A few years ago I bought a lower-middle-market services business. I personally guaranteed the debt. We had run a quality-of-earnings process before closing; it did not catch what was actually there. Within six months, more than sixty percent of profitability was gone. What I had bought was a slow-motion collapse held together by spreadsheets and silence — and I was now the one holding it.
For the next twenty-four months I did almost nothing else. I restructured the cost base line by line, sat with lawyers more than I want to remember, and removed headcount that should have been gone years earlier — people whose entire day was spent performing work rather than doing it. Weighted keyboards to keep their machine awake. Calendar invites to themselves so they showed "red" on Teams. Replies typed from an iPhone while their laptop sat dark on a desk they had not visited in hours, for a role that could only be done from that laptop. They had hoodwinked the prior owner for years. They had hoodwinked me for months.
This required everything I had. I gave up most of what people build their lives around so the company would survive long enough to fix. It did. We have since doubled the size of the business.
What I bring to this practice isn't a framework. I spent five years at McKinsey — I know what those decks are worth and what they are not. What I bring is the operating scar tissue of someone who has lived every page of one.
I built this practice for other operators — sponsors, investors, CEOs, searchers, lenders — so they do not have to learn what I learned the way I learned it. The work is hard. The conversations are harder. But the math, once you've actually seen it, is not subtle.
My goal in running this firm is simple: to help you and your team see what is never subtle — where labor productivity is leaking, where employees are quietly lying to you, and where the operating reality of your business differs from the story being told about it.