Business analytics · Midland, Texas
Your business should run without you in it.
Could you leave for two weeks without one phone call? Most owners can't leave for two days. The fix pays for itself, and it starts with numbers you already have.
of small-business exits are closures
Five percent sell. Three percent go to family. McKinsey, February 2026.
What I do
I take readings on your business — the real numbers, not the ones on the P&L — and compare each one against where it should sit for a shop your size in your trade. The difference is the gap, and the gap is money. Then we spend that money buying you out of the daily job.
Δ is the gap. You'll see it on every page I hand you.
A $2.1M mechanical contractor. Three readings out of six.
Green is the reading. The grey mark is spec. Illustrative, but that spread is ordinary.
Two roads. Same road for a while.
Owners come to me wanting one of two things, and I build the same thing either way.
You stop being owned by it.
Fridays back. A vacation that stays a vacation. A company that pays you like an owner instead of like an employee who never clocks out.
You go, and you get paid properly.
A buyer needs a business he can finance and a lender will underwrite. That means one that doesn't stop working when you walk out. Same requirement, different reason.
For the first two years those are the same job. Plenty of owners switch roads once they can see the numbers. The work doesn't change when they do.
How the money shows up first
- Find the moneyReadings against spec. Your effective labor rate, your rework line, your bid variance, your AR days. In dollars, in the first thirty days.
- Fix how the work flowsThe job walk. Ten questions, ten leaks. Most are free to plug and nobody has looked at them in fifteen years.
- Buy your way out of the truckThe money from steps one and two pays for the person who takes the daily job off you. That hire is the gate. Everything after it depends on it.
- Prove itYou leave for two weeks. Phone on, nobody calls. That's the test and it's the only one that counts.
- Decide from strengthKeep it, hand it down, or sell it. All three are open once the business runs itself, and none of them are open until it does.
Who this is for
Texas service businesses doing roughly $2M to $5M with five to fifty people — trades, home services, industrial services. Fifteen years in or more. Statewide; I'm based in Midland. If you're under $2M I'll tell you so and point you at the one piece of work that makes sense at your size instead of selling you the monthly.
You may not sell for ten years. You still want to be able to.
A business you can't sell is a business you can't leave. Can't hand to your son. Can't take a season off from. The option is worth holding whether or not you use it, and there's only one way to know you have it: grade the business the way a buyer would.
So that's what I do. A buyer's questions are the only ones you can't answer with wishful thinking.
Start with the two-week test. Twenty questions, all answerable off the top of your head, about six minutes. You get a score and a straight read on where you stand.
Take the Baseline