Behind the practice
Meet the Founder
EAi Consulting Group was founded by T. Grant Dearborn, who spent nearly three decades running businesses before advising them.
Nearly thirty years in operational improvement, business transformation and commercial growth strategy — across manufacturing, distribution, service businesses and professional firms.
Before founding EAI, Grant led a consulting organization serving enterprise and mid-market clients through procurement advisory, staffing and operational support. He has built companies, scaled them, and sold one — which means the exit conversation is one he has had from the seller's side of the table, not one he has only advised on.
He works directly with owners and executive teams on planning, sourcing and growth strategy. Hands-on rather than at arm's length, which is a deliberate choice about what kind of practice this is.
Why this practice exists
The same pattern kept appearing. A business doing real revenue, run by someone capable, making decisions on financial information that was months old and partly wrong. Not through carelessness — because getting a clear picture had always required either a full-time finance hire or a consulting engagement priced for a much larger company.
A full-time CFO costs $250,000 to $400,000 in base salary. The fractional alternative starts around $3,000 a month and clusters well above that. Below roughly $1 million in revenue, neither is available. So most owners run on instinct and hope, and a surprising number of good businesses stay smaller than they need to for want of clarity that was never expensive to produce — only expensive to buy.
AI changed the second part. The analytical work that consumed most of a consulting engagement's budget now takes hours instead of weeks. EAI was built to pass that saving to the businesses that were priced out, rather than pocket it.
What that background changes
Advice from someone who has carried the risk
There is a difference between analyzing a payroll shortfall and lying awake about one. Between modeling an exit and negotiating one with your own company on the table. That difference shows up in what gets recommended and, more often, in what doesn't.
Recommendations you can actually execute
Advice that requires a finance department you don't have isn't advice. Every recommendation is scoped to what a small business can realistically do — with the people, systems and cash it actually has.
Straight answers, including the unwelcome ones
Sometimes the honest answer is that the plan doesn't work, the business isn't ready to sell, or the problem isn't the one you called about. Owners get told what they want to hear more often than is good for them.
On using AI in this work
AI is genuinely good at drafting and genuinely bad at knowing whether the draft is right. It will produce a plausible forecast, a plausible pricing model and a plausible plan, and nothing in it checks whether any of that survives contact with your actual business.
The judgment about which output to trust is the part that takes thirty years, and it's the part that doesn't get delegated to a machine here. AI does the reconciling, the modeling and the research. A person decides what it means and signs their name to it.
Talk it through
Thirty minutes, no cost, no pitch deck. You describe what's going on in the business, and you'll get a straight read on whether we can help — including if the answer is no.