Who we work with
The common denominator is not who owns the company.
It is a condition: the business has become more complicated than the operating system supporting it. That happens to founder-owned companies, family businesses, and sponsor-backed ones in almost exactly the same way.
Situations
You will recognise at least three of these.
We describe fit by situation rather than by industry, because the industry rarely predicts the problem and the situation almost always does.
"We are growing faster than our systems."
Revenue went up and nothing underneath it changed. Every new customer costs more internal effort than the last one, and nobody can say exactly why.
"Everything still lives in spreadsheets."
They work. One person maintains them. Nobody wants to think about what happens the week that person is away.
"Our CRM is technically working, but nobody trusts it."
Data is entered inconsistently, stages mean different things to different people, and the forecast has become a negotiation.
"The founder is still the operating system."
Decisions route through one person because the information does. That is a ceiling, and it gets lower as the company grows.
"We have five tools doing what one system should do."
Each was bought to solve a real problem. Together they produce five versions of the truth and a reconciliation job nobody owns.
"We hired good people, but nobody knows who owns what."
The talent is not the problem. The absence of defined handoffs, decision rights, and accountability is.
"We have data everywhere and answers nowhere."
Every system holds one piece. Nobody joins them, so the simplest questions take three days and still get argued with.
"We are not ready to hire a two hundred thousand dollar executive just to fix this."
Correct. This is a build, not a permanent seat, and hiring a role to do a project is an expensive way to get a project done.
"Something broke when we doubled."
The process that worked at thirty people stopped working at sixty, and it failed quietly rather than all at once.
"We are being asked for numbers we cannot produce."
A lender, a board, an acquirer, or an auditor wants something the company has never had to report, and the deadline is real.
Company types
Different companies, the same missing layer.
The work rhymes across all of these, because what is missing is structural rather than sector-specific.
Founder-owned
The company outgrew the founder's ability to hold it in their head, and nobody was ever hired to build what replaced that.
Family-owned
Decades of knowledge, very little of it written down, and a generational handover that will expose exactly how much of it lives in two people.
Growing companies
Headcount and revenue moved faster than process. The systems were right for the company that existed when they were chosen.
Professional services
Utilisation, project margin, and capacity all knowable in principle and nowhere in practice. Every question routes through a partner.
Healthcare
Clinical systems, scheduling, billing, and payer data that were never designed to answer an operating question together.
Technology
The product is well engineered. The company running it is held together by four integrations and a shared document.
Sponsor-backed
A reporting standard arrived with the investor, and management is being asked to produce numbers the business was never built to produce.
Preparing for a transaction
A sale, a raise, a refinancing, or a succession. The diligence will find what is not documented, and it is cheaper to build it now than to explain it later.
Post-acquisition
Two companies, two stacks, two versions of every process, and a management team being asked to run both while merging them.
Size and stage
Past spreadsheets. Nowhere near a corporate infrastructure build.
Most of the companies we work with sit somewhere between two and fifty million dollars in revenue, with twenty to three hundred people. That is not a rule, it is where the condition usually shows up.
Below that, the honest answer is often that the business does not need this yet, and building infrastructure early is a cost with a story attached. Above it, companies generally have the budget and the headcount to do this internally, and what they need from an outsider is different.
The more useful test is not revenue. It is whether the company has outgrown spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, disconnected tools, and founder-dependent processes, and is still a long way from being ready to carry a permanent executive whose only job is fixing that.
You should not have to be a Fortune 500 company to have a functioning operating system.
Not a fit
Where we will tell you no, on the first call.
Companies where nothing is recorded anywhere. There has to be something to build from. A business running entirely on memory and paper needs a different first step, and it is cheaper than this one.
Companies where the commercial model itself is the problem. Better reporting will show you that faster and in more detail. It will not fix it, and we are not going to take a fee pretending otherwise.
Companies looking for a permanent operations leader. Hire one. We will build the infrastructure they inherit if that is useful, but we are not an audition for a seat.
Companies where leadership wants the numbers to agree with them. Good instrumentation reorders which parts of a business are actually the asset, reasonably often. If that is unwelcome, the engagement will be unpleasant for everyone.
Next
Recognise the company in any of those sentences?
Tell us which ones. The first conversation is about what is actually breaking, not about our process.