The Next Version
Where this company has to be in two years, what’s actually stopping it, what closing that gap is worth — and who builds each part.
This is not an audit.
Plenty of people will come in and tell you what’s wrong. It is a low-value thing to buy, it puts you on the defensive about decisions you signed off on, and at the end of it you have a list rather than a direction.
This starts at the other end. What does this company have to be in two years — in your terms, not a framework’s? Then: what is genuinely in the way, across product, systems, marketing and cost at once. Then what closing that gap is worth, so the sequence is decided by economics rather than by whoever argued hardest.
The finding is not the product. The direction is, with numbers on it and a name against each move.
The three questions everything gets ranked against:
- 1Where are we leaving revenue on the table?
- 2Where are we spending money, or human effort, unnecessarily?
- 3What can we do now that wasn’t economically or technically possible two years ago?
I read your numbers before I talk to anyone.
Not to grade you. To price the gap.
Ask people what’s holding a company back and you get people-shaped answers — a decision nobody made, a thing nobody owns. Start instead with what the business actually did, and the roadmap comes back with numbers attached.
Billings by customer over time. Cohorts. Spend against what it returned. Every lost deal rather than a sample of them. Whatever’s least painful for you to produce — finance first, because that’s one export from one person who reports to you, and it doesn’t need an IT ticket. If something is genuinely locked down, someone with access drives their screen while I ask for specific views. Nothing leaves the building.
And if it turns out you can’t answer what you made last month from existing customers versus new ones, that isn’t a reason to skip this. That’s the first finding, and building the ability to see it is the first move.
- Where this has to get toThe next version of the company, in your terms. The CEO is in this part; it can’t be delegated.
- What’s in the wayRead from the numbers first, then tested against your people one at a time.
- What closing it is worthEach move priced and ranked, honest about how confident I am in each.
- Who builds each partYour people where they can. Hands I trust where they can’t. Never me.
Then I stay in while it moves.
A roadmap nobody owns is a document. What kills these plans isn’t the plan — it’s that everyone nods in the room and by week three the machine has quietly gone back to the old way. People go back to the old way when nobody is coming to look.
So the advisory seat is part of the shape, not an upsell bolted to the end. I hold what got done against what we decided and tell you straight: on track, drifting, or stalled on a decision upstream. What you do about it is your chair, not mine.
Where nobody on your bench can run a part, I’ll point you at someone who can — and take no fee for the introduction. If I earned on that, you couldn’t trust the name, and the name is the entire value of the introduction.
I don’t run the build. Your people do, or the hands I bring do. A fix that needs me in the room forever isn’t a fix.
Who this is for.
Software and SaaS, roughly $10M to $50M. You can see the company this has to become and the people around you have each only ever run one part of it, so it keeps coming back as four plans instead of one.
Usually there’s a roadmap for the product and none for the company. Often marketing never caught up with what engineering built.
It’s not for you if you want someone to run your ads, staff a build, produce a strategy deck, or confirm a decision you’ve already made. And not if leadership isn’t willing to change anything — the work only pays if we’re allowed to follow the evidence.
Know where this needs to go, and not how?
Twenty minutes. Tell me where you want this company to be in two years and I’ll tell you what I’d go look at first — or that this isn’t the right thing.