Applying institutional finance discipline to a business that had never seen it.

Residential trades businesses are a category that institutional finance has largely ignored. They run on intuition, on the phone, on the truck, and on whatever the owner happens to be paying attention to in any given week. Books often close late. Pricing is usually set by what the last competitor charged. Marketing is whatever the local advertising rep most recently sold to the owner. Capital decisions get made by which equipment salesperson showed up that morning. The category creates real cash flow and real wealth for the operators who run it well, but the financial sophistication that’s standard at a $500M Fortune 500 business unit is mostly absent.

I bought one to find out what would happen if you applied the discipline anyway.

Operate the business. Apply institutional finance practices that would translate — and identify which ones wouldn’t. Build the systems and the operating cadence the previous owner hadn’t built. And learn what’s actually different about strategic finance at this scale, because the differences matter and the experience is what gives the rest of my consulting work its credibility.

The first work was infrastructure. Implementing CRM and dispatch software the previous operation didn’t have. Standing up automated scheduling. Building the cost database and pricing model that turned every quote from intuition into a calculated number. Running the kind of dashboard the business had never had — daily revenue, daily margin, daily booking rate, daily technician utilization. Most of that work would be unremarkable inside a public company. At small-business scale it was a structural change in how decisions got made.

The marketing automation work was the next layer. Customer segmentation, reactivation campaigns, a published pricing model so the business stopped negotiating every job from scratch. Building the membership program — recurring revenue applied to a transactional business — which is the same servitization move from the Baxter playbook, scaled all the way down.

The AI and software work was the surprise. Operating a small services business with the tools that have become available in the last two years is meaningfully different from operating one before they existed. I’ve built internal tooling, inspection analysis software, and automated marketing infrastructure that wouldn’t have been possible to build inside a small business five years ago. Some of those tools have become their own products outside DeGeorge. The operating company became, accidentally, a research environment for what small-services-business operations look like when modern tooling is actually applied.

Not everything in the four years has gone the way the plan said it would. A combination of inherited liabilities, market timing, and improperly capitalized growth led to a voluntary restructuring. Restructuring at small-business scale is its own discipline — different from the Chapter 11 work I saw as an analyst at ATA Airlines two decades earlier, and different from the institutional restructuring scenarios most senior finance leaders read about in case studies. Working through it from the operator’s chair, with personal exposure and real stakeholder relationships on the line, is a kind of credential that doesn’t appear on a résumé but matters in the work I do now.

The operating company runs. The infrastructure that wasn’t there in 2022 is there now. The financial discipline that wasn’t applied is applied. The technology layer that’s accumulated has produced real operational improvement and has spun off into a separate set of software ventures. The restructuring work is the work it needs to be. The business has been an honest education in what institutional discipline can do at small-business scale — and what it can’t.

The institutional finance toolkit translates, but most of it has to be modified before it works. The 100-page strategic planning process becomes a one-page operating priority document the owner can actually use. The board reporting package becomes a weekly dashboard the operating team actually opens. The five-year capital plan becomes a quarterly capital allocation conversation tied to actual cash on hand. Same discipline, scaled to the cadence of how decisions actually get made.

The other thing that transfers is harder to name. There is a kind of operator credibility that only comes from having had skin in the game — having signed personal guarantees, made payroll in tight weeks, negotiated with creditors, and felt the difference between making a decision in a deck and making the same decision when it’s your name on the line. That credibility is the part most senior finance consultants don’t have, because most senior finance consultants haven’t operated.

For the operators I now work with, that combination — Fortune 500 finance discipline and small-business operator experience — is the unusual shape. The institutional toolkit applied with the operator’s understanding of what actually gets used and what doesn’t. That’s the consulting offer. This case is the proof that the offer is real.