What we do
Six lines of work. Most engagements touch two.
Every one of these exists because it is where small businesses most often get stuck. Read the symptoms before you read the service names — the constraint you feel is rarely filed under the label you’d expect.
How to read this page
We diagnose before we prescribe.
A cash-flow panic is often a pricing problem. A hiring problem is often a decision-rights problem. So we don’t sell packages off a menu — we find the constraint first, then bring the one or two lines below that actually move it.
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01
Growth & Go-to-Market
Who you sell to, what you charge, and a sales process that isn’t stored in the owner’s head.
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02
Operations & Profitability
What delivery actually costs, where the margin leaks, and the two changes that stop it.
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03
Finance & Capital
Cash you can see thirteen weeks out, a close that lands on time, numbers a lender would accept.
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04
Digital & AI Enablement
One system of record, clean data, a handful of automations, and AI used only where it earns its keep.
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05
Global Expansion & Market Entry
Choosing the right country on evidence, entering with the model that matches your risk appetite.
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06
Leadership & Org Design
Roles, decision rights, hiring and cadence — so the business stops routing through one desk.
01 · Growth & Go-to-Market
Sell to fewer people, on purpose.
Most small businesses don’t have a demand problem. They have a definition problem. Ask three people what the company sells and to whom, and you get three answers — so the marketing is vague, the sales calls wander, and price becomes the only lever left in the room.
We start with the money already in the building. Which customers pay on time, come back, refer, and cost the least to serve? That cohort is your real market, and it is usually narrower and more specific than the one on your website. From there we rebuild the positioning, the offer architecture and the price around those customers, then write the sales motion down so it survives a hire, a holiday, or a bad month.
Demand generation comes last, deliberately. Buying traffic for an offer that doesn’t convert is the most expensive way we know to lose a quarter.
You probably need this if…
- Two people in your company describe what you sell in two different ways.
- Discounting has quietly become how deals close.
- Your best customers arrived by accident and you can’t repeat it.
- The pipeline is one person — usually you.
- Marketing spend went up this year and revenue didn’t.
What you get
- A written positioning statement and an ideal-customer definition that includes disqualifiers, not just a persona sketch.
- Offer and pricing architecture: what sits in each tier, what it costs, why it costs that, and the rules for when a discount is allowed.
- A documented sales process — stages, exit criteria, the questions asked at each one — configured in the CRM you already pay for, not delivered as a PDF.
- A 90-day demand plan: two or three channels, a budget, and the number each channel is accountable for.
- A weekly pipeline review your team can run without us, with the scorecard to run it from.
02 · Operations & Profitability
Go and find the margin you already earned.
Revenue is a vanity number if the work costs more to deliver than the invoice admits. Most owners we meet can quote their top line to the dollar and cannot tell us gross margin by service line, by customer, or by job. The money isn’t missing. It is unmeasured.
So we map how work actually moves — not the flowchart on the wall, the real path, including the rework, the approval nobody needs, and the one person every job waits on. Then we cost it. Time, materials, subcontractors, the hours your team doesn’t log because they’re salaried.
The fix is usually unglamorous and fast: price to the true cost of delivery, renegotiate two or three vendor terms, remove one handoff, and give each job a named owner with a number they watch every week. Unglamorous compounds.
You probably need this if…
- Busy quarters don’t turn into cash.
- You can’t say which customers or which jobs are genuinely profitable.
- Quoting is a gut call with a spreadsheet attached to it.
- Every escalation ends up on your desk, whatever it was about.
- Overtime and rework have become budget lines you stopped questioning.
What you get
- A unit-economics model: true cost to deliver, and gross margin by job, service line and customer — built from the records you already keep.
- A process map of your two or three core workflows with the bottleneck, the rework loop and the single points of failure marked on it.
- A quoting and pricing standard that defends the margin at the point of sale, where it is won or lost.
- A vendor and supply review naming the specific terms to renegotiate first, in order, with the script for the conversation.
- A one-page weekly operating scorecard: five to seven numbers, each with a named owner.
03 · Finance & Capital
Stop finding out about cash late.
Bookkeeping tells you what already happened. It will not tell you whether payroll clears in six weeks if your largest customer pays twenty days late and the equipment deposit goes out on the fifteenth. Plenty of profitable small businesses run on a bank balance and a feeling, right up until the week they can’t.
We build the layer that sits above your books: a rolling thirteen-week cash view, a forecast tied to the two or three drivers that actually move your P&L, and a monthly reporting pack that takes an hour to produce instead of a weekend. It has to be maintainable by your team, or it dies in month three — so we build it in tools you already have and hand over the routine, not just the file.
If you are preparing to borrow or raise, the same work doubles as diligence prep. Lenders and investors ask for the same things; having them ready and consistent shortens the conversation considerably. We prepare you for that conversation — we don’t broker capital and we don’t give investment advice.
You probably need this if…
- You check the bank balance to decide whether you can afford a hire.
- The books close three weeks after month end — when they close.
- A customer paying late is an emergency rather than a scenario you already modelled.
- Nobody can explain last month’s P&L without the bookkeeper on the phone.
- Someone asked for a financial model and you sent a spreadsheet you were embarrassed by.
What you get
- A 13-week rolling cash flow model you can actually maintain — one owner, about thirty minutes a week.
- A driver-based annual forecast with three scenarios (base, slow, stretch) and the triggers that tell you which one you’re living in.
- A monthly reporting pack: P&L with written commentary, cash position, and the six to eight KPIs that actually drive your model.
- A finance stack plan — what your bookkeeper, a controller and a fractional CFO should each own, and the point at which you add the next one.
- Funding readiness: a lender- and investor-ready document checklist, plus the model and the numbers narrative that go with it.
04 · Digital & AI Enablement
Buy less software. Use it properly.
Small businesses are rarely under-tooled. They are over-tooled and under-configured: six subscriptions, three of them overlapping, none of them trusted enough to be the system of record — which is why the team quietly keeps a spreadsheet on the side, and why two reports of the same number never agree.
We pick the system of record first and make everything else answer to it. Then we clean the data going in, standardise the fields so a report means the same thing in March as it did in January, and automate the handoffs that eat hours: quote to job, job to invoice, invoice to follow-up.
On AI we are deliberately boring. We look for the two or three tasks in your week where a model does real work — drafting replies, summarising, pulling fields out of documents, first-pass support triage — and we put a review step, a guardrail and a named human owner on each one. If a use case can’t survive that test, we tell you so and we move on. Nobody needs a chatbot that invents your return policy.
You probably need this if…
- Your team retypes the same information into two systems.
- The real source of truth is a spreadsheet on somebody’s desktop.
- You’re paying for software nobody has opened this quarter.
- Someone trialled an AI tool and nobody can say whether it helped.
- Producing the monthly numbers requires a person and most of a weekend.
What you get
- A system-of-record decision and a full stack map: keep, cut, consolidate — with the annual cost impact next to each line.
- Data cleanup and a field standard, so the same report means the same thing every month.
- Two to four automated workflows built, documented and handed over — each with a manual fallback for the day it breaks.
- An AI use-case shortlist scored on time saved, risk and effort, plus a short written usage policy your team will actually read.
- Website and e-commerce fixes prioritised by revenue impact rather than by what looks worst.
05 · Global Expansion & Market Entry
Pick the right country before you book the flight.
Most international failures are selection failures. The market got chosen because a customer emailed from there, or because the founder likes the city, or because a competitor went first. Two years and a lot of goodwill disappear before anyone admits the choice was never tested.
We score candidate markets against your economics, not against a general ranking: evidence of demand for your specific offer, cost to serve from where you sit, payment and currency friction, regulatory drag, competitive density, and how quickly you would know it isn’t working. Then we match the entry model to the risk you can genuinely afford — direct export, a partner, a distributor, a reseller network, or a local entity — because most small businesses do not need an entity in year one, whatever they’ve been told.
From there it’s sourcing and vetting partners, adapting the offer, price and contract terms to how people actually buy locally, and installing an operating rhythm across time zones so the market isn’t run by whoever happens to be awake. We are not your lawyers, tax advisers or customs brokers — we coordinate with yours, and we’ll tell you when you need one.
You probably need this if…
- Orders keep arriving from abroad and you keep saying yes without a plan behind it.
- A distributor or partner relationship has gone quiet and you can’t tell why.
- You’re about to register an entity somewhere because somebody said you have to.
- Your pricing is in dollars, your buyer isn’t, and margin is vanishing in the gap.
- You’ve been in a market two years with no agreed measure of whether it worked.
What you get
- A market scoring model with three to five candidate countries ranked, and the reasoning written down so the decision can be revisited later.
- An entry-model recommendation comparing cost, speed and reversibility side by side — including the option of not opening an entity.
- A shortlist of vetted partner or distributor candidates, with outreach done and the first conversations held alongside you.
- A localisation plan covering price, payment methods, contract terms, positioning language and support hours.
- A cross-border operating cadence — meeting rhythm, metrics, escalation path — and a scale-or-stop decision date set before you spend.
06 · Leadership & Org Design
Build a company that doesn’t need you daily.
Somewhere between fifteen and fifty people, the thing that made the company work — the owner in every decision — becomes the thing holding it back. The chart says there are managers. The calendar says everything still routes through one desk.
We redesign around the work rather than the people currently doing it: the roles the business needs next, who owns which decisions, what gets escalated and what emphatically does not. Then we make hiring repeatable, with a scorecard written before the job is posted, so “good culture fit” stops being the reason you hired someone who couldn’t do the job.
Compensation and cadence carry the rest. Pay tied to outcomes people can actually control. A weekly and monthly rhythm that surfaces problems while they’re still small. And a deliberate handover of decisions away from the founder — one at a time, each with a checkpoint, so it’s a transition rather than an abdication.
You probably need this if…
- You’re the bottleneck on decisions you don’t even want to make.
- The org chart reflects who you hired, not what the business needs next.
- Two of your last hires didn’t work out and you can’t say precisely why.
- Your managers manage the way they were managed — which is to say, however they like.
- Meetings are status reports, and problems surface a month after they started.
What you get
- A target org design for the next 12 to 18 months, with the two or three roles to fill next put in order.
- A decision-rights map: what the owner keeps, what moves to whom, and the date it moves.
- Hiring scorecards, structured interview guides and a repeatable process for the priority roles.
- A compensation framework — bands, variable pay tied to controllable outcomes, and a promotion path people can see.
- An operating cadence: weekly team meeting, monthly business review, quarterly plan — with the agendas and the scorecard to run them.
Start here
Not sure which one you need?
Good. That is the honest answer for most owners, and it’s a better starting point than a confident guess. The constraint you feel is usually a symptom of something one line over — the cash problem that turns out to be a pricing problem, the hiring problem that turns out to be a decision-rights problem.
That is exactly what the Signal Sprint is for. Two weeks, fixed fee, no commitment beyond it: we interview your people, go through your numbers and your systems, and come back with an honest read on what is actually limiting the business — plus the 90-day plan to move it.
- An honest diagnosis, including the parts that are working and shouldn’t be touched.
- A ranked list of moves with owners, dates and the metric each one moves.
- A clear statement of which service lines the plan needs — and which it doesn’t.
- A plan you can run yourself, hand to someone else, or hire us to build with you.
Engagement model
The Signal Sprint
Two weeks. One fixed fee, agreed before we start. Never hourly, never a surprise invoice. It stands alone as a piece of work — and if you go on to a larger engagement, it’s credited toward it.