Growth Consulting
The operating work that makes a business worth buying.
We buy businesses and we run them. The work that moves a company between entry and exit is available on engagement, to owners and sponsors we hold no position in. It is the value creation, margin, and readiness work that comes before a transaction, or after one.
Why we do this
The same work we do in our own positions.
Kadenwood invests as an operator. Where we hold a position, the difference between entry and exit is made by a defined set of work: demand the company owns rather than rents, a sales process that survives the founder's absence, reporting a buyer can rely on, and people who carry the decisions the owner used to carry.
Growth consulting is that work, unbundled. The engagement is the same and only the ownership is different. We invest to grow a business quickly and drive it to a return rather than to hold it, and engagements run on that clock. We say so plainly when an engagement is not one we would take.
Capabilities
Five bodies of work.
Owners come to us with one of these named and the other four attached to it. We scope against what we find rather than against what was asked for.
Revenue systems and distribution
We build demand the company owns rather than rents. That begins by reading the buying language and trigger events already present in the serviceable market, then working backwards from those signals to the offer and the message that meet them. What remains is a repeatable source of qualified conversations that does not reset when a media budget is cut.
Sales process and enterprise conversion
We install the process that turns those conversations into contracted revenue: qualification criteria, stage definitions, pricing structure, and the terms governing what is collected upfront against what sits in the back end. Deal structure gets written down rather than improvised per deal. Buyers pay for revenue a process produces, not revenue a founder produces.
Operating infrastructure and reporting
We put in the systems that carry fulfillment and the back office: how work is taken in, tracked, delivered, and closed, and how each of those states is reported. Numbers move out of the founder's head and into records a lender, a buyer, or an incoming manager can read without translation. Diligence is unkind to businesses that cannot produce this on demand.
Leadership and talent
We define the seat, recruit into it, and hold it to a standard: the closers and operators a business needs to run without the owner in the middle of everything. A company whose judgment sits with one person trades at a discount to one whose judgment is distributed. Taking the owner off the critical path is value creation, not delegation.
Exit readiness
We prepare the company for the process before the process starts: quality of earnings, customer concentration, working-capital behaviour, contract assignability, and the parts of the story a buyer will test first. Findings get addressed while there is still time to address them, which is the difference between a diligence adjustment and a diligence discount. Whether it ends in a sale, a refinancing, or nothing at all remains the owner's decision.
How engagements run
Embedded, scoped, and measured.
The terms below are the same on every engagement. They are the reason we can only run a few at a time.
Embedded
We work inside the business rather than alongside it. Engagements are staffed by the people doing the work, and they sit in the operating rhythm: the same meetings, the same numbers, the same accountability as the team.
Defined scope
Each engagement is scoped to a build with a stated beginning and a stated end. We are hired to install something and to leave it running. A retainer that renews because nothing was finished is not the arrangement.
Measured against baselines
We record the operating baseline before starting: how demand arrives, what converts, what the owner personally carries, and what the reporting withstands. We then report against it. Direction is reported honestly, including when it is flat.
Selective by design
We take a small number of engagements at a time, because embedding is the method. Where we would not have been prepared to put our own capital behind the outcome, we decline the mandate and explain why.
Questions
What owners ask first.
How is this different from hiring a consulting firm?
Consultants advise. Operators build.
A consulting engagement usually ends in a recommendation the client then has to implement with its own people, on its own time. Ours ends with the work running inside the business: distribution, sales process, reporting, and the people holding them. We are accountable for whether it still runs once we have gone.
Do you only work with companies you invest in?
No. Most engagements involve no investment by us at all.
The test is the same either way: we take on work where we would have been prepared to own the outcome. The engagement is scoped and priced as advisory, and neither side is obliged to transact afterwards.
Where does this sit next to your advisory work?
Advisory runs the transaction. Growth consulting changes what the business is worth before one, or after it.
The two are scoped and engaged separately, and neither is conditioned on the other. An owner who works with us on the operating side is free to run a process with whoever they choose, and we will say so at the outset rather than at the end.
What does an engagement look like?
It opens with a diligence conversation running in both directions.
If there is a fit, we scope a build against what we found, usually some combination of distribution, sales process, operating infrastructure, and the hires that carry them, then embed to install it and hand it over against a defined finish. If there is not a fit, we say so, and you keep the read-out either way.
Transaction credentials available upon request.