Two ways to engage the firm: operators in a fractional executive seat, or a clear-eyed evaluation of your business, its strategy, and what it's worth.
We take the seats where growth is actually decided: CMO, CFO, COO, or the CEO chair itself. One seat per engagement, one operator in it. A full-time hire takes six months you may not have. A fractional executive is in the seat this month, on an agreed path, at a fraction of the cost.
Strategy isn't a separate seat here. It comes with whichever seat we take.
Where it fits: companies roughly $5M to $100M in revenue, where one experienced operator can change the year. Larger than that, we work project by project: a valuation, a diligence sprint, a strategy built and handed off.
You hire one operator, not a team of two. Which of us takes the seat depends on the work, and whoever takes it brings the firm's combined expertise: growth and capital, operations and process. Our operating histories were built at enterprise scale, which is exactly what a growing company borrows when it hires fractionally. The standard is the same either way: the path is agreed before it starts, and the engagement ends with your team running it without us.
The shape of it: most seats run one to two days a week on a monthly retainer. Project work is scoped and priced fixed. Either way, you'll know the number before the work starts, and the number will hold. Ask us in the first conversation and we'll tell you straight.
Post-close gaps, founder-to-PE-grade transitions, and pre-exit de-risking twelve to eighteen months out. We've sat in capital board meetings from both sides of the table.
A departure left a gap, and the search plus ramp is a six-month hole in your operating year. We cover the seat, run the function, and stay only as long as the work requires.
Your board wants a position, not a pilot. Most mid-market firms use AI; few have the in-house judgment to run it as a capital allocation question. We built, ran, and exited an AI company. The judgment comes with the seat.
The plateau that needs go-to-market or operating discipline, not another tool. We find the levers, build the numbers forward, and pull them in order.
We tell owners what their business is actually worth, and why. Not a multiple pulled from a chart: the real estate, the liens, the leases, the depreciation schedules, taken apart piece by piece, then rebuilt into a three-to-eight-year forecast grounded in what businesses like yours actually return. Most valuations never lead to a sale, and that's the point. Some owners need the number for the bank. Some need it for a partner, or the family, or a plan. Some just need the truth.
On credentials, the honest version: no letters after our names. The method came from people with plenty. We were trained in this work by McKinsey and Bain veterans and Kellogg MBAs, and we practice it the way they taught it. What we do is the operator's valuation: the distance between what the books say and what the cash flow proves. When the moment requires a certified appraisal, for a court, an estate, or certain lenders, we'll say so plainly and quarterback the right credentialed appraiser.
The growth paths open to you, the levers behind each, and readiness on either side of a merger or acquisition. We've sat in the middle of transactions: the diligence, the middle work between buyer and seller, the numbers both sides could live with. We are not investment bankers and we are not M&A attorneys, and we won't pretend to be either. We do the operator's part of a deal: making sure the number is real before anyone signs it.
In a deal team, we sit beside your banker and your counsel, not in their chairs: pre-LOI readiness, operational diligence, and the first hundred days after close, when the plan either becomes real or becomes a binder.
The valuation work meets businesses where they are, Main Street included. The strategy and fractional work serves the mid-market, and our operating seats draw on experience built at enterprise scale. More than size, we look for one thing: a leader who runs their company with a market-wide mindset and the perspective to be a partner. A smaller company with a market-minded leader beats a bigger one without.
Founder and family-held companies, and PE portfolio companies. Central Ohio first by relationship, anywhere by fit.