Advisory for owner-run businesses · Hill Country, Texas
You have worked out roughly what this business would sell for. You suspect the number is lower than it should be, and that the reason is you.
That is not something you can say to your leadership team, and it is not something you can say to the friend who has known you since college and still needs you to be the guy who has it handled.
I am the person you say it to.
01 · The problem
The revenue is up. The team is hired. The building got bought. By every measure the people around you use, you are killing it.
The part nobody sees is how much of it still runs through you. Every price that takes judgment. Every job. Every hire. You are in all of it, and you have been for years.
That is what a buyer is looking at. A business that needs you every week is a job with employees on it. A business that runs without you is an asset somebody can buy.
What runs without you is what sells.
02 · The method
Four dependencies, taken in order of what they cost to remove. The first takes months. The last takes longer than anything else you will do.
The work only runs your way. It lives in your head instead of in a system somebody else could pick up. This is the one that moves on a clock measured in months, and the only one that leaves artifacts you can actually show a buyer.
The calls only you can make. This is decision authority, not headcount. Who can decide without you, on what kind of call, up to what number, and how often are they right. It takes years, because judgment gets developed rather than documented.
The accounts belong to you rather than to the company. One person almost never inherits the whole book, so this gets migrated one relationship at a time, in an order you choose before you need it.
The market knows your name, not your business. You have to build a second thing next to yourself and then step out of its light while you are still living off your own. It is the longest of the four and the reason most owners stop at three.
Message sits in the middle of all four. You are usually the only one who can say why this company exists, and every one of the four either carries that or drops it.
Why it sticks.
Everything else you have tried added something. A system. A hire. A standing meeting. This one takes something off you instead, and that is why it holds. Once somebody else really owns a decision, it stops coming back to your desk the first busy week. The order matters too. Process comes first because it moves in months and leaves something a buyer can see. Reputation comes last because it takes years, and it is where most owners quit. Start in the wrong spot and you spend a year on the hard one while the easy wins sit there.
03 · The work
The sprint exists so you can find out what I am worth before you commit to anything. It is finite, it is specific, and it ends on a date we set before we start.
Forty-five days · Fixed fee · Defined end
Forty-five days, ending on a date we set before we start. It begins differently from anything else you have tried: I talk to your people, one at a time, before I tell you anything. Then one dependency at a time, a decision a week, and a written record of why you made it.
The terrain read. I interview you, then the people who actually run things, your operator, your bookkeeper, whoever holds the thing together on a bad week. Separately, and candidly. They tend to say things to me they have not said to you, not out of disloyalty, but because they assumed you already knew.
The decision you’ve been carrying. We take the one you have been putting off for months and settle it. You leave the first week with it made, not scheduled.
Process. What only runs your way, and which two things get documented first.
Person. Who can decide without you, on what kind of call, and up to what number.
Relationship. Which accounts are yours personally, and the order they move.
Reputation. Where lead flow actually originates, and what it costs to move the anchor. This is usually the uncomfortable one.
The through-line. Everything above becomes one page and a sequence. Then we stop.
Monthly retainer · Month to month
The sprint tells you what to change. This is me staying while your team actually changes it, because when this does not stick, the plan is almost never what failed. Your people do the work. I hold the line on whether it is actually happening, so it does not quietly revert the first week you get busy.
Ninety minutes, same two slots. Held on the calendar so they do not quietly disappear when you get busy, which is exactly when you need them.
A direct line. You text me or you call me and it lands on my phone. Same day on weekdays, and if I am in a session I will tell you when I am out of it.
I talk to your people again. Things slide back quietly, and your team feels it months before it reaches you.
The hard rooms. A termination, a partner conversation, an offer on the table. I prepare with you, and I am reachable the day of.
Both are scoped to the size of the business and the weight of what is in front of you, so I quote them in conversation rather than on a web page. What I will say plainly: I take on work I believe will more than justify the fee. If I don’t believe that about your situation after we talk, I will tell you so.
One conversation, thirty to forty-five minutes. I ask about the business and about you. You will do most of the talking. That is the entire first step.
If it fits, you get one page. What we will do, what it costs, and the date it ends. Written down before you decide anything.
You decide, in your own time. If it does not fit, I will say so in the first conversation and point you at who is better for it.
04 · Fit
You have not taken a week off in two years without checking in daily, and you have been telling yourself that is temporary for longer than two years.
Your people bring you decisions you have already given them permission to make. You answer anyway, because it is faster.
You have hired good people. More than once. And you are still the one in the weeds.
If you were unreachable for thirty days, you already know which parts would break, and roughly what week.
You have tried to fix this before: a system, a hire, a consultant, a book. It held for a quarter and then it went back.
The business does two million or more, and you are still the one who decides what you charge, who you hire, and what you spend money on.
You have worked out roughly what this would sell for. You also suspect the number is lower than it should be, and that the reason is you.
05 · Questions
The 45-Day Sprint is $12,000, fixed, ending on a date we set before we start. The Standing Seat is a monthly retainer priced to the size of what you are carrying, month to month. No long contract. You will know the number before you decide anything.
It is when the value of an organization lives inside one person. The work cannot be handed off, the business cannot be sold, and very little survives a month without you. Most owners know they have it. Very few know how much of it is them.
People who built something real that other people now depend on. Staff, members, customers, a payroll. Usually they have not taken a week off in two years, and they know exactly which parts would break if they were unreachable for thirty days.
Yes. I spent fifteen years running them, including one that grew from fifteen hundred people to more than six thousand. An organization built on one voice has the same structure as a business built on one owner, and it comes apart the same way.
I interview your people privately and tell you what they actually said. You get one page for you and your leadership scoring all four dependencies, a ninety-day sequence with a name and a date on every item, and a decision log explaining why you chose what you chose.
The Sprint is forty-five days and ends on a date set before it begins. The Standing Seat runs month to month for as long as it is useful. Neither one is open ended, and neither one requires you to keep paying to find out whether it worked.
Boerne, Texas. Most of the work happens in San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country, in person, because the interviews are worth more when I am in the room. Work outside the area happens by conversation.
One conversation, thirty to forty-five minutes, with no obligation to go further. If it is not a fit, I will tell you in that call rather than after you have paid for something.
Free · Two minutes · No email required to see your result
Eight questions. At the end you find out which of the four is carrying the most weight, and it is usually not the one you would guess.
06 · Who I am
I started in pharmaceutical sales, four years at Novartis, sixth of a hundred and ten reps.
Then, as Executive Director of multiple non-profits, I grew membership from six thousand to more than ten thousand, and took our footprint from two locations to five in two years, hiring the teams that ran them.
Five locations meant five rooms that had to work every single week whether or not I was in the building, which meant I could not be the person holding them together. So I hired the leaders, built the pipeline that trained them, and got out of the way. The deadline came back every seven days, which turns out to be a useful way to find out whether something actually runs without you.
It held because people told each other the truth. That is what I build: a place where people say the real thing out loud, and a direction clear enough for them to aim at.
Then I moved into business, leadership development, then advisory. The rooms changed. The work didn’t. An owner staring at a leadership team that won’t execute is in the same position as anyone else who has run out of road: they don’t need more information. They need one person who will be honest with them, and something written down that still makes sense on Thursday.
I can usually tell when the thing you are describing is not the thing that is bothering you. That comes from twenty years of sitting across from people who were working up to something and had not got there yet.
What carries over from all of it is fairly narrow. I get up to speed on a business fast. People stop performing for me inside an hour. And I will say the thing in the room that everybody already knows and nobody has said.
I am for the person in front of me before I am for his business. Now and then those two pull against each other. When they do, I say so out loud instead of quietly picking one.
I live in the Hill Country outside San Antonio, and I take a deliberately small number of clients at a time.
Years leading people through high-stakes decisions
Executive Director roles at large, fast-growing organizations
07 · Next step
One honest conversation about where you are and where you are actually trying to go. Nothing follows it unless you ask for something to. And if I am the wrong person for this, I will tell you inside that call and point you at who is better for it.