Results
Forty-one businesses. Some of them for years.
Contractors, machine shops, insurance agencies, accounting firms, IT companies, media businesses, manufacturers, a childcare group, a trade association and a city government. What they had in common was not an industry. It was an owner who wanted the business worth more, easier to run and ready for whatever came next.
41
Businesses we have worked inside since 2022. Not advised. Worked inside.
5 years
Our longest client relationship, and it is still running. Several others have passed three.
12
Acquisitions our founder has led across his career, roll-ups, carve-outs and exits.
Why we lead with how long they stay
Every one of our agreements can be cancelled on thirty days’ notice. There is no lock-in, no minimum term and no penalty for walking away. So when a client keeps us for four years, they have made that decision forty-eight separate times. That is a harder number than any case study, and it is the one we would want to see if we were you.
Nobody keeps a consultant for four years. They keep an operator who is making the business worth more.
What forty-one engagements actually produced
Not recommendations. Things that exist and are still in use.
Documented processes
Sales processes, month-end close, AR and AP, employee onboarding, apprentice to technician, dispatch, estimating, project handoff. Written from watching the work, and built into the tools the team already opens.
Scorecards and operating rhythm
A handful of numbers that predict performance, with a name against each one, reviewed in a weekly leadership meeting that actually ends in decisions.
Systems that agree with each other
CRM, accounting and operational tools reconciled into one version of the truth, so people stop keeping their own spreadsheets because they do not trust the system.
Org design and the hard conversations
Who owns what, who is answerable for which number, and the performance conversation the owner had been avoiding for two years. We have sat in on those, and run them.
Eight of them
Eight businesses, eight industries, anonymized. The same problem underneath every one of them.
Home improvement contractor
Growing, and losing money on every job
Sales past a million and net income negative. The owner was estimating, scheduling and running production himself. We took the finance seat and the operating seat, built the numbers and the accountability, and the business turned profitable. Five years later we are still there.
Design and build construction
The bank would not lend to them
The owner wanted to hand the business to the next generation but could not raise capital to grow it, because nobody could see what was actually happening inside it. We documented the core processes and fixed the financial reporting. They got out of debt, and the bank lent.
Accounting firm
Underpricing an entire book
The owner knew he was too cheap and could not bring himself to have the conversation. We built the pricing model and the client-fit rules, then coached him through every call. He repriced thirty-three clients and found six figures of annual revenue that was already his.
Regulated professional services
Three systems, none of which agreed
They could not say with confidence what they had earned. We built one source of truth, reconciled years of revenue history to the cent, and found a six-figure gap between what they were billing and what their own numbers said they should be. Then we took the decision rule out of one man’s head and made it a system.
Specialty manufacturing
A failed audit, and one machine to prove it
A failed audit exposed how much of the process lived in the operators’ hands. We started with one paid day on a single machine. It worked, and grew roughly tenfold into the largest engagement we run.
Professional services
The system everyone had stopped trusting
Their core business system was broken, so the team built workarounds and quietly stopped trusting the numbers. We fixed it in one bounded project and gave them back a single source of truth.
Municipal government
A twenty-year-old system nobody could replace
A twenty-year-old core system ran the operation, held together by a few people’s memory. We mapped the systems and the single points of failure and turned an unspoken risk into a plan.
National trade association
The financials took a month to produce
It took four to six weeks to produce financial statements, so leadership steered by month-old numbers. We rebuilt the close and took the finance seat, and they could finally see the present.
We were growing but losing money on every job. KPI brought the structure we were missing. Within months we had real numbers, real accountability and growth that finally made us profitable.
Bruno Aragao, Ulta Home Improvements
The pattern is always the same
A contractor, a manufacturer, a city government and an accounting practice have nothing in common. Except that in every one of them, the thing holding the business back was not the market, the team or the strategy. It was that too much of the business lived in one person or one undocumented system, and everybody had quietly agreed to work around it.
That is a fixable problem. It is the only kind we take.
The work is done by operators who have actually held the seat. More about KPI, and about Jeff.
Curious what your business is worth?
Ten questions, about three minutes. Find out where your business stands and what it could be worth.