Where you are

Owners arrive here from three places.

The standard is the same in all three. Where you start is not.

A capital event is coming

"Somebody is going to look at this company hard. I don't know what they'll find."

You see the transition on the horizon: a sale, a recap, a handoff to the next generation. The work gets you the read before a buyer does, and the runway to act on it.

You are still the constraint

"The company works. It only works when I'm in it."

Nothing is broken. Everything routes through you. The work moves decisions to the team and gives them the rhythm to carry them, so growth stops costing you your calendar.

You were hired to grow it

"I own the plan, not the company. I still have to deliver both."

You lead a company you don't own, for an owner or a board with a number in mind. The work gives you a plan they can underwrite and a team that runs it, so performance belongs to the company instead of to your presence in it.

What it asks of you

A company doesn't outgrow its owner.

It rises to the level you lead it at, and gets stuck where you do. So the work starts with you: growing into the owner's seat, out of the operator's. Concrete leadership work, aimed at the business. It develops you, it does not reinvent you.

If this sounds familiar

You've probably said one of these.

"I've read all the books. I just can't get us to do it."
"You can't run a $50M business the way you ran a $5M one."
"We're profitable, but where's the money?"
"We keep resetting the same priorities."
"It's lonely at the top."

Most of your net worth is in this one company. Left alone, it gets stuck at the level you can personally hold, growth just adds chaos, and the senior people you need for the next phase won't join a company that runs on one person.

What we believe

Growth should produce lift. Done right, the business gets stronger and lighter at once: worth more, and less dependent on you.

In practice

What the work is worth when it counts.

Kinco

Years of cadence. An exit that proved it.

Kinco is a founder-led manufacturer that wanted to keep growing without the business leaning harder on its owner. We installed a quarterly operating cadence and opened the economics to the team, so the people running the work could see the score and act on it.

Year over year, the leadership team took on more of the plan and the founder stepped further out of the day to day. In under two years, employee engagement rose by half, revenue grew by more than a quarter, and profitability doubled. This is the work that later became Build90, run here well before it had the name.

Kinco has since completed an exit to a capital partner, at a valuation nearly double its industry average.

Founder-led manufacturer · exited to a capital partner
Nearly 2×
the industry-average valuation, realized at exit.
Alignment

We would rather be paid for what gets built.

Most engagements here are scoped and fixed-fee, and that is a complete way to work. But this work aims at value you capture, and where there is a real asset and a real horizon we would rather tie part of the compensation to that value as an outcome than to the calendar we commit. If sharing in what gets built is not how you want to work, say so early and we will keep it simple and scoped.

Start with the free diagnostic. The Structural Value Diagnostic is a seven-minute, no-cost read on how much of your value would survive a buyer's scrutiny, or your own absence. You leave with a score and a sense of where value is leaking.
where we start

ValueX first, then the build.

Every engagement starts with ValueX, so the work goes to the right things in the right order. Forty-five days or less, fixed fee. See ValueX ›

Start a conversation.

We'll take a straight read on where your business stands and what's in the way.

Start a conversation