Two hours on a factory floor tells you more than a month of documents. A few things we have caught that way.
We visit every business before we introduce it to anyone. It is expensive in time, it does not scale, and we have not found anything that replaces it.
Documents tell you what a business reports. A morning on site tells you how it runs.
A few things we have found that way, none of which were in the pack.
A plant whose stated capacity was real and whose actual constraint was a single elderly machine that everything passed through. The accounts showed sixty per cent utilisation. The floor showed one queue.
A warehouse whose stock was immaculate on the system and stacked to the roof in a corner nobody had listed, because it had not moved in three years and writing it off would have made a covenant uncomfortable.
A business where the founder answered every question and the production manager answered every follow-up, which told us more about succession than the family had said in two meetings.
And, more often than any of these, the opposite: a company whose paperwork was ordinary and whose floor was exceptional. Tidy, quiet, well lit, with people who knew what they were doing and had done it for a long time. That is not visible in a spreadsheet, and it is one of the better predictors we have.
The visit is also the point at which the business gets to inspect us. They watch which questions we ask, whether we have read what they sent, and whether we understand what they make. Several of the introductions we are proudest of started with someone deciding, on a factory floor, that we were worth their time.
An introduction from us carries our name. We would rather spend the day than lend the name to something we have only read about.