You’re not hiring a consultant. You’re hiring owners who already did this.
Thirty-five years building the systems businesses actually run on, now pointed at one job: making a business work when its owner walks out.
The Kleenex Box
When we started our investigation firm, clients kept getting angry at us for the same reason.
They’d hire us to watch a house. We’d sit there for seven, eight hours, and see nobody. Clients were spending $2,500 to $5,000 on an investigation and sometimes getting little more than footage of an empty driveway.
We kept telling them what every investigator tells clients:
“We can’t sit there 24/7.”
One day we heard ourselves say it and flipped it around. Okay, what COULD sit there 24/7?
Not a person. Way too expensive. Then the real question showed up: what could sit on that street that nobody would ever look at twice?
A car.
Every street in the country is full of parked cars. They’re invisible. So we bought an old car. Four car batteries and a converter. A remote camera and a recording box we could log into from anywhere.
Then the last problem: you can’t have a camera visible in a car window. So we built a small glass box, covered it in one-way film, cut a hole in the top, and stuffed Kleenex in it.
From outside, it was a Kleenex box on a dashboard. From inside, it was a surveillance camera recording around the clock.
That rig could sit legally parked on a street, recording 24/7 for five days as part of our licensed investigative work. Then we built a way to sift the footage so we only reviewed the moments with movement. We could learn someone’s routine from a couple of hours reviewing footage, without paying an investigator to sit outside all day.
And the routine was the goldmine. Conventional surveillance runs during predictable working hours. The rig caught what that misses: people leaving home at strange times, mowing lawns, climbing onto roofs, doing the things they’d claimed they couldn’t do. Once we knew the routine, our investigators needed roughly half as much field time to get the evidence.
Here’s what it did to the business:
We charged a flat $250 a day for the rig. Clients’ overall surveillance costs dropped by roughly half, and they stopped paying thousands for empty driveways. The system paid for itself in its first month.
But the bigger thing happened quietly. The firm stopped needing us in it. The waiting was never the product. Clients weren’t paying for a person in a car. They were paying for answers. Once the answers came from a system instead of a body in a seat, the business could run without the people who built it. Ten years later, it still does, on about 20 minutes a month.
That one build taught us the method we’ve used ever since, in every business we’ve run:
- 1When someone says “we can’t,” flip it: what could?
- 2Find the thing that already does the job. It’s just called something else. (A car isn’t transportation. It’s the one object a street is designed to ignore.)
- 3Don’t make the expensive thing cheaper. Kill the reason you keep paying.
We used the same three steps to build an 18,000-customer medical supply business around government-funded purchasing channels the big players aren’t structured to serve. That one runs on a remote operator and systems today.
That’s what Divergent Minds is. Not a product company. A method, applied.
Thirty-five years of building the parts nobody sees.
We helped build national infrastructure at Shaw, Bell, and the Government of Alberta, then built and ran the technical backbone of our own companies. That is where the instinct comes from: strip a job down to what it actually needs, then build something to run what’s left.
We are small and hands-on by choice. The people in your first meeting are the people who do the work. There is nobody in between.
We work in your business, not above it.
We sit with your staff and learn how the work really gets done, because that is the only way to find what only happens when you are standing there.
We’ll tell you when the answer is don’t.
If a fix is not worth what it would add to your sale price, we say so and you keep your money. We would rather lose the work than sell you something that does not move the number.
Find out where your business stands.
15 questions, 5 minutes, no cost. You will see how much of the business still runs through you.