1:1 ADVISORY · $5M TO $50M COMPANIES
Tired of being the only one who sees the whole picture.
Quest Advising is one advisor, embedded in the business rather than advising it from outside, working with the owner rather than the leadership team, with no end date on the relationship.
Roughly nine owners at a time.
Most of the companies we work with are in decent shape. Capable team, real margins, a product that works. Nothing is broken.
What is true anyway is that every call that matters still routes to one desk. The team brings options instead of positions, because positions get overruled. Over a few years the company grows to the size of one person’s calendar, and everyone works very hard inside that ceiling.
The harder part is not the volume. It is that there is nobody to check the thinking with. The people qualified to argue with you all report to you. The people who do not report to you do not know your numbers, your people, or what you decided last quarter.
So at three in the morning you are not short of frameworks. You are short of one person with the whole picture who will say what he actually thinks.
WHAT THIS IS
Max Kozlovsky is a growth partner, embedded in the business rather than advising it from outside, working with the owner across everything from the pricing call that landed Tuesday to the three-year picture nobody has written down.
You work with Max. There is no associate, no assigned guide from a network, and no point where this gets handed off. That is why the roster is around nine.
BEFORE YOU CALL ANYONE
Most owners at this size are already in something, and they should be.
Here is an honest read on what each one is built to do.
Operating systems
EOS · Scaling Up · Metronomics · Great Game · Summit OS
Installing a repeatable meeting and priority rhythm into a leadership team is the hardest thing to build from scratch, and these systems do it with a proven toolset so you do not have to invent one. EOS is the fastest and simplest to install. Scaling Up goes deepest on strategy and cash. Great Game is unmatched on financial literacy and giving every employee a stake in the numbers. They are also clear about their own design, and that clarity is a feature. An EOS implementer does not tell the owner what to do, because the answers are meant to come from the leadership team. The engagement is built to finish, which they call graduation. The client is the team.
Peer groups
Vistage · EO · YPO · TAB · C12 · Convene
A room of people who have carried the same weight, under confidentiality, on a disciplined monthly rhythm, with a structured method for working a real issue. Most of the majors include one-to-one time with your chair inside the base fee. EO and YPO forums go further and deliberately forbid advice-giving, restricting members to their own lived experience, which is precisely what makes those rooms safe and honest. Most Quest clients should be in a room too, and several are. Quest often works best before or alongside one, because an owner who has already sharpened the question gets more out of the day he spends there.
Online programs, courses and masterminds
This is how most owners meet a good framework for the first time, and a lot of the material is excellent and cheap relative to what it teaches. Knowledge is rarely what is missing at this size.
Consulting firms
Analytical firepower and an answer backed by a team, which is a capability most companies between $5M and $50M cannot staff. When you need a hard piece of analysis done properly, hire one. They are built to study, deliver and hand it back.
Fractional COO, CFO and integrators
Someone genuinely runs a function, part-time and embedded, and is in the business more days a month than Max is. If what you need is someone to run it, hire an operator.
None of that is a criticism, and every one of those is good at the job it was built for. Quest sits in the seat none of them was built for, which is next to the owner, across the whole business, with nobody scheduled to leave.
HOW IT WORKS
Bring the decision, get an opinion.
Not a question back. Not a deck in three weeks. An opinion, from someone who already knows your numbers, your people and what you decided last quarter.
The alternatives decline to answer on purpose, and their reasons are good ones. An implementer holds back so the answers come from your team. A forum forbids advice so nobody in the room can sell you anything. Both are sound design. Both mean the answer has to come from somewhere else.
By month four Max has the context, which is the whole point. You are not briefing anybody. You put the thing on the table and get a straight read on it in five minutes instead of forty.
IN THEIR WORDS
Owners who have been through it.
Bridget
“It was just too difficult for me to do it alone.”
Lucas
“I need a strong board and I need a coach.”
Lucas
“The best results have come when I’m least involved.”
Bridget
“We found our love again.”
THE RANGE
The same person, either way.
Some weeks we build the financial model. Some weeks the model is fine and you are the thing in the way. Same conversation either way, same person, already holding the context.
Where that second one is true, we work on it. Not as a separate program, just because it is what has to move before anything else will.
“Very patient, very thorough, quite demanding, but realistic.”
Dr. Bryan Stuckey · Perrin 410
ONE EXAMPLE
A veterinary practice owner came to Max carrying seven figures of debt.
He later sold the practice for an eight figure number, at a twelve times multiple, with net margins above thirty percent. He also said this about his own week: “I reduced my time in the business from 60 plus hours per week to 15 hours per week.”
7 figures in debt
where it started
8 figure sale
at a 12x multiple
30%+
net margins at exit
He did not start out convinced.
“I was kind of dubious. I have had management consultants. I have been to seminars and all of this, but I was very pleasantly surprised at the tremendous increase in the growing of our business.”
Dr. Bryan Stuckey · Perrin 410
AND FROM OTHERS
"I'm pretty good at what I've been trained to do as an engineer, but I was not trained to run a company."
Jim Westbrook · Westbrook Engineering
"Within a year we are averaging more pages as a publication, seeing our highest revenue as a company."
Tomas Martinez III · Luxury Home Magazine
"Our small business has doubled in revenue and improved profitability."
Peter and Lisa Moon · Paper Moon Painting
"He makes us feel equal. He's the leader, but he's right there with us."
Bridget
"After nine months of focused effort our culture is better than it has ever been since purchasing the business four years ago."
Garrett Wacaser · Safety Supply
"I can be gone now, and I have the comfort level that things will be carried out as they should be."
Dr. Bryan Stuckey · Perrin 410
IF YOU ARE WEIGHING A SYSTEM
Decide before you install.
Most owners at this size are weighing a three-year operating system install somewhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. That is a good decision to make deliberately. It is also a decision you cannot un-buy in month five.
The implementer who sold it to you is bound to the purity of his system, and structurally cannot tell you it might be the wrong fit at this stage. That is not a knock on him. It is what he signed up for, and the purity is part of why the system works at all.
If the right move is to install one of them, you will hear that from Max, and you will go in knowing which parts you actually need.
IF YOU HAVE BEEN BURNED BEFORE
The version we hear most is not that the person was incompetent. It is that you found out two months in, and two months is the expensive part.
“Everyone sends me a proposal and says they can do it. Half of them are blowing smoke. They won’t admit it until after I’ve invested two months of my life with them, and I don’t have that kind of time.”
So there is no proposal cycle here, and there is no open commitment either.
The first engagement is one quarter.
It starts with two days together, on your property, with whoever else needs to be in the room. Then ninety days of the actual work. At the end of it we both stop and say plainly whether it is working.
Ninety days is not a trial and it is not discounted. It is one full turn of the work. Priorities set, priorities worked, an honest look at what moved. It is the shortest run in which you see the real thing instead of a version of it built to impress you.
If it is working, we keep going, and after that there is no end date. If it is not, you have a finished quarter and a set of priorities you can run without me, and neither of us has to make it awkward.
Two more things worth saying plainly, because they come up.
If you think you are too far along for coaching, you probably are. This is not skills coaching and it is not somebody checking whether you did what you said. You are going to keep making the calls. Max is the second read before you make them.
And if the honest answer after one conversation is that what you need is an operator, or a room, or an implementer, you will hear that instead.
"If you have a leadership team that's not willing to change or not open to feedback, it's not going to be a great partnership."
Caroline · Blades Group
ABOUT
Thirty plus years in business. Seventeen in the room.
As an entrepreneur, in startup and scale-up, and inside top consumer packaged goods companies. Seventeen of those years in the room with owners.
Roughly nine clients at a time. That is not a waiting list and it is not a sales device. It is the number that makes everything above possible.
1:1
No associates, no handoff, no substitution
$5M to $50M
The companies this is built for
By referral
And deliberately low volume
