About
A practice that shows its work.
Highland Willow modernises owner-operated businesses end to end: operations, ERP, pricing and analytics. Every figure in our journal carries its date, its source and what it does not prove. We assemble the specialists an engagement actually needs, engaged by name, and accountability stays in one place.
The practice is led by Will Kennedy, who ran product development for a manufacturer delivering programmes for Target, Google, Under Armour, Duke Energy and more than a thousand other clients. He designed and built a 130,000 square foot plant in four months and twenty-one days at the height of COVID, raised production elevenfold without adding a person to the payroll, partnered with UL to create and pilot a global safety programme, and ran the build that still holds the Guinness World Record for the largest indoor illuminated advertising sign. The firm's econometric work comes from the economics degree he added afterwards.
Specialists are brought in by name when an engagement needs them, and you are told who they are and what they can reach before they touch anything. The practice scales to the work rather than carrying a bench, so nobody is billed to you for an idle week and you are never handed to whoever happened to be free.
The businesses we serve are owner-operated, often decades old and sometimes generations, and the people running them are rarely short of ability. What they are short of is time, and a system that answers a question without a week of reconciliation first.
More than one of them could do this work themselves. They hire it out for the reason anyone does: it has to get done while the business keeps trading, and it has to survive being checked by someone who knows exactly what they are looking at. That is why the method below is written the way it is. Showing the command that produced a number is not reassurance for people who cannot read it. It is the only thing that holds up in front of people who can.
That is the part worth being optimistic about, because it is the part that has genuinely changed. Work that used to need a staffed team for most of a year is now within reach of a much smaller one, and we would rather show that than claim a multiple: a complete commercial platform taking real customer revenue, and an econometric study over years of a client’s own transaction history.
Teaching has been part of this work from the beginning, and the goal of every engagement is to end it, leaving a company running its own system with its own people. That is why the method below is written down rather than kept.
Credentials, with their issuers
- UL 962, Flexible Construction
- UL Solutions, 2019
- UL 48, Signs
- UL Solutions, 2019
- UL 1598, Luminaires
- UL Solutions, 2019
- UL 970, Commercial Displays
- UL Solutions, 2019
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
- Credential 24950265, 2018
- Certified SolidWorks Professional
- Dassault Systèmes, credential C-TDA7NX54YM, 2017
- DriveWorks Pro Technical
- Credential DW20160707406686, 2016
- Leadership and Management, six months
- Crestcom International, 2019
How we work
Count rather than estimate. Where a number appears in our work, it was counted, and we will show you the command or the query that produced it. An estimate wearing a decimal point is worse than no number at all.
Say what we do not know. Every assessment we write separates established fact from a proposal nobody has agreed and from what nobody knows yet. The third category is the one that saves money.
Reversible changes. Production changes run dry first and carry a rollback path. On the one live system we have taken into production, that discipline has produced no data-loss incidents.
Leave it maintainable. An engagement that ends with only us able to run the thing has failed. The live engagement already carries written procedures for every routine task, an onboarding course, recorded video, and a support contractor we hired and trained, so the client’s own people run the system day to day.
We are not a staffing agency, not a reseller, and not a firm that will tell you your problem is the thing we happen to sell. If the honest answer is that your spreadsheets are fine, that is the answer you will get, and it costs you one call.
Want the detail rather than the summary?
The journal is where the working goes: measurements with their dates, the commands behind them, and a section in every piece on what the evidence does not prove.