Fit
Typical clients
Who LINX usually works with, and where we're the wrong call. Reading this and deciding not to contact us is a good outcome for both of us.
- The businesses we usually work with
- Where LINX is a strong fit
- Where LINX is the wrong call
The profile
The businesses we usually work with
Roughly 5 to 50 people. Roughly $500K to $10M in revenue. Past the point where the owner can hold the whole business in their head, and short of the point where there is a management layer to hold it instead.
Two shapes come up more than any other: an owner-operator whose company outgrew the way it was run, and a second-generation or newly bought business that inherited somebody else's systems and never got to choose them. The third is a company with real demand that is losing money somewhere it cannot see.
In common
What they have in common
Almost none of it is industry. Nine industry pages exist because the mechanics differ, and the mechanics matter. What repeats is the shape.
01 Demand is real.
Nobody here needs convincing that customers want the thing. The phone rings.
- Work comes in without a new campaign behind it
- Referrals still arrive from jobs finished years ago
- The hard part sits behind the sale rather than in front of it
02 The company outgrew the way it is run.
Systems that worked at half this size are being held together by two or three people's memory.
- The process lives in somebody's head rather than on paper
- Two people can answer a given question and nobody else can
- One vacation exposes more than any audit would
03 Somebody already tried something.
A consultant, a hire, a piece of software, and often all three.
- There is a binder, a dashboard or a report that nobody opens
- The software got bought and half configured
- The last attempt made the owner slower to trust the next one
04 The owner is still the escalation point.
Money, people and anything unusual all land on the same desk.
- Decisions wait for one person to be free
- Staff ask rather than decide, because asking is safer
- The business runs at the speed of the owner's calendar
Fit
Where LINX fits, and where it does not
A strong fit
- Real demand and real potential, with the systems, controls, leadership, capacity or owner role behind the company
- An owner who will change how the company operates, not only how it gets described
- An owner who will open the numbers
- Somebody inside the business to hand something to, or the willingness to let us provide the hands
Not the right fit
- The owner wants a report and is not willing to make changes
- The economics do not work and nobody is willing to confront that
- The need is primarily legal, tax, clinical or another specialty outside our scope
- A solo operator who wants one strategy session, which is a coaching call rather than an engagement
- An owner who wants somebody to agree with a decision already made
- The market no longer wants what the company makes, which cannot be fixed from inside the building
The shape matters more than the industry. If you recognized yourself in the first half of this page and not the second, the fit is probably there.
The six doors
What they usually come to us with
Six doors, in the owner's words rather than ours.
Not sure
If you're not sure
Most owners recognize three of those six, which is normal and not a problem. If you'd rather work it out on paper before talking to anyone, two things here do that without a form.
Start the conversation
Not sure you're our kind of client? Ask.
You'll have the answer inside the first thirty minutes, and a pointer somewhere else if it's no.
