Bartosz Miszkiewicz

Bartosz Miszkiewicz

Independent partner to business owners

  • 26 years in international logistics
  • 16 of them as an owner
  • a company grown from nothing to around PLN 40m a year

Some decisions cannot be discussed properly inside your own company.

Sometimes it is about the very people you would normally take it to. Sometimes you simply need the view of someone with no position to defend in your company and no stake in the answer.

I work directly with owners. I help them step back, check whether what they have taken for granted still holds, and choose the next move.

Confidential. Concrete. Grounded in the years I spent running a company of my own.

Let's talk about your situation

When this conversation helps

Some conversations are hard to have with anyone inside your own company.

01You have been circling the same decision for weeks.

You know the arguments on both sides. You have already talked it through with people. You still do not have clarity on the right move.

02The matter concerns the one person you would normally take it to.

A co-owner. A board member. A key manager. Before anything else, you need to sort out your own thinking.

03The company is growing, yet too much still lands back on you.

You have the people and the structure, and the decisions and exceptions still end up on your desk.

04Something is grinding, and you cannot yet tell where the problem sits.

The symptom shows up in sales, in people or in a process. The source can be somewhere else entirely.

05You are facing a decision you will not get to make twice.

Succession, a sale, bringing in a co-owner, stepping back from part of the business. You have built something of real value, and nobody inside the company can weigh it with you without a stake in how it ends.

06There is a matter you would not hand to anyone else, and no time to take it on yourself.

A conversation with an important client. A complaint where you would rather not send anyone already involved. A direction somebody has to test first. You know you will not pass this one down, and you know you will not get to it yourself.

Let's talk about your situation

Why someone from outside

I am not part of your organisation. That is exactly the point.

  • I run none of your departments.
  • I compete for none of your budget.
  • I have no past decisions to defend.
  • I am tied into none of your internal relationships.

That leaves me free to ask the questions people inside a company eventually stop asking.

What I bring to them is my own time as an owner: years of decisions about people, money and where the business was going.

I do not know your company better than you do.

But I can see what you have stopped noticing by being in it every day.

How we work

One real problem first.

Not with a transformation programme, and not with a consulting package off the shelf.

We start with one problem, and we stop wherever you decide we should.

01

We take the situation apart

You tell me how you see it. I ask, I push on the assumptions, and I try to separate what is fact from what is interpretation.

02

We look for the source

What looks like a problem with a person often turns out to be a problem with who owns what. Trouble in sales can start in the way the company is run. And a process grinds because for years the company kept adding safeguards and never took one away.

03

We choose the next move

We are not trying to fix the whole company. We settle on what is worth doing now and how we will know it worked.

04

If you want, I take it all the way

A diagnosis is a diagnosis, and that is what you pay for. But you are not then left looking for someone to carry it out. If you decide it is worth doing, I come in and run the work. That is a separate decision on separate terms.

Let's talk about your situation

In practice

What owners bring me, and what turns out to be the real problem.

01

An outside read on the company before deciding its next direction

My role: working with the owner, independent diagnosis and recommendations
Status: diagnosis and recommendations delivered; the next steps are the owner's call

What the owner brought me

The company had been going for many years. The owner came to me with an idea: modernise the business and get people talking about it.

What looked like the problem

That the company was not visible enough and told its own story badly. Underneath sat another question: who on the team was not delivering.

What I found

The team was buried in day-to-day work, and the direction for growth lived nowhere but in the owner's head. He wanted more from the company than the company could carry at the time.

What I did

I looked at the company from outside, including through the eyes of the customer it wants today. Then I put what the owner sees next to what the key people on his team see. “Who is not delivering?” turned into “can we get where we want to go working the way we work now?”

What changed

The owner saw his own company from outside and came away with a short list of things he had to decide. What to do about the operating model, and who would really carry responsibility for it, he settled himself.

02

The automation that was meant to fix an overloaded team

My role: diagnosis and solution design
Status: system designed on the back of the diagnosis

What the owner brought me

In a company outside logistics, a seven-person customer service team could not keep up with gathering documents. The decision to automate was already on the table.

What looked like the problem

That the team could not keep up and the process needed automating.

What I found

The documents sat scattered across email inboxes, and the whole job came down to hunting for them and checking whether they had arrived.

What I did

I started with a question: how much would we gain from simply sorting out how those documents move, and showing in one place which ones are missing. The analysis pointed to the work of two to three people that could be freed up before anything was automated.

What changed

The owner decided on the numbers rather than on his first instinct. The system was designed only out of that diagnosis.

03

I had no single picture of what was really happening in my own operation

My role: system design and build
Status: in production, in daily use

The situation

In my own company I had dozens of shipments moving from Europe to Kazakhstan at any one time: five countries, more than 5,000 km by rail. What we knew about them was scattered across people, email inboxes and spreadsheets.

What looked like the problem

At first glance we were short of hands. Nobody could say on the spot where a particular shipment was, or what it was still missing.

What I found

The people were doing their jobs well. The problem was in how the company gathered information and passed it around. Retyping it from one place to another cost us around half a person's time. It was the only place the truth about a shipment came into being, which made it the only place errors did too.

What I did

Instead of retyping the same data in several places, I brought it together in one: dates, documents and where each shipment actually was. I came to the technology at the end, after the diagnosis, not at the start.

What changed

I knew again, day to day, what was happening across the whole operation. Handling one shipment went from fifteen minutes or more, sometimes far more, down to a few. The retyping errors went away because the retyping did.

When you cannot go yourself

I can go in your place.

Sometimes a matter needs someone who can sit at owner level, who knows the whole company rather than one department, and who is not personally involved in it. In a difficult complaint, that last one often counts for more than the first two.

That is when I go, on your behalf and on your terms. The other party knows from the outset whom I represent.

A conversation that has to be held at owner level.

An important client, a key partner, a negotiation where experience and the standing of the person in the room decide how it goes.

Something that has only just come up.

You do not need a defined project. I can find out what can realistically be built with a particular client, market or idea, and come back with a worked-out plan. While I am only looking into it, I do not have to say who is asking.

Something that needs someone from outside the company.

A difficult conversation, a sensitive subject, something you do not want visible inside the business yet.

I take it on, work out what it really involves and carry the conversations to the point where your own team can take over. The day-to-day running stays with them.

Before any such trip we agree what I can do in your name: what I settle myself, where I have room to negotiate, what I do not promise, and what comes back to you.

Not every company needs more.Some need less.

  • Fewer decisions that only the owner can make.
  • Fewer reports.
  • Fewer approvals.
  • Fewer meetings.
  • Fewer procedures that exist because something went wrong once, years ago.

Adding another solution is always the easy part. The harder question is this:

What could we stop doing?

Real change often starts there.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is not an add-on to this work.

Owners sometimes need to talk about things their own company should not know yet.

  • Co-owners.
  • People.
  • Money.
  • Changes not yet announced.
  • Their own mistakes and doubts.

I do not use clients' names or their situations in my own marketing without their consent. If you want formal protection, we can sign an NDA.

What we discuss stays between us.

About me, briefly

I know this side of the table.

I have worked in international logistics since 2000 and have run my own companies since 2010. One of them I built from nothing to around PLN 40 million in annual revenue, with a team of several dozen people and sales won largely online.

I hired people and built teams. I handed over responsibility. I made investment decisions whose consequences only surfaced years later. Not all of them were good. Some of them cost money.

For most of those years I carried a quiet fear. About the money, about the people, about whether I had just called it wrong. From the outside, none of that showed.

In time I noticed something else. Problems other owners had been carrying for weeks often came apart within an hour of talking them through with me. Not because I knew better, but because I was looking from outside and had already lived through decisions like theirs.

Friends started calling with questions. I did that for years alongside my own business, until it was clear this was work in its own right and I began treating it that way.

So what interests me now is one owner's real situation, not a model from a slide deck. Not as a member of your team. As an independent partner on the other side of the table.

  • 26 years in international logistics, 16 of them as an owner
  • A company built from nothing to ca. PLN 40m in annual revenue
  • A team of several dozen people, sales won largely online
  • Intermodal, Europe to Asia by rail, China–Europe trade
Bartosz Miszkiewicz speaking at a business conference

19th Polish Logistics Managers Forum, Warsaw

Contact

Is there something you need to talk through with someone outside the company?

You do not need to know which service you want. Start with the situation in front of you. The first conversation is there to understand it and to see whether I can add anything worth having.

The first conversation: 60 minutes, online or at your office, at no charge. We both need to see whether there is something here and whether we want to work together. If there is, we agree the scope and the terms. I charge by the day or by the project.

Prefer email?

bartosz@miszkiewicz.pro

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