Who We Work With

IS THIS FOR YOU?

Who is this for? What challenges do they face? What benefit do they get from working with us?

Here are a few of the people we’ve worked with and the challenges they faced when they came to us.

A mom and pop retail store. Mom and Pop are always there. Only they know how to do certain key things, and they can’t trust anyone else to make the deposits. They can never take a day off together.

A designer with six others designers working for him. Every job is a struggle to get done within sight of the deadline and budget. He longs for the time when it was just him.

A rapidly-growing, wildly successful restaurant. It has doubled in size and gone from twenty to fifty employees. “I feel like I need to wear a nametag so my kids will recognize me,” sighs the owner.

A home-based graphic designer. She has to juggle it all – doing the work, generating more work, getting the invoices out.

A personal care salon. The employees never seem have enough clients or make enough money to be happy. The owner feels like she works for her employees.

A bakery with thirty employees. The owners work by far the longest hours. They have hired managers to reduce their load, but the employees go around the managers and come to the owners.

An engineering firm where the owner wants to retire and turn it over to his son. But the son’s heart is not in the business, and none of the other managers seem capable of stepping up.

A non-profit organization. “My board members just don’t think like business people. Yet they expect me to produce results and stay within budget. I have nobody to talk with!” complains the Executive Director.

As you can see, these are not high-tech, venture capital-funded endeavors. These are Main Street companies run by people dedicated to doing the best job they can. They are successful, but they work way too hard. They are profitable, but they don’t take home as much as they want or need. They have grown, but they would like to be larger.
Many started their business from nothing, out of a garage or back bedroom. Some bought out former employers, others took over a family business. Some have been in business for decades; others are brand new.

Very few of them set out to be business managers. “My husband and I have art backgrounds. We never had formal training on how to run a business. Now we have six employees,” says the co-owner of a print shop.

Many came from the corporate world. “When I was with the bank, I routinely put together two hundred million dollar deals. That was nothing compared to the stress of meeting my ten-person payroll,” says a former investment banker who took his “golden parachute” and started the studio he had dreamed of for years.

If these people sound a bit like you, then you should find out more about our business owner groups.

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