Projects we’ve put our name on.

Harborstone had plateaued: strong product, loyal customers, and an owner spending every hour firefighting instead of steering. We stepped in as the fractional strategist, building a twelve-month growth roadmap, resetting prices against the market, and installing a weekly operating cadence.

Within two quarters the roadmap was running itself: priorities set quarterly, a scoreboard reviewed weekly, and the owner’s calendar finally pointed at the future of the business instead of its daily fires.

Kestrel doubled its crews in two years and its systems never caught up: scheduling lived on a whiteboard, and nobody could say which jobs made money. We mapped the workflow, cut the bottlenecks, and stood up a simple weekly scoreboard the foremen actually use.

Six months later the numbers told the story. On-time completions rose from 71% to 94%, and the management team now runs the Monday meeting without us in the room. That’s the goal: systems that outlast the engagement.

Cedarwood’s books were three years of catch-up: uncategorized transactions, unreconciled accounts, and a tax season that ran on guesswork. We rebuilt QuickBooks Online from the chart of accounts up, reconciled every account, and put a repeatable monthly close in place.

By day ninety the close landed reliably by the 10th. The monthly review calls turned the financials into decisions about which product lines carry the margin and what the studio can afford next.

Solstice was growing fast enough that cash was the constraint nobody could see: reimbursements lag, payroll doesn’t. We built a rolling 13-week cash forecast on top of a cleaned-up close, with a simple monthly reporting pack for the partners.

The forecast turned two hiring decisions from leaps of faith into planned moves. The clinic added two clinicians on schedule and never touched its line of credit.

Northwind had two candidate cities for its first out-of-state store and a lease broker pushing for an answer. We sized demand, mapped the competitive field, and modeled a realistic ramp for each market. That is the kind of homework you want done before the signature, not after.

The evidence pointed away from the “obvious” choice. Northwind entered the second market instead, and the store reached payback well ahead of the original plan for the first.

Brightline believed its next growth curve was a new customer segment, but the early pitches kept stalling. Before the team rebuilt its roadmap on a hunch, we ran structured customer interviews and tested demand signals against the competitive set.

The segment was real. The offer wasn’t. We repositioned the package around what buyers actually valued, and the win rate in the new segment roughly doubled over the following two quarters.

The owner couldn’t point to anything specific. Margins just kept eroding in ways the job costing couldn’t explain. We traced three years of transactions, isolated a pattern of duplicate vendor payments and unauthorized transfers, and quantified the loss at $86,400.

The findings were documented to a litigation standard: every flagged entry tied to source records. The owner recovered restitution, and we stayed on to close the control gaps that made the scheme possible.

A two-partner firm was splitting, and so was its story: years of informal draws, missing records, and two very different versions of who owed whom. We reconstructed the ledgers from bank records and source documents into a single independent accounting.

With a defensible set of numbers on the table, the dispute moved from accusations to arithmetic. The partners settled in mediation, with no trial and a fraction of the legal spend both sides had braced for.