what you thought the problem was when you called, and not against whatever I’d prefer the problem to be.
Sometimes I’m the right person to build the fix, and I do. Often the right answer is someone else, and I’ll tell you that and point to who. That independence is the whole point. There is nothing bolted to the back of my diagnosis.
Ask
Interview the stakeholders. Owner to front counter. The gap between how the work is described and how it actually happens is where the problem lives.
Look
Read across everything. Systems, people, culture, data, technology, marketing, money. Problems that matter rarely stay inside one department.
Design
Build the solution against the diagnosis. What to do first, what to leave alone, what will cost more to fix than it's worth.
Build or hand over
If I'm the right person, I execute. If I'm not, you get the honest referral and a document any good provider can act on.
03 / Who this is for
Problems that don’t belong to any one department.
I work with New Zealand businesses across sectors and across scale, from owner-led operators to established multi-division firms.
In a smaller business, the problem usually lives with an owner who is close enough to the work to feel that something’s wrong and too close to name it. In a larger one, it’s the thing that falls between divisions, where everyone can see it and nobody owns it.
The common thread is never the industry. It’s a problem that sits between functions rather than inside one, which is exactly where specialists can’t reach and I go first.
04 / Two ways in
Two ways in. Both start with the question.
The question, answered properly
The Audit
A fixed-price diagnosis of your business. I interview your people, read your systems and your numbers, and find where the constraint actually sits. You get a written diagnosis and a designed response: what to do first, what to leave alone, and what will cost more than it’s worth.
The document stands on its own. Hand it to me, hand it to someone else, or act on it yourself. It’s yours either way, and it isn’t a brochure for the next thing.
The answer, executed
The Engagement
When the diagnosis says I’m the right person to build the fix, this is where we build it. Scoped against the Audit, priced against the outcome, and run alongside your people rather than done to them.
I don’t take an Engagement I haven’t diagnosed. That’s not a rule for you, it’s a rule for me.
No funnels. No discovery call to book a discovery call. If you want to talk, email me, call me, or send a note.
hello@regan-hines.com05 / About
How I got here.
The method comes out of design. I trained and worked as a designer, including running the in-house design studio at Ballantynes, and design teaches you one thing before it teaches you anything else: the brief is rarely the problem. The work only gets good once you’ve asked properly.
I’ve spent my career applying that to bigger and bigger canvases. Brand. Then technology, including two years inside a regulated financial advisory firm building AI systems that went into production and stayed there, which taught me more about change management, data quality and organisational resistance than it ever taught me about models. Then whole operations, backed by an MBA from the University of Canterbury.
The range isn’t the point. The range is what lets me look across a business without deferring to a specialist in every room. The method is the point. Question before solution, every time, including on the questions you’d rather I didn’t ask.