Telling Clients the Truth They Don't Want to Hear

The report was fourteen pages long. Page nine was the problem.

Grace Yoon's firm, Plumbline Advisory, had been hired by a fast-growing medical supply company to review its workplace culture. Employees had been leaving at an alarming rate. Grace's team interviewed sixty people. The pattern pointed to one senior executive, a co-founder who was also the client's main contact.

"They hired us to find the problem," Grace said. "They didn't expect the problem to be signing our invoices."

The name on the door

Grace named her firm after the tool builders use to find true vertical. In Amos 7, God holds a plumb line against a wall to show where it leans. She liked the image of an objective standard that doesn't bend to whoever is paying.

She started Plumbline in 2017 after a decade as an employment attorney. The firm now has six consultants and works mostly with mid-sized companies on investigations, policy and leadership training.

Keeping the report honest

The co-founder asked Grace to soften page nine. Then he asked her to remove it. She offered to rewrite the language to be more careful and fair, but not to change the findings.

Plumbline lost the contract, roughly a quarter of the firm's annual revenue. Grace delayed a planned hire and spent a hard spring rebuilding the pipeline.

"Integrity is easy to talk about when it costs nothing," she said. "That was the first time it cost us something big."

Grace in the hard conversations

Her colleagues say Grace is not harsh. She insists that every investigation report include what's working, not just what's broken, and she meets personally with anyone named in a finding before it goes to leadership.

"Truth without mercy crushes people," she said. "Mercy without truth leaves them stuck."

Eighteen months later, the medical supply company's board contacted Plumbline again. The co-founder had stepped down. They asked Grace to help them start over.