Our Services
Four stages. One partner.
Most firms hand you a menu and ask you to diagnose yourself. We work the way businesses actually move: understand the numbers, fix what's draining you, build for growth, and eventually hand it off well. You can start anywhere on that path. Most clients start at the first stage and stay through the third.
Stage One
Know Your Numbers
Clarity before strategy.
You can't fix what you can't see, and most owners are running on a picture that's months old and partly wrong. Revenue looks fine, the bank account says otherwise, and nobody can explain the gap.
We take whatever you've got. Bank statements, a tangled QuickBooks file, a drawer of receipts, three spreadsheets that don't agree with each other. Out of that we build an accurate view of your business: what you actually earn, what you actually keep, and where the cash actually goes.
This is where nearly every engagement starts, and it's routinely the part clients say changed how they see their own company. Some find their busiest service line is their least profitable. Some find a subscription they stopped using two years ago. Almost everyone finds something.
The Financial Clarity Sprint
Not ready for a full engagement? The Sprint delivers the core of this stage in one week for $1,000 — a clean P&L, a real cash flow picture, and three prioritized findings with dollar figures attached. Fixed price, no retainer, and if it doesn't surface something worth acting on, we refund it.
See the SprintWhat you get
- A clean, categorized profit and loss statement
- Cash flow analysis and a working 12-month forecast
- True margin breakdown by product, service, or location
- Financial health assessment and benchmarking against your industry
- A plain-English walkthrough, so you can read it yourself going forward
This is you if
- You're not confident your books reflect reality
- You've been told your records are a mess
- Revenue is growing but your bank balance isn't
- You're about to make a decision and don't have the numbers to make it
Stage Two
Fix What's Draining You
Margin is found, not earned.
Once the numbers are clear, the problems tend to name themselves. A service priced five years ago and never revisited. A vendor whose rates crept up quietly. Labor that scaled faster than the revenue it was hired to support. A process nobody has questioned that eats six hours a week.
Some of what's draining you is money and some of it is time, and in a small business those are the same resource. We treat them that way.
We work through the list in order of what each item actually costs you, in dollars and in hours, not in how annoying it is. The first fixes typically cover the cost of the engagement, which is the order we recommend working in for a reason.
What you get
- Pricing analysis and specific repricing recommendations
- Cost structure review across vendors, labor, and overhead
- AI-assisted process mapping to find where hours and dollars disappear
- Team structure and role clarity where the org chart is the bottleneck
- Technology and automation recommendations that don't require hiring a developer
- A prioritized fix list ranked by impact, not by effort
This is you if
- Revenue is solid but profit is disappointing
- You haven't raised prices in years and aren't sure how to start
- You're working more hours each year for the same take-home
- Too much of the business runs through you personally
Stage Three
Grow With a Plan
Ambition, backed by a model.
Growth breaks businesses that aren't ready for it. The second location that drains the first. The big contract that wrecks cash flow before the first payment clears. The acquisition that looked good until the seller's books got a real look.
The problem is almost never ambition. It's that the decision gets made on a feel rather than a model.
We build the plan and the math underneath it: what the move actually costs, what it returns, when cash gets tight, and what has to be true for it to work. Then we build the version where things go sideways, because that's the scenario that determines whether you can survive being wrong.
This is also where we do acquisition work: evaluating a target, pressure-testing the seller's numbers, valuing the business, and structuring the deal, including seller financing, which is how most small business acquisitions actually get done.
What you get
- Multi-year projections with best, expected, and downside scenarios
- Market and competitive analysis
- Acquisition evaluation: target screening, valuation, and deal structure
- Seller financing and capital strategy: what you need, when, and from where
- KPI frameworks so you can tell early whether the plan is working
- A clear view of the cash requirement before you commit to it
This is you if
- You have a growth plan and no model to test it against
- You're evaluating a business to buy
- You're weighing a second location, a new market, or a major hire
- You're about to make a bet you can't easily undo
Stage Four
Exit on Your Terms
The work starts years before the sale.
What your business is worth and what a buyer will pay are two different numbers. The gap is usually closable, but only with runway. Owners who start this conversation ninety days before they want out have very few options. Owners who start three years out often add more to the sale price than they earned in those three years.
Most of the gap comes down to a short list: books a buyer can trust, revenue that isn't concentrated in one or two customers, and a business that doesn't stop working when you leave the room. Each takes time to fix, and each one moves the number.
We help you see where you stand, what's suppressing the value, and how long each fix takes — then prepare you for the process from the seller's side of the table, where the information advantage usually isn't.
What you get
- Business valuation and a clear view of what drives it
- Value-gap analysis: what's holding the number down, and how long each fix takes
- Owner-dependency assessment and a plan to reduce it
- Diligence readiness: books, contracts, and dependencies cleaned up first
- Deal structure guidance through closing
This is you if
- You're two to five years out, which is the window where this work pays most
- You've had an unsolicited offer and don't know if it's fair
- You want to know what your business is worth before you plan around it
- You want someone in your corner who isn't paid on commission
Where experience meets AI
Where Experience Meets AI
AI isn't a product we sell — it's a tool we use to work faster and see more clearly, on your behalf. Every engagement blends nearly three decades of hands-on business experience with AI-assisted research, modeling, and automation, so you get sharper insight without waiting weeks for it. Here's what that looks like, service by service.
Know Your Numbers
Categorizing and reconciling thousands of transactions used to be the single most expensive part of any financial engagement — days of manual work billed at consulting rates. AI does it in hours, and does it consistently. That's what makes a full P&L rebuild from raw bank statements a one-week job rather than a one-month one, and it's most of the reason this stage costs what it does instead of what it used to.
Fix What's Draining You
Once your data is clean, AI-assisted analysis surfaces the patterns that are hard to see from inside the business: the service line whose margin has eroded quarter over quarter, the vendor cost that's grown faster than the revenue it supports, the process step absorbing hours nobody has counted. We use AI-assisted process mapping to find bottlenecks objectively rather than through interviews alone, and where it makes sense, we build no-code automations that take repetitive work off your plate without hiring a developer.
Grow With a Plan
Modeling a growth scenario properly means building it three ways — expected, optimistic, and the version where things go wrong — and testing each against your real cash position. Done by hand, that's a week of work per scenario, which is why most small businesses get one model or none. We build all three. AI also lets us pressure-test a seller's numbers during an acquisition review far faster than a manual read of the books allows, which matters when you're on a diligence clock.
Exit on Your Terms
Valuation work depends on clean comparables and clean books, and both are research-heavy. AI compresses the research so we can spend the time on judgment instead: what a buyer will actually discount for, which dependencies surface in diligence, and how long each fix realistically takes. We also use it to run the diligence review a buyer would run, before a buyer runs it, so nothing appears at the worst possible moment.
How we work
A simple, collaborative process
Discovery Call
30 minutesA complimentary call to understand your business, your goals, and where you're feeling stuck. No pitch, no pressure — just a conversation.
Deliverable
A clear sense of whether we're the right fit, and what a possible path forward looks like.
Assessment
3–5 business daysWe take a close look at your business — the numbers first, then operations and strategy — and identify where you sit across the four stages and which one deserves attention first. AI-assisted analysis is what lets us do this in days instead of weeks.
Deliverable
A Discovery Findings Summary showing what we found, which stage you're in, and where the biggest opportunities sit.
Custom Plan
1–2 weeksWe build a tailored engagement plan with clear deliverables, timelines, and measurable outcomes — scoped to your goals and budget.
Deliverable
A written engagement plan with milestones you review and approve before any work begins.
Partnership
OngoingWe work alongside you to execute, adapt, and drive results — staying accountable every step of the way, with regular check-ins and clear progress tracking.
Deliverable
Scheduled milestone reviews and a direct line to your advisor throughout the engagement.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Find Your Stage
Not sure which stage you're in?
Most owners aren't, and that's fine. The Business Health Check scores six areas of your business in about ten minutes and tells you which stage deserves your attention first. It's free, a person reviews every submission, and your scorecard comes back within a business day — whether or not you ever speak to us.