Who We Are

We’ve been friends for more than 20 years, and business partners for most of that time.

We’ve been through a lot together: poverty and wealth, payroll worries, nuisance lawsuits, late nights and all-nighters, worries over payroll, stress over cash flow, great successes and spectacular flame-outs. We’ve had good, bad, and psycho customers, partners, and employees.

We’ve tried to learn from everything.

We both spent our early salaried careers in software, but we could never stifle the entrepreneurial impulse enough to stay with that.

In the past two decades we’ve started many businesses: auto repair, computer software, computer hardware, antiques, rental property, home building, retail, restaurant, venture capital, wholesale surplus, internet retailing, travel agent, heating & cooling, electrical, plumbing. Some have done extremely well; a few fizzled out quietly; and several served as very expensive and effective learning experiences.

We’ve faced and solved personnel, marketing, executive, legal, financial, and technology problems of every stripe.

The point is, if you’re an owner or manager of a small business, we’ve experienced most of whatever you’re going through right now. And we survived and came out the other side (even the failures), and are happy to share what we’ve learned.

What We Do

Our skill is in helping you improve your business operations with our 2 decades of experience. We'll "meet you where you are" and help you move forward. Here are just a few examples of what you might hire us to do:

• Reduce your overhead by showing you how to reduce the costs of many of the things you are buying now and stop money from leaking out in dribs and drabs here and there – basically running a tighter ship.
• Improve your gross margins by reducing your cost of what you sell and/or increasing your prices (so many business owners don’t charge enough, and can’t figure out how to increase their prices without losing customers).
• Improve your net profit by helping you collect what’s owed to you, billing for all the work that you do, and increasing your average sale.
• Get more personal fulfillment out of your business by doing less of the work you don’t like – we can show you how to transfer much of that to your employees and/or vendors and spend your time on the things you love, or just working less overall.
• Help you define what you really want to get out of your business, and create a plan once you've decided.
• Helping you create an exit strategy.
• Meet with you regularly (in person or on the phone) to gently push you and keep you accountable for what you have committed to do – hey, don't think this is for wimps! We need it ourselves – everyone does.

Over the years we've done pretty much every job in our many businesses, and most importantly, we understand the owner's viewpoint. Our goal is to help you make more money and get more satisfaction from your business.