Your business runs on what you remember.
I help owner-operated service businesses make more money, lose less of it, and stop depending on the owner to hold everything together. I spent four years doing all three inside a multi-location service business that grew 3.6x: product, demand, pricing, crews, logistics, and the operating system underneath it.
If jobs, customers, employees, equipment, follow-ups and exceptions are scattered across your head, your texts, a spreadsheet and five different apps, that is what I fix.
Tell me what is falling through the cracks
- 1,279 → 4,649+Customers in a season, while raising prices
- 17k → 147kAnnual website visitors
- 5.0 stars / 644Google reviews, highest rated in market
- 20 to 40 hrs → 2 to 4Weekly planning
- Nobody was checkingCustomer balances on jobs starting that week
One company. Same management team. Demand, pricing, operations and the software rebuilt together.
You already know the problem
It is one in the morning and you are lying there running tomorrow in your head, because there is nowhere else it lives.
Somebody called Tuesday about a job. Nobody wrote it down.
The invoice from three weeks ago never went out. You are pretty sure.
Two guys think they have the same truck.
None of those would sink you on their own. They keep happening, and you are the only person who can see how it all connects. That is not disorganization. The business got bigger than the way you have been running it, and the last thing holding it together is you.
Ignore most of the AI noise for a minute. It is not the first move. Make the business legible and dependable first, and then the tools become genuinely useful, because there is finally something for them to read, check and act on. Skip that step and you have bought an expensive way to be wrong faster.
Three things worth paying for
You do not buy all of this. You buy the one that is actually holding the business back, and the first job is finding out which one that is. Usually the owner already suspects, and is wrong about the order.
Make more money
Getting found, getting chosen, and charging what the work is worth. Usually the half that has never had a system behind it.
- A website people can actually find
- Showing up when somebody searches, including in the answer engines
- Your own audience: photo, video, social, an email list
- Paid acquisition only when it earns its place
- Reviews that match the quality of the work
- Follow-up on the leads you are already losing
- Pricing and discount discipline, once demand proves you can
That library is past 3.6 million organic views. The traffic, the reviews and the customer numbers at the top of this page came from the same work.
Then a policy change cut our largest account from about half our revenue to under twenty percent, in a low water year. We rebuilt the demand between February and May and broke every record the company had before the season opened.
I am not an ad agency and I do not want a monthly ad budget from you. Most of what worked for us did not need one.
Stop losing money
The money already inside the business that leaks out quietly. The cheapest money there is, because you already earned it. Nobody has to sell anything twice.
- Unpaid balances and invoices that chase themselves
- Missed calls, texts and web leads, surfaced while still warm
- Quotes that went quiet
- Discounting you cannot currently see
- Pay reconciled against what actually happened
- Equipment problems tracked, not lost in a text thread
- Conflicts caught the day before, not the morning of
What this turned up at my own company is further down the page. It was not a rounding error.
Stop being the operating system
Your team sees the plan without calling you. Not a prettier dashboard. Fewer decisions that need you personally.
- Jobs, crew, equipment and schedule in one place people actually use
- Changes captured where your crew already communicates
- A daily view of what needs a person today
- Task and maintenance tracking with a name attached
- Training and checklists, so the work goes the same way whoever shows up
- Hiring that gives you a real choice, not whoever applied
Weekly planning: 20 to 40 hours down to 2 to 4. 44 seasonal staff across two bases. A training program built from nothing, 100+ people through it, rating held while the company tripled. 300+ applications a season for a handful of spots.
What changes
Before
- You answer every question
- The schedule lives in several places
- Employee changes disappear into texts
- Follow-up depends on somebody remembering
- Nobody fully trusts the numbers
- Problems appear the morning they matter
- Growth means more coordination overhead
After
- The team can see the current plan
- Changes land somewhere durable
- Exceptions get surfaced on their own
- Money owed actually gets chased
- Routine questions stop reaching you
- Problems appear early enough to solve
- More volume does not mean more office work
Nothing here runs your business unsupervised. Anything touching money, safety or a customer relationship still stops for a person. That is a design decision, not a limitation I am apologizing for.
The order I work in, and I will argue with you about it
- The product. Make it the same every time, delivered by people who are not you. That part is training and standards, not software.
- The people. Training, standards and debriefs, so quality holds while the volume grows. Here is how I did it.
- Demand. Get found, get trusted, get chosen.
- Pricing. Raise it once demand has proved the product is worth it.
- The operating system. The process and the software underneath it, so growth stops running through one person's memory.
We start where the actual bottleneck is. I am not going to sell you an operations project if the real problem is that nobody is calling.
What this turned up at my own company
Two bases about three hundred miles apart, 44 seasonal staff at peak, 663 customers served in the busiest week, and a few thousand a season. I built the system it runs on and I still run it every day. Some of what it found:
- Customer balances on jobs starting within the week that nothing in the stack was checking. The booking system only flagged declined cards, so anything else simply sat. Now a list lands every morning and it gets collected before the job runs.
- Payroll deductions that would have come out of the crew's checks. Two systems disagreed about who had worked what. The reconciliation caught it before anyone was paid, and every correction went in the employees' favor.
- Tips the tip report could not see, because of how they had been paid they were not landing anywhere anyone would think to look.
- A formula that broke and returned nothing for weeks. Every number downstream still looked healthy, which is the part that should bother you. Nothing was checking.
If you want to see how deep the system goes, the full architecture is here. The longer argument for why this kind of work only recently became possible at all is in the expensive part was never the software.
Who this is for
Probably a fit if:
- Roughly $500K to $5M a year
- Somewhere around 5 to 50 employees or contractors
- Real work has to happen somewhere, on time
- People, customers, vehicles, equipment, inventory or jobs have to be coordinated
- You are still pulled into routine operational decisions
- Growth is exposing cracks in how the business is run
- The business is doing well enough that fixing how it runs is worth a real project, not a weekend of tinkering
Trades, rentals, landscaping, restoration and cleanup, guided experiences, and other field-heavy owner-operated companies. Guided trips is where my proof is deepest, but the shape of the problem is the same. Plenty of these engagements are narrow on purpose.
The same four problems repeat across all of them: seasonal labor in towns nobody wants to commute to, capacity gated by permits or physical constraints, inventory that perishes nightly, and an operation that lives in one person's head. I have run all four at once, and built the system that answers them.
Not for you if what you need is somebody to answer your phones or keep your books. Real problems. Not the one I fix.
What an engagement looks like
First, a half day. No charge.
I come to you, or we do it on a call. I ask about how work gets promised and scheduled, what breaks when somebody is out, and where the whiteboard is. Then I write down what I heard: what your business is actually running on, which of those rules exist nowhere but in somebody's head, and what that is probably costing you.
Most owners have never seen their own operation written down. You keep the document. There is no obligation attached to it and I will tell you honestly if I do not think this is worth doing.
The diagnostic
Two weeks. $5,000 to $7,500.
This is the paid one, and it is a different thing. Two weeks, $5,000 to $7,500, and it works on your data rather than on a conversation.
You get: a written model of how your business makes promises. Every rule you are actually running on, in plain language, with where it came from and who confirmed it. Plus a build recommendation, which sometimes says do not build. You keep the document either way, and if you go ahead the diagnostic comes off the install price.
You would be the first business I have done this for outside my own. That is part of why the diagnostic is priced the way it is, and why you keep it either way.
Behind this I am building the part that makes step two repeatable: a set of analyses that reads your own operational data and proposes the rules you are already running on, so the working session starts from evidence instead of a blank page. Every install sharpens it.
The install
$10,000 to $50,000
A focused install and a full operating rebuild are different projects, which is why that is a range. You get your number in writing at the end of step two.
Two phases, both included in the one number.
Build. The database, the model, the board your team actually looks at, and connections into the systems you already pay for.
Run alongside. Four to six weeks with the new system running next to how you work today. Nobody is asked to switch. This is not a safety net bolted onto the end, it is when most of the real rules get written, because a system only finds out what it has wrong by being wrong in front of people who know better. Skip this part and you get something your crew stops opening in week two.
You get: fixed scope, fixed price, one number agreed before the build starts. No hourly meter running while you are on the phone with me.
The retainer, optional
A modest monthly amount for monitoring, fixes, small improvements, and keeping your tools connected as they change underneath you.
If you stop: the system is still yours and it keeps running.
A number like that makes sense when the problem it fixes is already costing more than that in your time, in payroll, in work you cannot take on, or in money that never got collected. If I cannot find a problem that size, I will tell you, and there should not be a project.
Some of what an install can be:
- Missed lead and customer follow-up system
- Scheduling with a crew and resource board
- Unpaid balance and invoicing workflow
- Task and maintenance tracking
- Operational reporting and an owner view
- Turning employee messages into tracked changes and tasks
- A connected operations layer across the systems you already pay for
Tell me what is falling through the cracks
Why can't I just do this myself?
You probably could, eventually. The tools are cheap and getting better every month. But the tool was never the hard part.
A weekend gets you
- Something running
- Your spreadsheets in a nicer shape
- A dashboard that looks right
- A good feeling on Sunday night
Months get you
- What a job actually means here, and what it consumes
- Which two things can never be true at the same time
- What changes downstream when one number moves
- What happens on its own, and what stops for a person
- Accuracy your whole team will trust
- Keeping it accurate while the business changes underneath you
Get the right column wrong and everything built on top of it is wrong, quietly, for a whole season, while every report still says you are fine. Most of that work is judgment rather than software. Demand is the same story: getting found, earning a reputation that holds up, and then pricing against it is a couple of seasons of compounding, not a campaign you run once.
I spent four years doing both in a live business, with the mistakes that came with it. That is what you are buying, not access to a tool you could have bought yourself.
What I do not do
- I am not your bookkeeper, and I do not touch payroll processing or taxes
- I do not sell you software or mark it up. You buy your own, in your name
- I do not replace management, and I cannot make your crew use something
- I do not let a machine make consequential decisions unsupervised
- I build around the systems you already have wherever that is possible
This is not a job, and it is not fractional
I am not looking for a seat at your company, and I am not selling you a part-time operations executive on a retainer. Both can be the right answer. Neither is this.
| This | An agency | A fractional exec | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid to | Finish | Keep the retainer | Be needed |
| Ends when | The scope is done | You cancel | You cancel |
| Cost shape | One fixed price | Monthly, ongoing | Monthly, ongoing |
| Who owns it | You, in your name | Often them | Nothing to own |
| If you stop | It keeps running | The work stops | The work stops |
| Success means | You do not need me | Renewal | Another month |
The first row is the whole thing. The longer you need a fractional person, the better it goes for that person. That is not dishonest, it is just what the arrangement pays for. This is a sprint with an end. If I do it well I am not necessary, and that is the outcome we both agreed to buy.
A fractional operations person is paid to be needed. I am paid to finish.
What you own at the end
- A database in your name. Your operation's structure, in an account you control, on your card.
- The operating model. Your rules stored as rows you can read and change, not logic buried in code somebody has to be hired to edit.
- A written manual of your business. Generated from the model. Every rule, in plain language, with the reason it exists and who confirmed it. It is what a new manager reads on day one, and it is what makes the rest of this yours rather than mine.
What happens if you fire me?
The accounts are in your name and the software is on your card. Your data never lives in my system. Every connection runs through a login your business owns, not mine. You change one password and everything keeps working, because it was never wired through me in the first place.
That is on purpose. I have watched too many people get stuck inside something they paid for.
What is the first step?
Send me an email. Two sentences is enough: what the business does, and what keeps getting missed, delayed, or routed through you.
If it sounds like something I can help with, we will talk for twenty minutes. If it does not, I will tell you that, and I will usually tell you what I would do instead.
Tell me what is falling through the cracks
Building software for businesses like these rather than running one? That is the page you want, not this one.