Before you hire, one question needs a clear answer: can your commercial engine feed two people, or just one?
If the pipeline has always run through you - your relationships, your reputation, your presence in every conversation - a second consultant doesn't change that. They take on delivery. You still do all the BD.
This session maps that gap. Before the hire creates a cost the pipeline can't cover.
The Commercial Engine Audit is a 90-minute working session. We go through your commercial engine - how the pipeline is built, where it's dependent on you, what would need to change for a team to generate consistent work without you in every room.
By the end of the session, you'll have a clear picture of where the engine is solid, where it's fragile, and what the highest-leverage change is before the transition happens.
You'll receive a written Commercial Readiness Map within 24 hours - a specific, named gap assessment you can act on, share with an incoming hire, or use as the brief for the next phase of work.
Tech boutiques at this stage tend to have the same pattern. Two to five clients, real revenue, the offer working. A first hire approaching - maybe already made.
The question that doesn't have a clean answer: where does the pipeline come from once someone else is on the team?
The solo practice ran on the founder's network. That's not a design choice - it's how early traction works. The first three clients came through relationships. They hired you, personally. And that worked.
But when the firm grows, the commercial engine that built the solo practice doesn't automatically scale. A second consultant can absorb delivery. They can't absorb your network.
The pattern that follows is consistent: the founder ends up doing 100% of BD for a team, while also managing a second person's delivery. The hire solved the capacity problem. It created a different one.
The audit is designed to surface that gap before it becomes that story.
At the end of the session and within 24 hours, you'll receive:
The written summary is detailed enough to share. Most founders who go through the session use it as the brief for the 90-day sprint. Some share it with their incoming hire. Either way, it's a working document - not a report that sits in a folder.
This session is intentionally narrow. It’s focused on one decision and the immediate implications of that decision. We’re not:
We're auditing one thing: whether the commercial engine is designed to support more than one person. That's the decision in front of you. Everything else becomes clearer once that decision is made with accurate information.
This works best if:
It’s less useful if you’re not yet selling, or if you’re looking for a broad strategic exploration rather than a concrete output.
1. Book your session: Payment and time selection in one step. This confirms your spot.
2. Short intake form (5 minutes): Sent right after booking. Covers your current pipeline situation, your hiring timeline, and the commercial pressure you're feeling now. It prepares both of us for the session.
3. Session (90 minutes): We meet and work through your actual context.
4. Commercial Readiness Map (within 24 hours): You’ll receive a written summary with the three-area gap assessment, one verdict, one next action.
5. Optional 20-minute check-in, two weeks later: At no additional cost. Covers what's moved, what hasn't, and whether the next action needs adjusting based on what's happened since the session.
The First Yes Session is $600, credited 100% toward the 90-day sprint if you decide to go further.
The sprint is the full commercial engine build - positioning, offer architecture, BD system, content motion - delivered over 90 days. The fee for most founders in that programme is in the $8–12K range. If you go that route, the audit fee is deducted in full.
If you don't go further, you still have the Commercial Readiness Map.
Because each session is delivered personally, we run a small number each quarter - typically four to five. When those are full, the next availability opens the following quarter.
Marcus had been running his cloud infrastructure boutique for two years. Fully booked. Turning down work. Pulling in freelancers by the hour to get through delivery.
He came to the audit with a clear plan: make a first hire. A senior cloud engineer, someone who could own delivery on two or three projects and free him up to think about the business. The person was almost identified. He just wanted a sense check before signing anything.
We spent the first twenty minutes mapping how his engagements actually ran. Every project was scoped differently. Every client had a custom setup, a bespoke architecture, decisions made in real time based on Marcus's judgment and context. There was no playbook. There was no documented approach. There was barely a consistent onboarding sequence.
A senior engineer coming into that environment wouldn't free Marcus up. They'd need Marcus in every decision, every client call, every technical review - because none of the knowledge that made the work valuable had ever been written down. The freelancers were managing fine because Marcus was managing them. A hire wouldn't change that dynamic. It would just make it more expensive and harder to exit.
The second problem was the pipeline. Marcus was fully booked, which felt like a commercial success. But every project had come through direct referrals - his network, his former colleagues, his reputation from a previous employer. There was no inbound. No BD motion. No system for following up with contacts who had gone quiet. Three conversations in the last quarter had drifted into silence because he'd been too busy to respond. He hadn't noticed until we went through the log together.
The capacity constraint had masked a commercial fragility. He looked busy. The pipeline looked healthy. But it was running entirely on goodwill and memory, and there was nothing in place to sustain it once the referral well ran dry or once he was no longer personally available to every client.
The hire he needed wasn't a second consultant. It was an operations and marketing assistant - someone who could start documenting what Marcus did well enough for it to be repeatable, build the basic marketing infrastructure that would generate consistent inbound, and handle the follow-up and process gaps that were quietly losing him work.
That wasn't the answer he came in with. But it was the answer the audit produced.
Six months later, he had a documented engagement framework, a small but important lead flow that didn't depend entirely on who he'd had coffee with recently, and a much clearer picture of what the second hire - the technical one - actually needed to look like.
That's what the Commercial Readiness Map is for. Not to confirm the plan you already have. To find out if it's the right one.
Book your session below. You’ll be taken to a page where you can choose a time and complete payment in one step. This secures your spot.
Book your Commercial Engine Audit →(For tech boutique founders · Small number of sessions per quarter)