Thoughts worth sharing.
Practical guidance on tax, profitability and growth, written for the owners of business by our team.
Tariffs Are Your New Weather. Stop Waiting for the Storm to Pass.
Most owners are treating tariffs like a bad storm — brace, absorb the hit, wait for it to clear. But cost volatility isn't weather anymore. It's climate. The businesses pulling ahead stopped reacting to each announcement and built a repeatable system for defending margin. Here's what that looks like.
Google Used to Send You Customers. Now It Keeps Them.
For years, search quietly fed your business — someone had a question, Google sent them to your site, some of them became customers. That pipe is narrowing fast. AI now answers the question on the results page, and the click never happens. Here's what's actually changing, and the three moves that still bring customers in.
You Don't Have an AI Problem. You Have a Workflow Problem.
Most owners your size are now paying for AI. Almost none are getting real money out of it. The gap isn't the technology — it's that nobody rewired how the work actually gets done. Here's what the companies pulling ahead do differently, and where to start.
Stop Hiring Heroes
The qualified-worker shortage is real — 84% of owners trying to hire this summer can't find good candidates. But most $5M–$15M businesses aren't short on people. They're short on roles an ordinary good employee can actually win in. Here's the more durable fix.
The Line Item You Stopped Reading Is Eating Your Margin
Small-group health premiums are set to climb 11% in 2026 — the steepest in over a decade — a federal subsidy cliff lands in January, and liability rates keep grinding higher. For owners between $5M and $15M, insurance has quietly stopped being a fixed cost. Here's what you still control.
Everyone's Raising Prices. Almost Nobody Is Pricing.
Tariffs and cost inflation have pushed nearly every owner into raising prices this year. But raising a price and running a pricing strategy are not the same thing — and the gap between them is the single most underused profit lever in your business. Here's how to close it.
The Cost of Chasing New Customers Keeps Climbing. Your Best Growth Is Already on the Books.
The price of winning a new customer has roughly tripled in under a decade, and the ad meter keeps running. Meanwhile the cheapest, highest-odds growth you have is sitting in your existing customer list — most owners just aren't measuring it. Here's how to find it.
Nobody Quits a Company. They Quit a Manager.
Your best people aren't leaving for money as often as you think. They're leaving the person they report to — and at your size, that's frequently you or someone you promoted because they were great at the job, not at leading. Here's the fix.
You're Still the Best Salesperson You Have. That's the Problem.
Most owners between $5M and $15M are still the engine of their own sales — and the first salesperson they hire usually fails. The data shows why, and it's almost never the hire. It's what wasn't built before they arrived. Here's the sequence that works.
Most Businesses Never Sell. Yours Doesn't Have to Be One of Them.
70-80% of businesses listed for sale never find a buyer, and nearly 90% of the average owner's wealth is locked inside the company. The work that makes a business sellable is the same work that makes it better to own. Start years before you think you need to.
27 Days of Cash: Why Profitable Companies Still Run Out of Money
The median small business holds 27 days of cash; a quarter hold less than two weeks. Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact. Why the P&L keeps surprising owners, and how a 13-week forecast turns month-end panic into a Tuesday-morning routine.
The AI Adoption Gap: Your Competitors Are Using It. Most Are Using It Badly.
Small businesses are now adopting AI faster than large companies, but most are winging it: five disconnected tools, no policy, no link to the numbers. Where AI actually pays off for $5M-$15M businesses, and how to adopt it like an operator instead of a hobbyist.
Past the Plateau: Why Growth Stalls Between $5M and $15M, and What Actually Breaks Through
Almost every business that reaches $5M hits a wall the owner can't push through alone. The wall isn't the market or the team. It's the operating model that got you here. How to recognize the plateau early, and the four walls that actually cause it.
Five Tax Moves Most Scaling Businesses Miss
The fastest-growing companies are often the ones overpaying the most. Here are five proactive strategies that quietly leave money on the table.
Bookkeeping vs. Advisory: What a Scaling Business Actually Needs
Most owners think they're buying clean books. What actually moves the needle is the strategy on top of them. Here's the difference.
