Published, because nobody else will

What it costs.

I looked. Not one broker, exit planner or advisory firm serving Texas companies under $5M publishes a price. You're meant to sit through a meeting to find out. Here's mine — and underneath it, exactly what happens at each step, because a price with no work behind it is just a number.

The work itself

The Baseline

Free

Pick your trade and answer a few ranges on this website — about two minutes. No email address, no form, nothing saved. You get a Delta score out of 100 across five numbers, a band — In Spec, Within Tolerance, Out of Spec, or Needs a Teardown — and a straight read on where you stand and what the gap is worth. Nobody calls you afterward.

Most owners land in Out of Spec. It is the range where the money is largest.

Take the Baseline

The qualification call

Free · thirty minutes

You fill out a short questionnaire before it, so we don't spend the call on things I could have read. Then thirty minutes on the phone about your numbers, your crew, and what your week actually looks like.

I'll tell you on that call if I don't think I can help. That happens, and it is a better outcome for both of us than the alternative. If you're under $2M in revenue I'll say so and point you at the one piece of work that makes sense at your size.

The Reality Check

$3,500 written  ·  $6,500 delivered live

This is not a report you could have written yourself, and it isn't a proposal with findings bolted on the front. It is six hours of analysis on your own numbers, and here is every step of it.

What happens

1. You send what you haveThree years of P&Ls and tax returns, twelve months of revenue by customer, a payroll summary with hours, your current rate sheet, AR aging, and anything written down about how the work gets done. "We don't have that" is a useful answer by itself — don't go building anything for me.
2. I run the three calculationsYour effective labor rate against what the market is actually paying. Your customer concentration. Your revenue per employee against norms for your trade. Then I read everything else you sent.
3. We get back on the phone, midway throughA short call where I test the two things I think I've found, in your words, before I write a line of it. That call is what keeps a wrong finding off paper.
4. The document gets written, and then it sleeps a nightThe next morning it gets two hard reads: one asking whether you'd actually read every page, one checking that no sentence in it has drifted into valuation, legal advice or tax advice. Both reads happen every time.
5. Thirty-minute walkthrough, on the phoneNever an email with a PDF attached and nothing else. The questions are the point, and they don't happen over email.

What you get

• Ten to fourteen pages. Three to five findings, never more. Every finding has the same four parts: what I found, what it's costing you a year, roughly what fixing it takes, and who does the work.
• Dollar figures that are arithmetic, not forecasts. 7,020 technician hours times a $41 rate gap is Δ $288,000 a year. You can check every step of it, and you should.
• The order. Which fix funds which, on what clock. Five true findings worked in the wrong order costs you a year — the sequencing is the part that is actually judgment, and it is the part you're paying for.
• One page on the two-week question. Could you leave for two weeks without a single phone call? Your own answer from the questionnaire, put next to what your numbers say.
• Three options at the end, laid out plainly. Run it yourself with this document and your CPA. Stop here — the report stands on its own. Or hire me for the Groundwork. All three are real, and plenty of owners should take the first one.

$3,500 is two percent of what a broker takes for selling the same business — and it's the only one of the two that happens early enough to change anything.

The Groundwork

$10,000–$15,000 · three to four weeks of work, staged over 30 to 60 days

The full teardown, across five areas, in the same order every time.

The books · Operations and process, pricing included · The people · The customers · The owner.

Books first, because everything downstream gets measured in dollars that have to be real. The owner last, because that conversation goes better once you've seen your own numbers.

Where you land in the range depends on your size, how many entities there are, and the state of the books. I'll tell you which one drove the number, out loud, on the call.

What happens

1. Week 0 — kickoffSixty minutes. The data request goes out annotated, so you know why I need each item rather than wondering.
2. Weeks 1 and 2 — evidenceDocuments in. A three-hour interview with you, which is where half the findings in the other four areas get their explanation. Thirty-minute calls with your bookkeeper and, with your permission, your CPA. Then the standard tests, below.
3. Week 3 — the findings sessionNinety minutes. Everything found, nothing prescribed yet. You correct it, contest it, confirm it. What survives that session goes in the readout; what doesn't, doesn't. This is why the plan lands instead of sitting in a drawer.
4. Weeks 4 to 6 — the plan, deliveredA written readout and a ninety-minute session on it.

The tests that get run

• A P&L-to-deposits tie on two sampled quarters
• An add-back schedule, each item rated provable, partial, or unprovable
• Bid-to-actual variance across twenty recent jobs
• One real job mapped from the first phone call to money in the bank, with every wait marked
• A count of the steps only you can do
• A decision inventory — who actually quotes, buys, hires, fires, and recovers an unhappy customer
• Your concentration curve: top one, top three, top ten
• Who personally holds each of your top ten relationships — you, or the company
• Key licence mapping: whether the company can legally do the work without you in the state

What's in the readout

• One page up front. The bottom line in three sentences, the two-week answer in one, and the single number that matters most this year.
• Five area verdicts in plain words — solid, needs work, or at risk — each with the two sentences that justify it. No scores, no colours, no radar charts.
• Eight to twelve findings, same four-part format, with the exact figures and the evidence behind them.
• An eighteen-to-thirty-six-month plan on one timeline, worked in dependency order. Every item carries a duration, an owner, what it depends on, and the cash it frees or consumes. Month one is always specific enough to start Monday.
• A recommendation — including "neither." If the honest answer is run this yourself with your CPA, the readout says that. That sentence has done more for this practice than any pitch.
• An appendix of workpapers — the add-back schedule, the effective-rate calculation, the concentration curve. These are the pages your CPA, and someday a buyer's accountant, will respect.

The Overhaul

$2,500/month · eighteen to thirty-six months · cancel any time

The monthly work that runs the plan. Five named problems out of the Groundwork, ranked most severe first — and only the top three worked at once, because going after five at a time is how nothing gets finished. When one is verified fixed, the next moves up.

The rhythm

The checkpoints — what has to be true, and when

A checkpoint is a date with pass criteria written down ahead of time. You don't argue with one; you either pass it or you schedule the fix.

Keep it, hand it down, or sell it. All three are open once it runs without you. None of them are open before.

Travel

Within about 200 miles of Midland, an on-site visit is included. Beyond that the work is done remotely by default — the job walk happens by video, with you or a lead walking the shop, the truck, the board and the counter with a phone while I ask the ten questions. It works better than it sounds: you narrate instead of performing, and I get the same evidence without a day in the truck.

An on-site visit further out is available for the live-delivery premium plus travel at cost. Cost means cost — receipts, no markup. Nothing about the prices above changes because of where you are, and nobody outside the drive radius gets a lesser version.

Three things about the money

• Cancel means cancel. No notice period, no last month, no penalty. If a draft goes through after you've said stop, it comes back within three business days.
• No late fees and no interest, ever. If an invoice goes past two weeks the work pauses, and you're never billed for paused time. There's no collections agency in this business and there never will be. If something's wrong, I'll call you myself.
• Bank transfer is cheaper. Card is the posted price; pay by transfer or check and there's a published 3% discount. That's a discount, not a surcharge — Texas is particular about the difference and so am I.

The other side of the ledger

A price on its own is just a cost. Here is the only sum that decides whether this is worth doing.

That is deliberately the smallest number that works, not the biggest one available. The mechanical contractor used as the example on this site had a labor-rate gap of $340,000 a year on one reading out of six. That spread is ordinary. It is not a promise, and I won't make it one.

What the price also buys, which no sum captures

• Cancel any time, no notice, no penalty. Thirty-six months is how long the work takes, not a term you're locked into. If a cycle doesn't produce, you leave. That's the strongest line on this page, and it's why the arithmetic above isn't a sales projection — I'm paid monthly to keep earning it.
• Eight clients, hard cap. You're one of eight permanently, not one of eight this quarter. The cap is arithmetic: past eight, the hours to do the work properly don't exist.
• One person. You talk to me. No associate, no handoff, no account manager.
• A paid trial that credits back. $3,500 to see your own numbers first, credited in full toward the first cycle within ninety days. Nobody is asked to believe the arithmetic — only to spend $3,500 finding out whether it applies to them.

And what it costs you in hours

This is the objection that kills these deals, so here it is before you ask.

Against the hundred and sixty-plus hours a month most of these owners are working, that's about five percent of your time for three years, to get a large share of it back permanently. Cycle one costs more of your hours than cycle eight, because by cycle eight somebody else is doing it. Which is the point.

The freedom to walk away, and the value to keep the checks coming — regardless of how you walk away.