Business advisor for owners and leadership teams

What does a business advisor actually do for an owner?

A business advisor helps an owner make the big commercial decisions, test the assumptions behind them, and come back later to see how they turned out. For me that usually means three moments: deciding whether an idea is worth doing, working out how to make it real, and figuring out what’s wrong when something in the company breaks. The difference from a one-off project is that the advisor stays. Some months it’s a pricing question, some months a hire, some months marketing, and each decision gets easier because I know your business better than I did the month before.

Where my experience runs deepest is the commercial side: pricing, winning customers, how much to spend on marketing and sales, and the growth decisions around them. I founded Connective Web Design, the agency I still run, so I’ve made payroll, hired, lost big clients and lived with my own calls. On tax, legal, financing and HR questions, I work with your specialists and don’t pretend to be one.

What I look at first

Before I give an opinion on a big decision, I want to see what the business is actually doing. Usually that means:

• The financials your CPA already prepares, so we’re working from the same numbers.
• Customer concentration: how much revenue sits with your biggest few clients.
• The sales picture: what’s in the pipeline, what’s closing, and what it costs to win a customer.
• Delivery capacity: whether the team can take on what the plan assumes.

You don’t need a finished brief for the first call. We start with what you’re seeing and decide together what’s worth looking into.

“Is this even a good idea?”

Most of the ideas owners bring me are good ideas in general. A new service line, a second location, a bigger marketing push, a big hire. The question is whether they’re good for this company, now, at this size.

A few things I look at:

• What it costs to win a customer, under your own assumptions. Say you sell a service for $100,000. Back out what it costs to deliver, say $60,000, the overhead it has to carry, say $15,000, and a minimum profit, say $10,000. What’s left, $15,000, is the most you should be willing to spend on marketing and sales combined to win that customer. It isn’t a law, just a ceiling under your own assumptions. It’s the upper limit under those assumptions, so we still check cash timing, since you often spend that money before the client pays, and whether every sales cost is in the math.
• Whether the business can carry it. In my opinion a business isn’t really a business unless it’s profitable. That doesn’t rule out a stretch of investment, but a campaign or a hire needs a credible path to profit and the cash to get there. If it needs more money than the business can support, not doing it at all is a very real option.
• How reversible it is. An idea you can test small and back out of is a different decision from one that commits you for three years.
• Whether you can afford to be wrong about lifetime value. It’s easy to justify unprofitable work because the client might be worth a lot over time. You can’t always bank on that, because the relationship might not last.

Reversibility is the one I lean on most, and it comes from my own start. When I founded my agency, I kept my job for a year and didn’t quit until I could see the business would pay my rent. I’m willing to take chances as long as I can back out of a direction if I need to. So before committing, I want to know what a smaller test would cost and what happens if it fails.

Sometimes the recommendation is to stop, wait, or test something smaller first.

“How do we make it real?”

Once we decide to go, we set the budget, who owns each piece, the order it happens in, and the dates we’ll check it. Who builds it, your team or someone outside? What has to be true for it to work, and how will we know early if it isn’t?

I try to draw a straight line from every activity back to a company goal. If nobody can trace how a piece of work moves the business forward, it probably shouldn’t be on the list. There’s always a ramp-up, and any plan is a plan until you get your hands dirty, so nobody can promise exactly how it’ll go. The team still needs a clear recommendation, even when some assumptions are still open, and a plan that names those assumptions so you know when to change it.

What you get is the decision written down: what we decided, why, what we assumed, what would make us change course, and the date we’ll look at it again. Most of the value is in making the decision explicit and coming back to it on that date.

“Help me figure this out.”

The third call usually starts with “something’s off.” Revenue is fine but margins are slipping. The team is busy and things still fall through. A client that’s a third of revenue suddenly feels fragile.

Busy and stable aren’t the same thing. You can have a full team, good revenue and everyone working hard, and still be very exposed. I’ve lost some very large clients over the years, more than once, and the lesson was always the same: even at your busiest, you have to keep bringing in new customers so no single one can sink you.

I also like to ask the what-if questions most companies only ask after something goes wrong. What would happen if the person who holds a one-of-one role quit tomorrow? What if your biggest client left? What if a key supplier went away or doubled its price? What would be the first three things you’d do? Checking those as often as you check the strategy is cheap insurance.

When an advisor is worth paying for

Ongoing advice earns its fee when the same kinds of decisions keep coming: what to price, where to spend, who to hire, which opportunity to chase. Those reward someone who already knows the business and remembers how last year’s version went. When you have one defined question with a clear finish, like a pricing review before planning season, a project is usually the better fit, and we can scope it that way.

Advisory runs on six-month terms that renew automatically, which is long enough to make a few real decisions and see how they played out.

Business advisor vs consultant vs coach

The labels get used loosely, and plenty of good people do more than one. So this is how the work I sell compares with the other kinds of help an owner might hire.

A consultant is often hired for a defined problem: a pricing study, a market entry plan, an operations review. You get a deliverable, and the engagement wraps up when it’s delivered. Some consultants stay on for years, but that’s the usual shape when you know the question and need depth on it.

A coach usually works on you. Good coaches help owners think more clearly, lead better and hold themselves accountable, often by asking questions and letting you find the answer. Many also share opinions. It’s valuable, and it’s a different job from mine.

My advisory work is ongoing. I bring recommendations from having run a company, help you weigh the trade-offs, and come back to the decision after you act. I also have enough hands-on marketing, search and website experience to go from strategy down to tactics without handing you off in between.

Is a CPA a business advisor?

Yes, and a good one is among your most important. Your CPA may already advise on tax, cash flow and financial planning, and plenty go well beyond that. Your banker looks at risk and capital. I work alongside both on the commercial decisions: what to sell, to whom, how to win customers, who to hire to do it, and what it should cost. I’d want your CPA’s numbers in front of me, and I’ll never pretend to replace them.

What should you ask a business advisor before hiring one?

• Have you run a company? Made payroll, hired and let people go, lost a big client? Advice lands differently from someone who’s lived it.
• Will you tell me not to spend money with you? You want someone who will.
• Can you go from strategy to tactics? A plan you can’t act on this month isn’t much use.
• How will we know if your advice was wrong? Listen for dates, measures and a willingness to say “I got that one wrong.”
• Who else do you work with? Not names, but sizes and situations. You want someone who’s seen businesses like yours.
• Where does your experience stop? A good advisor can tell you which questions belong with someone else.

Who this is for

It might be one owner talking to another, or a leadership team. Once a company gets big enough, you stop talking only to the owner, and the right room is the leadership group. Roughly $5M to $100M in revenue, with someone in the room who can actually decide. I’m based in Houston and work with owners across the U.S., mostly remotely and in person when it’s worth the trip.

If marketing is the big lever, the fractional CMO page explains how I take that on, and if it’s AI, the AI enablement page does.

Based in Houston, working nationwide

I’ve built and run a company in Houston since 2010, through the oil downturns and the swings that come with a city tied to energy. That’s the background I bring to an owner’s decisions. Houston clients can meet in person; I advise owners across the U.S. the same way, mostly over video.