How I Evaluate a Business in 72 Hours

A friend called me recently and said, "I've got a business that's doing okay but I know it could do better. I just don't know where to start." I told him to give me three days.

Seventy-two hours later, he had an interactive strategy platform with competitive analysis, ranked marketing channels, an AI tool evaluation, a product expansion roadmap, a 2-year action plan with live ROI calculators, and networking recommendations for his industry. Not a PDF. Not a slide deck. A working tool he could adjust with his own numbers and show to his team.

His response was, "How is this possible?" Here's the short version — and keep in mind, this is just a fraction of what goes into a full engagement.

Why I go this deep

Let me explain something first, because it changes the context of everything that follows: I work on revenue share. I don't invoice for this analysis. I don't bill by the hour. When I evaluate a business, I'm evaluating whether I want to bet my time on its success — because my income depends on the revenue we generate together.

That changes everything about how thorough I am. A consultant billing $300/hour is incentivized to take longer. An agency billing fixed-price is incentivized to keep it surface-level and move on. I'm incentivized to go as deep as humanly possible, because the better I understand the business, the better I can build tools that actually generate revenue — and the more we both make.

Your success is literally my success. That's not a tagline. It's a compensation structure. And it's why the analysis I deliver in 72 hours goes deeper than what most businesses get from six weeks of traditional consulting. I'm not doing this to impress you with a deliverable. I'm doing it because my livelihood depends on getting this right.

Start with the money, challenge the assumptions

After 25 years of FP&A, I can't look at a business without first understanding how money flows through it. Revenue sources, margins, acquisition costs, repeat purchase rates. Most marketing consultants start with "let's redesign your website." I start with the P&L, because if I don't understand the financial structure, I can't tell whether any marketing channel is a good deal or a waste of cash.

Then I challenge the comfortable assumptions. When a business owner tells me they have no direct competitors, I push back — not to be difficult, but because it's almost never true the way they think it is.

Evaluate the tools, expand the product, rank the channels

I audit the marketing tools a business is actually using — not just what channels they're on, but whether their AI content tools, ad platforms, and workflows are producing results worth the cost. I've found businesses spending their entire monthly content budget on AI-generated assets that weren't ad-ready because the tool wasn't designed for their use case. Swapping to a purpose-built alternative produced 5-7x the output at comparable cost.

Then I look at product expansion through the FP&A lens: what assets does this business already have — manufacturing relationships, certifications, materials, supply chains — that could produce adjacent products with minimal new investment? This is where 25 years of analyzing business operations across six industries pays off. I see expansion opportunities that the owner hasn't considered because they're too close to their current product to see the platform underneath it.

I rank marketing channels by estimated revenue impact for the specific business — not by what's trending. A DTC product brand gets a completely different playbook than a financial services professional. For one client, TikTok Shop was the clear #1 channel. For another, LinkedIn thought leadership and referral partnerships mattered far more. Generic marketing advice is worth exactly what you pay for it.

Deliver it as something that actually gets used

Here's my pet peeve with consulting: the deliverable is usually a PDF that gets opened once and forgotten. I deliver strategy as an interactive web platform — scroll-triggered sections, expandable drill-downs, live ROI calculators where you plug in your numbers and watch projections change, all branded in the client's colors. It's designed so that when you show it to your team, your partner, or your board, the format communicates the caliber of the thinking before anyone reads a word.

The 2-year plan breaks down into quarterly phases with specific, named deliverables. Not "improve social presence" — more like "launch TikTok Shop, onboard team to these specific AI tools, film batch content session, publish 4 SEO articles targeting these keywords, approach these 3 industry contacts." Each quarter builds on the last. By Year 2, the business has a self-sustaining growth engine.

And like I said — this is just a fraction of what a full engagement covers. The evaluation is the starting point. From there, I build the tools, platforms, and systems the strategy identified — all on revenue share, all with the same depth of analysis applied to every technical and business decision.

The referral engine nobody designs but everybody wants

I don't have a marketing department. I don't run ads for my own services. I don't cold-call anyone. Here's what happens instead:

I do the work. The client shows the interactive platform to someone — a friend, a business partner, a fellow owner. That person has never seen anything like it. They ask who built it. The client says my name. A conversation starts.

That's the entire growth strategy for my own business. Do work so good that it markets itself. The revenue share model makes this sustainable because I don't need 50 clients to pay the bills — I need a handful of partnerships where the product generates real revenue over time. Quality over volume. Depth over breadth.

And honestly? It's the same advice I give my clients. Build something genuinely excellent. The people who experience it will tell other people. That word-of-mouth engine is slower to start than paid advertising, but it's more durable, more profitable, and far more enjoyable to operate.