Financial model builds
You don't know what you don't know.
Neither does the spreadsheet.
Hiring, pricing, and expansion decisions are riding on instinct because the numbers can't keep up. We build the model that shows what's ahead — your revenue drivers, cost structure, and capacity, with the scenarios you actually need to test before you commit. Fixed fee, two to four weeks, and the model is yours to keep.
The problem
You're not in crisis. That's part of what makes this easy to postpone.
The business works. Revenue is real, the team is busy, the lights are on. What's missing is instruments. Last month's P&L arrives on the tenth and tells you what already happened. Your accountant can say where the money went. Nobody can say where it's going.
So the decisions that actually move the business get made on instinct: hire two more people now or wait a quarter, raise prices and risk the churn, take the client who'll eat forty percent of capacity. Instinct is often right. You have no way of knowing which times.
And the questions that matter most are the ones you can't currently answer. What happens to cash in month four if the hire doesn't produce until month six? How much can we grow before capacity breaks? What does losing our largest client actually do to us — not emotionally, arithmetically?
That isn't carelessness. Nobody ever built you the instrument that answers them.
What we build
A forward-looking model of your business, built on your actual financials.
We start with your historicals — P&L, balance sheet, payroll, customer and revenue detail — and work backward to the drivers. Not "revenue grew twenty percent," but what produces revenue: units, rates, headcount, utilization, retention, seasonality. The model is only as good as those drivers are honest, and getting them right is most of the work.
Then forward. A revenue build you can argue with. A cost structure with fixed and variable properly separated. Headcount and capacity, so you can see which constraint binds first. And cash flow — because profit and cash are different questions, and the second one is the one that wakes you at three in the morning.
On top of that, scenarios. Not three columns labeled good, better and best. The specific decisions in front of you, modeled: the hire, the price increase, the second location, the client you might lose. Change the assumption, watch the consequence play out over the next eighteen months.
And a scorecard — the handful of numbers that tell you whether the business is tracking to plan, in a form you can check monthly without rebuilding anything.
You receive three things. The model itself, built in Excel, yours to keep and run. A working session where we walk through it live with you, so you can drive it rather than admire it. And a short written memo of what we found while building it: the assumptions that didn't survive contact with the data, and the places the business is quietly fighting itself.
That last one is usually the part founders remember.
Why this is usually the right first step
Two reasons.
The first is risk. Fixed fee, a few weeks, a bounded deliverable you own at the end. You know what you're buying and what it costs before you start. If we turn out not to be the right people for the bigger work, you found that out for ten thousand dollars and you still have a working model.
The second is what happens while we build it. To model a business you have to understand it — how revenue is actually produced, where cost really sits, which constraint binds first, and which of the founder's beliefs the numbers don't support. Doing that honestly surfaces the operational problems worth solving next. The pricing nobody has revisited in three years. The service line quietly losing money. The capacity ceiling arriving in the fall. The one person every process routes through.
We won't pretend that's incidental — it's why this is the project we most often recommend first. But the model has to be worth it on its own, and it is. Some clients take the model, run on it for a year, and call when something else breaks. That's a good outcome too.
How it works
What it costs
The model
From $10K Two to four weeks
Complexity moves the number — multiple entities, several distinct revenue models, or books that need reconstructing all add work — and we quote it before we start, not after.
Fixed fee, quoted in full before we begin. No hourly meter, and no scope-creep invoice at the end. The model is yours to run.
The first week is discovery. We get read-only access to your financials and spend real time with you and whoever knows the numbers best, mapping how money actually enters and leaves the business. Most of the useful arguments happen here.
Weeks two and three we build, with a check-in against a draft partway through, because the fastest way to find a wrong assumption is to show you a number that looks off.
Then the walkthrough: a working session, recorded, so the model gets handed over rather than delivered. Then the memo.
What we need from you: read-only access to your accounting system, payroll or headcount detail, revenue detail at whatever granularity you keep it, and roughly three to four hours of your time across the engagement. If the model takes a month of your attention, we've built the wrong thing.
Common questions
What does it cost?
Fixed fee starting at $10K, quoted in full before we begin. No hourly meter, no scope creep invoice at the end.
How long does it take?
Two to four weeks from kickoff to walkthrough, depending on the state of your data and how quickly we can get time with the people who know it.
What if our books are a mess?
Common, and not disqualifying. We work with what exists and tell you plainly where the numbers are load-bearing and where they’re a guess. If reconstruction is genuinely required, we’ll say so before we start and price it in. What we won’t do is build a confident-looking model on numbers we don’t trust.
Who maintains it afterward?
You do, and it’s built for that: labeled assumptions, no buried hardcodes, documentation inside the file. The walkthrough exists so your team can update it without us. Some clients have us refresh it quarterly. Most don’t need to.
Do we need a finance person to use it?
No. It’s built for the founder making the decision. If you have a controller or fractional CFO, they’ll pick it up immediately.
What if it turns up something bigger?
We’ll tell you what we found and what we’d do about it — and you’re free to act on it with us, with someone else, or on your own. The model is yours either way.
More of what we do
Custom software
You’ve outgrown spreadsheets and off-the-shelf tools. We build software your team will actually use, and you own all of it.
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A buyer’s lens on your business before a buyer takes one — findings ranked by valuation risk.
Read more →AI solutions
Seats aren’t adoption. A paid workflow audit, then the expensive work rebuilt with AI inside it.
Read more →Get the other instrument.
A 30-minute conversation about where your business is, what's not working, and whether we can help. If we can, we'll tell you exactly what we'd do first. If we can't, we'll say so.
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