After the wire.
Most owners have watched a buyer disappear the week after closing. We do the opposite.
Small companies rarely stall on strategy.
They stall on the unglamorous things. A scheduling process nobody owns. Quotes that take four days because one person has to touch every one. A machine only one technician knows how to reset.
That is the work. It is not clever and it is not fast. It compounds, which is why we stay.
We keep the team, and we pay them properly.
- No layoffs as an operating plan.
- Your managers keep making the calls they already make.
- Reviews and pay bands that actually exist, not a policy nobody has read.
We write down how the work is done.
- One named owner per process.
- The same numbers, in the same format, every week.
- Fix the bottleneck, not the symptom. Usually it is one handoff, not the whole process.
Boring software, installed properly.
- No rip-and-replace in year one.
- The stack I have actually run: HubSpot, RingCentral, Azure, Power BI, Power Automate.
- Automate the paperwork before you automate the people.
Meet everyone. Change nothing.
Sit in on the actual work. Write down what is broken.
Weekly numbers live. Two fixes started.
First process documented, and owned by someone who is not me.
What doesn't change.
The name over the door. The people who built it. The customers who already know who to call. If we needed to change those, we would have picked a different company.