Bring the decision you keep putting off.

The work is good. The handful of customers you have are happy and would say so. Everything before that point is the problem: who exactly you are for, what you say in the first sentence, and which door you knock on first.

Finding customers is the problem people bring to us most often, and it is almost never solved by doing more of what is already not working. An hour with someone who has positioned businesses for a living tends to be spent narrowing, not adding.

You would leave withA sharper description of who you are for, and one route to market specific enough to test next month.

This is not a reach problem, it is an offer problem. What the thing actually is, what it is called, and how the pieces fit together into something a person can decide to buy.

It shows up as a website nobody can finish writing, a proposal rebuilt from scratch every time, and a team who each describe the business slightly differently. An hour with somebody who packages offers for a living is mostly spent deciding what to leave out.

You would leave withA description of the offer that a stranger could repeat back to you, and a decision about what to stop selling.

The expensive version of this mistake is well documented: an owner hires a senior salesperson on the strength of the company on their CV, without ever asking whether that person found their own buyers or had them handed over. Nine months later the money is gone and the pipeline looks the same.

An hour with someone who has built a sales function from nothing will tell you whether you are ready at all, what the first hire actually needs to be, and what has to be written down before you advertise.

You would leave withAn honest read on whether to hire now, and a clear view of what the role really is.

There are four ways out of this and they are not interchangeable. Hire somebody. Build a bench of people you trust enough to subcontract to. Turn what you do into something that does not need all of you. Or put your prices up and do less of it.

Each one has a different failure mode, each one changes what the business is, and realistically you get to try one at a time. That is worth an hour with somebody who has watched all four play out.

You would leave withA clear view of which route suits the business you actually want, and what trying it would cost.

Pricing is the fastest lever most businesses have and the one they touch least. Most fix it early, when they know least, and then treat it as a fact about the world rather than a decision they are allowed to revisit.

An hour on pricing is usually spent on structure and nerve rather than the number itself. What are you actually charging for, how does the buyer want to pay for it, who signs it off, and what happens the first time you say a bigger figure out loud without flinching.

You would leave withA price you can defend, and a way to test it that does not frighten the customers you already have.

Anyone running a business eventually has to hire somebody more experienced than they are at the very thing they are hiring for. That is exactly what makes it so hard to assess, and it is the hire people tell us they most fear getting wrong.

Spend an hour with somebody who has run large teams and made this hire many times and the interview questions improve immediately. So does the job description, which is usually the real problem.

You would leave withA clear brief for the role, and the questions that would actually catch a mis-hire before you make it.

A business that has stopped growing is a harder problem than one that never started, because everything is working just well enough to defend. The answer is rarely a new tactic.

More often the proposition, the pricing or the market moved and the business did not. Working out which of those three it was takes an outside pair of eyes and about an hour.

You would leave withAn honest read on which of those three has actually shifted, and what to do about it first.

Public sector buying in the UK has a grammar of its own. Frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems, pre-market engagement, the difference between a real budget and a keen conversation, and the question of who inside a trust or a department is genuinely allowed to say yes.

Getting it wrong is rarely fatal, but it usually costs a year. The people below have sat on the buying side of it as well as the selling side.

You would leave withA realistic timeline, and a straight answer on whether your route to that buyer exists yet.

Enterprise deals are rarely lost in the pitch. They are lost inside the buyer’s own organisation: the security review nobody warned you about, the procurement team that appears in month four, the sponsor who moves teams, the budget that quietly relocates.

People who spent whole careers inside those companies can draw you the map, because they have been the person on the other side of the table deciding whether to bother.

You would leave withThe real decision chain, and the specific thing to ask your champion next.

Build or buy. Rewrite or patch. Whether the roadmap is honest, whether the architecture survives the next customer, whether the estimate is an estimate or a hope. These are the questions you cannot ask alone if you are not technical, whether the people building it are your own team or an agency you are paying.

You do not need a permanent CTO to answer them. You need one hour with somebody who has been one, and who has no stake in the answer.

You would leave withA second opinion you can act on, in language you can take straight back to the team.

Founders tell us raising is taking longer than they expected, and that they are being asked to show traction and a clearer growth logic earlier than they had planned for. That makes runway a strategic question rather than a spreadsheet one.

What helps is not another deck review. It is somebody who has sat on both sides of the table telling you plainly which parts of your story are load-bearing, which are decoration, and how long you genuinely have.

You would leave withThe two or three objections you will keep hearing, and a way to answer them that does not sound rehearsed.

Which market, in what order, through which channel, and what the compliance, logistics and tax reality looks like once the first order actually lands. Exporting is a very expensive thing to learn by trying, and the mistakes tend to arrive several months after the decision.

An hour here is often the difference between one considered market and three half-served ones.

You would leave withA first market chosen for a reason you can say out loud, and a list of the things that will bite you.