How it works & the cost
What happens at each stage, what it costs, and what you’d bring
The practical side: the stages, the numbers, the division of labor, and the one thing I ask of you in return.
The stages
What working with me would look like
You tell me about your business, I ask questions, you get a feel for how I think. That’s the whole agenda. At the end I’ll tell you what I think - including whether the session is worth it for you. Sometimes it isn’t, and I’ll say that. And if you already know you want to work, skip this and go straight to the session.
This is where working together starts. Not a discovery call, not a warm-up - we start on the actual work right away.
Before we meet, you complete a detailed intake on your business. I review it first - if I don’t think I’m the right fit for your situation, I cancel the session and refund you in full.
The session is two hours. Most of it is me making sense of your business - how it runs, where the money and the time go, what depends on what. You’ll spend a lot of it answering questions: some easy, some nobody has asked you before, some that bring up things you’d forgotten about or stopped seeing. I’m not looking for anything specific yet - I’m walking through the business to see what I find.
Sometimes two hours is enough - you leave with something worth doing, and more time with me isn’t worth the money yet. I’ll say that. Sometimes it’s the opposite - the business is tangled enough that two hours mostly shows us how tangled, and the first real work would be making it visible. I’ll say that too. Usually it’s in between: there’s more worth doing, and you can take it further or less far - a quick patch, a solid fix, or something built around where you’re headed long term. Different depths, different investments. Either way, by the end we’ll have a better grasp of your business - and you’ll be more equipped to decide what’s best to do next.
If you don’t think the session was worth what you paid, tell me and I’ll refund it. You’re the judge.
There are two ways we can work together after the initial working session.
My preferred way: a custom engagement - scoped from what we found and what you most want to get done. I prefer it because it lines my incentives up with yours: we find the sweet spot between the results you want and what those results are worth to you. I find this works out better than hourly billing for both of us, most of the time.
That said, the second way is by the hour: $1,000 an hour, one-hour minimum, and only if you’ve done the initial working session. Sometimes this makes more sense - like when you mainly want someone to think with who already has a good grasp of your business. That grasp is what makes the hour efficient.
Q&A
Can you tell me more about the initial working session?
If you’ve ever signed up with a new doctor - especially a concierge doctor - one of the first things they do is have you come in for a physical. The doctor gets to know you: your history, your goals, your priorities. And he runs tests and scans. Sometimes he finds something important in that first visit and prescribes right then. Sometimes he says you’re in good shape and doesn’t need to see you for a while. Sometimes he recommends a follow-up. You can’t know which until the physical happens. Either way, you walk out with something you didn’t have before: a doctor who knows your situation and is up to speed on you, in case you ever need him.
The initial working session is that physical, for your business.
What does working together look like after the initial working session?
There’s no program and no package. If we keep going after the initial session, I put together an arrangement that fits your situation - your constraints, mine, and what we’re trying to get done. Sometimes that’s more working sessions. Sometimes it’s me going off and working on something on my own. Sometimes it’s email back-and-forth for a few weeks while you pull information together, then a session to work through it.
I don’t force a cadence. No standing weekly call you don’t need, no twelve-week program because programs come in twelve weeks. I build the arrangement around the work - not the work around an arrangement.
And when the thing we set out to do is done, we’re done. You don’t stay on a plan. If something new comes up later, you come back - and I’ll already know your business.
The division of labor
What you bring, what I provide
The work is collaborative by design. You bring what no method can replace, and I bring the structure for turning it into something you can decide from.
Deep knowledge of your market, your team, your customers, the day-to-day, and what you’re actually trying to build. That knowledge is the raw material the whole analysis runs on. Some of it arrives as context up front, the rest comes out in a few conversations.
A working model of how your business runs, a diagnosis of what’s constraining it and why, and clear findings on the highest-impact change. The answer comes from analysis of your specific business, not from advice or guesswork. And the numbers keep the story honest: what you tell me has to reconcile with what actually happened, and where it doesn’t is usually where the finding is.
The one ask
The one thing I’ll ask in return
Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. If you hate networking and you’re never going to do it, say that. If you’re not going to fire the underperforming manager because they feel like family, say that. Those aren’t problems. They’re real constraints I can design around.
What I can’t design around is a polite agreement that never turns into action. The more honest the inputs, the more useful the output. The work isn’t about hearing what sounds good. It’s about getting to what’s actually true, then building from there.
The instrument
What a “model” of your business actually is
You know how in school they had equations for things? A model is just an equation built for one specific situation: yours. A picture of what’s driving what, where the money and time actually go and what they come back as, where the whole thing is really stuck, and which parts are pulling on which other parts.
In school, the equation was handed to you and your job was to solve it. The actual skill is the part before that: walking up to something that never came with an equation, watching how it really runs, and building the equation from scratch. Solving one is common. Building the right one for a messy real business is the rare part, and it’s most of the work. I trained as a chemical engineer, a field where the entire job is doing this for systems with too many moving parts to hold in your head. A business is the same kind of animal, so the skill transfers straight over. I’m not bringing your industry’s knowledge. That comes from you. I’m bringing the part that builds the equation.
And it’s a specific kind of equation: not the proven-by-logic kind, the kind that holds up bridges and flies planes. Built by watching how something really behaves, and accurate enough to bet on, even though it’s never perfectly exact. “Not perfectly exact” and “completely dependable” aren’t opposites. Almost everything you already trust lives in exactly that space. Which is also the best part: you can check it. A model is something you hold up against your actual business and ask, does this fit? It’s never “take my word for it.” It’s “here, look: does this match what’s actually happening?”
The payoff
What the model lets you do
Run a price change, a hire, or a new location through the model first, instead of paying to find out the hard way. It’s how NASA learned to land on the moon in simulations before risking a single real landing. Same idea, scaled all the way down to your business.
See which one actually comes out ahead before you commit to any of them.
Catch the second-order problem a change sets off three moves down the road, like raising prices and losing the exact customers who send the referrals, before it costs you.
Even a move that doesn’t work tells you something the model hadn’t captured yet. You feed it back in, and the next decision is better aimed. Even a loss pays you back.
That’s the difference between reacting to your business and actually steering it. And what it’s worth depends on where you’re standing. If the business has been grinding, the model is the answer to why nothing has worked, and the relief is that it was never you. If the business is doing well, it’s the straight answer to what’s being left on the table. Same instrument. It just finds different money.
The AI part
About AI, briefly
It’s in the room whether anybody likes it or not. Most owners I talk to hold two feelings about AI at the same time: no real interest in burning a week on AI stuff, and underneath that, the question nobody says out loud: what if ignoring it turns out to be expensive?
Both feelings are reasonable. And here’s the straight answer. The businesses getting real returns from AI are not the ones buying the most tools. They’re the ones whose business is clear enough, organized enough, and connected enough for AI to actually be pointed at something. AI leverage is an architecture problem, not a tool problem.
Which means, and I mean this as good news, you don’t have to get excited about AI to get ready for it. A working model of your business is what ready looks like. And it pays off whether or not you ever touch a tool.
Start here
Want to see whether this fits your business?
The first conversation is free, it’s real work on your actual situation, and by the end you’ll have either a proposal with exact numbers or a straight answer that this isn’t your best move.