Make your next 90 business days your best 90 business days.
You want a more profitable, more sellable business - and we help you build one with a method we’re proud to share.
We’ve designed the room so one afternoon gives you what would take months to find on your own. One expert. One topic. Real numbers from real clients your size. And one rule: if you want to talk, you need to show what you paid or what you received. Everything else is air.
One afternoon a month that routinely uncovers tens of thousands of dollars sitting untouched in your business.
Each session, we hear from our category expert showing the receipts from their clients on what’s moving the needle for companies your size. This means no canned keynote speech, no dusty slideshow, no softball future predictions. They are there to look at your financial data and help you make smart choices. That’s the only thing they’re there to do.
You’ll also learn prices, outcomes, and key contacts from trusted peers who’ve already made the move - business owners just like you, showing what they paid and what they got.
Whether you need to avoid the pitfalls, learn the guardrails, or just pave the safe road ahead, Top Quarter focuses on repeatable best practices for profitable businesses that want to stay that way. The outcome is threefold: make fewer mistakes, make more money, and drive a stronger bargain when you sell.
And stay married while you do it. The true value of work life balance goes beyond a hashtag into sustainability: owner-operators who focus on work during work hours and their personal life after hours stand a better chance to keep both. Facts.
Top Quarter is a kick in the pants wakeup call for making real revenue a priority - with peer accountability on expert advice from people who’ve already spent the money.
Private round table · 50 founding seats · Closes June 1 · Request a Seat →
Most businesses fail inside ten years - 60, 70% of them. So if you’re not in the top quarter of business practices, you’re not going to have a business. You have to aim for the top quarter of practices across all these different areas.
I want people to have their best 90 days, their best business quarter, and be in the top quarter of any industry they’re in.
That’s why I called it Top Quarter.
Vistage can give you coaching. EO can give you community. A fractional CFO can give you one perspective. Top Quarter gives you a working session with receipts - one afternoon a month where the expert looks at your actual numbers, your peers show their actual results, and you leave with an actual list of what to do next.
It won’t be there forever. But it’s right there.
There’s so much fear in business. You place imaginary boundaries between yourself and the next level because you don’t know if the cash flow is there to get there. Sometimes it is. You just don’t know it yet.
What you don’t need is a campfire hangout where we all sing a song about how good it feels and then you leave going - now what.
What you get is a list of five people you could phone, a number in mind of what they should charge you, a calendar to expect it, and a metric to hold them to. If they hit it, you go: we’ve done great.
Two people I know.
One is family. She and her husband built a profitable business in Florida. Good cash flow, real customers, decades of hard work. They wanted to sell - their adult children were in Canada, their health was turning. They spent two extra years stuck in Florida because buyers kept walking. The books were a mess. The systems ran through them. They didn’t have a handle on the box they were selling.
The other is a family friend. Late 60s. Made millions. The business still runs. But he’s accepted he won’t sell it - no one has the skills and the cash and the appetite to take it on as it sits. He’s going to lock the door and walk away.
Both of them poured two inches of whiskey and forgot it was probably millions of dollars.
These are not cautionary tales from a business book. These are real people in my life. And they are everywhere - profitable operators who never thought at 50 about what they’d do at 65.
The gap between a business that sells at 6× and one that closes is almost never the revenue. It’s the architecture. On a $1M EBITDA business, the difference between a 3× and a 6× exit is $3 million. Not created by growing the business. Created by making it legible, clean, and buyer-ready.
Every session at Top Quarter moves that number. That’s the actual product. The monthly savings is how you pay for it.
You didn’t build this business to run it forever. You built it to fund something. This room helps you get there.
It’s a 50 person room - enough variety that you feel like there’s a bunch of people there, but not so broad that you can’t know everybody. You feel like you could text or call anybody and say: hey, I don’t know you, but let’s talk.
At 50 you can know each other. You need to see 50 other profitable companies telling you what they spent on a lawyer, what they spent on an accountant, what they spent on marketing - and just have that data in your head. Next year you want to be at $7 million, and those five people are all at $7 million, and they spent the same money. So you don’t have to be afraid of it.
It’s lonely at the top. Most CEOs don’t have that person they can phone. And most haven’t created a culture where they can talk numbers. Most people who own a business do not have someone they can call and say: I want to look at the bill. I want to see it.
That’s the room.
The added value of a community changes your experience from group learning to a true business network with successful peers you can trust, built on transparency and respect.
If you want to come off mute and talk, show me the screenshot first.
Dollars you spent or dollars you received. What you paid, what you saved, what you recovered. Everything else is air.
You’re going to be in a room where you can call bullshit - and someone pulls up the screenshot and says: here’s $15,000. Here’s exactly what came back. And you go: okay. I’m listening.
No receipts, no floor.
Every session runs one of the Money Lanes - the categories where profitable businesses leak the most and where a single expert conversation pays for itself. Payment processing. Business insurance. Cash flow. Tax structure. Your SaaS stack. Contracts. Payroll. Marketing and customer acquisition. Debt and financing. Exit readiness.
Every lane meets you where you are. If you’re leaking, we stop the leak. If you’re stable, we tighten the margin. If you’re ready, we build the thing a buyer wants to own.
At 50 members, the expert can actually prepare for the room. Your submitted stats card goes in before the session. The presentation comes out of your data, not a template.
The map grows as the room does.
I pay them in front of the room. You watch the money move. That’s how you know this is not a keynote speech. Not that dusty slideshow they’ve given a hundred times. They are there to look at your numbers and tell you what they see.
Every member who submits a stats card - a one-page index of your key business stats, submitted before each session - gets their numbers looked at directly. The expert goes through the room: if you’re under this number, here’s your move. If you’re over it, leave it alone. Here’s who to hire, what they cost, how long it takes.
A 0.2% move on a $5 million business is $10,000. Right there. Do that 10 times and someone just handed you $100,000. You’d say - I’m sorry, what?
The top quarter of businesses aren’t ignoring AI and they’re not going all in on it. They’re using it where it moves a number - and spending the rest of their time lowering costs, negotiating better rates, tightening margins, and building the kind of operation someone pays a premium to own. Playing with AI tools is not the same as growing a more profitable, more sellable business. These are the things that actually move the exit number - and most of them are sitting untouched.
These are active, ongoing drains - almost certainly present in your business today - each fixable with a single decision, a single call, or a single conversation.
Operating as an LLC taxed as a sole proprietor above $100K net means 100% of profit is subject to 15.3% self-employment tax. An S-Corp election splits income - distributions avoid self-employment tax entirely. One IRS form. Most owners were never told this existed.
Auto-renewing at 5–15% annual increases on an already-inflated base. Wrong classification codes, outdated payroll figures, redundant endorsements. An independent broker audit costs nothing. Most businesses that do it save 15–25% at next renewal.
Flat-rate bundles a hidden markup on top of wholesale interchange. On $50K/month in card volume, the spread between flat-rate (2.9%) and interchange-plus (1.9%) is $500/month. One conversation with a processor. Sometimes with the same provider.
The average business in this range pays for 40–75 SaaS subscriptions. A significant portion are redundant, abandoned, or auto-renewing on a card no one monitors. One person, one afternoon. Businesses that do this cut 20–35% of software spend in the first pass.
The most valuable marketing asset in the business - hundreds of past buyers who cost nothing to reach - sitting completely uncontacted. One re-engagement email routinely generates $10,000–$50,000 in reactivated revenue. No ad spend. No new leads.
Inflation and labor costs have increased 20–30% since 2021. A 10% price increase on $3M revenue is $300,000 in additional gross revenue with zero additional cost. Most B2B clients accept a well-communicated annual adjustment.
Collecting at net-52 instead of net-30 on $5M revenue means $300,000 in unnecessary float. At 7% cost of capital: $21,000/year in pure opportunity cost. A four-touch automated follow-up sequence, built in one afternoon, reduces average collection time by 10–18 days.
The most expensive person in the business spends 60–70% of their time on work a $60K–$80K manager could handle. Every hour the CEO spends on $40/hour work is an hour not spent on $500/hour work. This is a delegation problem, not a time management problem.
These ranges reflect what operators at this revenue level recover across these categories. Based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of owner-operated businesses. Your number will be different. It will be real.
Every member receives a TQ Score - a 0 to 100 index measuring how sellable your business actually is right now.
It measures five things: how clean your financials are, how independently the business runs without you, how mature your operations are, how defensible your market position is, and how ready your structure is for a transaction. Those five components, weighted and scored, produce a number.
Below 50 means asset sale only.
3 to 4 times EBITDA at exit.
4 to 6 times EBITDA at exit.
6 to 8 times EBITDA at exit.
Every session moves the score. That’s how you know the afternoon was worth showing up to.
Your P&L, cost structure, and vendor stack get reviewed against the room’s benchmarks. Private. No pitch.
Your numbers benchmarked against the room. You’ll see where you stand.
Every vendor scored. Overpayment identified. Vetted shortlist provided.
Specific. Documented. Actionable. $10K minimum mandate. If the CFO intake doesn’t identify $10,000 in 30 days, your first month is free.
0–100 sellability index. Your starting line. Every session moves the number.
Every person at this table starts with the same intake. Your numbers are private, but your starting point is never unique. That shared context is what makes the room work from the first session.
You join for the room. You get immediate value through the intake. You stay because the room compounds: better decisions, better operators, better exits.
Based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of owner-operated businesses in this revenue band.
50 seats, capped. Launching June 1 with whoever’s ready.
The founding members are the first receipts. That’s what founding means. Next year this page will have names and numbers on it. Right now it has a room being built by people who decided to stop waiting for proof and become it.
If your CFO intake doesn’t identify $10,000 in 30 days, your first month is free.
Bring whoever needs to be there - your ops lead, your controller, your accountant, your coach. That’s the Tandem Format: the expert sessions are designed for the decision-maker and whoever has to execute the decision. No extra charge. I want you to leave and go do the work.
Same annual membership. Different payment schedules.
I grew up next to one. My father and his partners ran a construction business for decades - $30 million a year, hard-built, fragile in the ways you only see from the inside. The decisions made under pressure, at 9pm, with no one to call. What it costs when the business gets shaken and you’re the only one who knows where the walls are.
I’ve built and hosted a room before. 250-plus exceptional people, built from dormant to full in just over a year. I know what it takes to make a room produce something, and I know what it looks like when it doesn’t.
This room runs on one conviction: no operator should have to figure it out alone, in the dark, with no one who has actually done it.
This room exists because too many profitable businesses close instead of sell, and too many operators make expensive decisions alone that a single conversation would have fixed.
One expert. One topic. Real numbers on the table. Every month.
My job is to make the room worth showing up to. Yours is to show up.
The founding members are the first receipts. Next year this page will have names and numbers on it. Right now it has a room being built by people who decided to stop waiting for proof and become it.
If your CFO intake doesn’t identify $10,000 in 30 days, your first month is free.
You’ll get a human response, a 20-minute conversation, and a straight answer.
Or write directly:
Not every applicant is accepted. Fit matters more than availability.
Top Quarter is not for:
If you’re in the revenue band, you run on receipts, and you’re ready to do the work, this room was built for you.
Book the 20 minutes or write directly. No pitch. No deck. No follow-up sequence if it’s not right. You’ll get a human, a straight conversation, and a straight answer.
This is not a campfire. If you want to talk in this room, you show the screenshot first.