Value creation for mid-market companies
Making businesses worth more.
Performance is only half of it. The other half is proving where it came from: the data, process, and reporting behind the number.
increase in company valuation ExGuard Manufacturing
increase in company valuation ModTek
within twelve months of the engagement Confidential client
The valuation gap
Every business knows what it earned. Fewer can prove where it came from.
Ask most owners which product line carries the margin, or which customers actually renew, and the answer takes three weeks. Nothing about that delay changes what the business earned. It changes what the business can do about it, and eventually what someone will pay for it.
When a business is being sold, that gap gets priced in quietly and usually nobody tells the owner it happened. When it is not being sold, the same gap shows up as a product line nobody realises is losing money, or a customer nobody realises is the most profitable one.
Either way it is not a performance problem. It is a proof problem, and unlike the market or the rate environment, it is buildable.
Most owners find out what their reporting is worth during diligence. We get there first.
The two levers
Every business has two numbers.
Move the first and the business earns more today. Move the second and every dollar of those earnings is priced higher when the business is valued. It is the same work.
In practice
Eight revenue streams. Three of them carried the profit.
The business was already profitable. It ran eight distinct revenue streams and reported on all of them together, which meant nobody could say which ones were carrying the others.
Six months of work on the data and the reporting changed that. The answer was not the one anyone expected: almost all of the profit was coming from three of the eight. What the owners did with that information is to their credit, not ours. Within a year, EBITDA had tripled.
Nobody in that story was preparing to sell. They wanted to know where the money was actually being made. That is the whole argument: a business that can prove where its value comes from runs better now, and is worth more whenever someone finally looks.
How we do it
The Alignment Quadrant Analysis
Think about your business as a kitchen. You have ingredients, recipes, tools, and a chef. We grade all four, not one of them.
Data
If the inputs are wrong, or defined differently in each part of the business, everything downstream inherits the error: the weekly report, the pricing decision, and the number anyone is later asked to trust.
Process
Undocumented process means the answer changes depending on who you ask and when. That is what makes a business slow to answer questions about itself, and expensive for anyone else to take on.
Platform
The most examined of the four quadrants, and the least often guilty. Sometimes the system genuinely is the problem. Usually it is not, or not only.
People
Judgement, ownership and the capability to keep it running after we leave. Fix the other three without this one and the gains leak back out.
Better tools will not save you. If the recipes are vague and the ingredients are spoiled, better tools just help you fail faster.
of digital transformations fall short of their objectives.
BCG, Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success, 2020. Based on 825 senior executives surveyed and BCG's work with 70 client companies.
of organisations both improve performance and sustain the gains.
McKinsey Global Survey, 2018. 1,793 participants.
Two firms, two methods, one answer. BCG names six factors that separate the winners. McKinsey names five. In each list, exactly one of them is the technology.
The newest version of this is AI. A business asks for agents and discovers the constraint was never the model. An agent plans, reads, decides and acts across several steps, so a wrong read early contaminates everything after it. Nothing underneath could answer the question reliably enough to act on, which is the ingredients problem again, moving faster and costing more.
We tell you which quadrant is actually holding you back. Sometimes that costs us the software project.
How an engagement runs
Find out. Build it. Keep it running.
Most firms sell you one of these three. The gains leak out between them, which is why we are built to carry all three and why you are not obliged to buy more than the first.
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01
Find out what is actually wrong
Senior operators, not a junior team learning on your time. The Alignment Analysis grades all four quadrants and names the one holding the business back, in board-ready form.
TSG Advisory -
02
Build the thing the diagnosis asked for
Defined scope with a stated end. Requirements, build, testing, training, deployment, and a hypercare period after go-live. Scoped against the findings rather than against an assumption written before anyone looked.
Professional Services -
03
Keep it running after we leave
Undefined scope, ongoing. A rebuilt reporting stack decays without someone senior owning it, and most mid-market businesses need that person less than full time. A flat monthly fee, hours that roll over or pull forward when demand spikes, and no long-term lock-in. Delivered on Salesforce.
Managed Services
There is a reason that last one belongs on this page rather than in a support brochure. A business whose reporting depends on one administrator who might leave is carrying key-person risk in the place a buyer looks hardest.
We are not platform agnostic, and we would be wary of anyone who says they are.
The diagnosis assumes nothing, and often the finding is that your platform is not the problem at all. We have people with real experience across Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite, so an assessment does not come from a room where everyone only knows one answer. What we build and what we run is Salesforce. When the right answer is a build somewhere else, we say so and introduce you to people who do that work properly.
For PE & advisors
We work on your problem, not only the portfolio company's.
Sponsors, M&A advisors and family offices bring us in at four points in the life of a holding.
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Pre-acquisition
What the systems and data actually support, and what they will cost to fix after close.
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Post-close value creation
The first-100-days operating infrastructure, built so the thesis has something to run on.
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Sell-side readiness
Getting reporting defensible 12 to 24 months before a process starts, not during one.
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Portfolio-wide
The same operating spine across multiple holdings, so the second one is faster than the first.
A Quality of Earnings report tells a buyer what the business earned. Nothing in it tells them whether the number could be produced again next quarter. That is the part we build.
Where to start
The Alignment Analysis
A short, fixed-scope diagnostic that tells you which of the four quadrants is holding the business back, and what it is costing you: in profit now, and in valuation whenever the business is priced.
- Fixed feeScoped and priced up front. No retainer.
- Under three weeksBoard-ready findings, not a discovery phase.
- No sales sequenceYou get the findings whether or not you engage us.
Contact
Start the conversation.
Tell us roughly where the business is and what prompted the question. We will come back to you ourselves. There is no sequence behind this form.
Or reach us directly:
Info@tekstakgroup.com
617-918-7038