Colombo, LK
Colombo, LK
A $100,000 finance hire makes sense at $50 million in revenue. At $3 million, you likely need ten hours of that judgment a week, not forty. We give growing businesses senior marketing and finance capability, part-time, in proportion to what they actually need — then build the systems so that judgment keeps working once we're not in the room.
Marketing creates demand. Finance tells you what that demand is actually worth once costs and capital are counted. One retainer, split across both — because a business is one economic system, not two departments.
Diagnosed through segmentation, targeting, and positioning, then built out through the four levers — product, price, place, and promotion — until the mix is pulling its weight on margin, not just top-line noise.
A business can grow its top line every quarter and still be in real trouble — a budget that's drifted from actual spend, cash tied up longer than it needs to be, no clear read on what's actually left over. This side builds the budget, the financial scorecard, and the discipline of checking the whole picture every cycle — growing or not.
An agency alone grows revenue. A financial consultant alone controls costs. Neither alone can tell you if the growth is actually worth having — a company can land customers at a price that looks fine until you count what it costs to service them, or grow the top line while burning through every dollar of working capital it has. Both partners check their scorecards against each other every cycle, so a revenue win can't quietly turn into a cash problem nobody saw coming.
Engagements can run all three ways, or start with whichever side needs the work first.
Each side of the retainer breaks down into specific, run-every-cycle work you can check against the calendar.
We map who actually buys from you, at what price, and why they picked you over the next-best option — then the marketing budget follows that map.
Messaging, channels, and pricing follow what the segmentation actually found. If your best customer isn't the one your marketing is talking to, that changes first.
Every deal that stalls does so at a specific stage. We find it, instrument it, and fix the actual bottleneck.
The team checks this every Monday — the same numbers a board would ask for, available all year instead of once a quarter.
Every cycle, the budget gets rebuilt against what the business actually spent the month before.
A margin problem gets caught the month it starts, because the financial scorecard is reviewed in the same meeting as the sales numbers, every cycle.
Receivables, payables, and inventory, tightened until the business is funding its own growth instead of running on the bank's money.
Lenders and investors ask for specific things. This gets that reporting built and current, months before you actually need it.
One read on the business, done once, by two partners working from the same numbers.
Both partners check the same two scorecards against each other, every cycle, so nothing moves on one side without the other side seeing it.
One engagement, one price, built from day one toward the point where the business can raise capital on its own numbers.
A Gridwerk engagement is built to end. The goal is a business that no longer needs the retainer — with the equity upside from having built it.
We baseline the business against its own numbers — an STP/4P read on the revenue side, a budget and scorecard read on the cost side — before proposing where the retainer starts.
02Both partners work inside the business, building the routines and the numbers it runs on, until the revenue engine and the cost discipline are both holding without instinct filling the gaps.
03Once fiscal discipline and a working revenue engine are in place — not before — the remaining constraint on most businesses is capital. We help structure and source financing to fund the next stage of growth, typically tied to an equity position rather than fees alone. Capital accelerates a good machine. It doesn't fix a bad one, which is why this step comes last.
04A hire or an existing team member is trained to run what we built. Once the business can run the system on its own — tested by stepping away for a defined period — the retainer winds down. The equity position remains.
Senior judgment changes the trajectory of some businesses and is simply the wrong tool for others. Worth knowing which one you are before we talk.
Both partners work inside the business, not around it. Bios below are a first draft — to be confirmed before this goes live.
Independent marketing, brand, and design consultant with a background spanning civil engineering and behavioral economics, including five years at Santani Wellness Resorts as Director of Brands and Product Development — an approach to marketing built on economic first principles rather than execution for its own sake.
Runs fractional CMO engagements across sales-led and consumer brands, with a diagnostic method built on segmentation, targeting, positioning, and the four Ps.
Finance professional with over eight years of experience across financial auditing, advisory, financial modeling, and investment analysis, including time at EY — brought in to run the budgeting, financial scorecard, and capital-structure side of every engagement.
Builds the financial discipline that makes growth financing possible, and the scorecard both partners run the business against.
This section fills in as brands come through the model. Reach out for engagements currently underway.
Also building: Gridwerk Tools, subscription software that packages the same analysis for teams who don't want a retainer.
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