No pitch · No pressure · No predetermined agenda
Most people who reach out already know something is wrong. They're not sure whether it's worth talking about — or whether Jeff is the right person to talk to. This page answers both questions.
How it starts
Jeff will ask: "What brought you here?"
That's not a formality. It's the beginning of the diagnostic. Your answer — however you frame it, however incomplete it feels — tells him more than a prepared presentation would. The way you describe the problem is often the first data point about where the real problem lives.
There is no slide deck. No capability overview. No structured pitch. Just a conversation that follows the thread of what you've told him.
What Jeff will ask
That's not a bad sign. It's how he works. Every question has a reason — he's building a picture of the organization before offering a single observation. Here is roughly what he covers, and why.
Revenue, headcount, locations, legal entity structure, business lines, back-office structure. Not to qualify you — to understand the scale and shape of what he's walking into. A $10M company with three employees and a $10M company with 200 employees are different problems entirely.
Has anyone tried to fix this before? What happened? The answer to that question tells him more about organizational change tolerance than any direct question about culture could.
Who in the organization is closest to the problem? Who would be most affected by a change? Is there anyone whose buy-in is essential before anything moves? He is mapping the human terrain before he has seen a single system.
By committee, by the owner, by whoever is loudest? Who defines success — and is everyone aligned on that definition? A technically correct solution that doesn't account for decision culture will fail the same way the last one did.
Is the urgency internal — leadership sees the cost and wants it fixed? Or external — a compliance deadline, an audit finding, a transaction that requires the operation to be in order? The source of pressure shapes everything about how a solution needs to be built and how fast.
Not the end state — the 12-month state. If everyone in the room can't answer this question the same way, that's already a finding worth noting before the engagement starts.
What to expect from Jeff
If the data supports a different conclusion than the one you arrived with, he'll say so. That's not confrontational — it's the only way this kind of work produces results.
A few things worth knowing before you talk:
That's by design. He's looking for root causes, not symptoms. The questions can feel relentless — they are. That's the diagnostic.
That's not a bad sign. He won't fill silence with words he doesn't mean. If he pauses, something you said landed and he's working with it.
Which sometimes means he'll come back to you rather than improvise. A wrong answer delivered with confidence is worse than no answer at the time.
Not in theory. Not in conference rooms. With the people who will actually use it, in the environment where they'll use it. If that means the first conversation doesn't produce a proposal, that's the right outcome.
On rates
There's no reason to spend three meetings getting to know each other and then discover the engagement doesn't fit the budget. Jeff will describe how he prices engagements — project-based, retainer, or fractional — and answer any questions directly. If there's a fit in scope and budget, you'll both know it by the end of the call.
How to know if it's worth the call
Most people who call Jeff don't. They have a sense that something is costing more than it should — in time, money, or people's patience — but they can't articulate exactly where it lives. That's fine. That's often the point. Here are the situations where a first conversation is almost certainly worth having:
Your operation is growing faster than your systems and processes can support it
A technology implementation has stalled, failed, or produced something that doesn't work the way it was supposed to
You're preparing for a transaction, leadership transition, or ownership change and the back office needs to be in order
You have a compliance deadline — CMMC, NIST, federal contract requirements — and you need someone who has done this before
You need senior technology or operational leadership on a fractional basis — not a hire, not a vendor, but someone embedded in the work
Something is costing you more than it should and you can see it, even if you can't name it yet
Ready when you are
Fill out the form and describe what's on your mind — however rough. Jeff will read it before he calls, which means the conversation starts further along than a cold introduction.