Your business is profitable.
So where did the money go?

It is the question that ends more founder-owned companies than any downturn does — and it is almost never answered by the people closest to it, because the answer is distributed across a dozen decisions that each looked reasonable at the time.

Three weeks. Two principals. Every lever in your business, ranked, with a number attached to each one. If we do not find at least three times our fee in value you can actually reach, you pay nothing.

See if it fits What you get

This is not for most companies.

It is for you if

You own or run a business between $5M and $150M in revenue.
Something is changing — growth that has outrun the systems, a margin that keeps slipping, an offer on the table, a lender asking harder questions, or a succession nobody has named out loud.
The numbers arrive late, and you do not entirely trust them when they do.
You have already asked your CPA, and the answer was accurate and did not help.
You are prepared to be told something you will not enjoy hearing.

Do not hire us if

You are pre-revenue, or under roughly $5M. The work costs more than it can return at that size.
You want a deck that says the plan is sound. Sometimes it is. We will say so, and that is not what you are paying for.
You have already made the decision and want it validated.
You will not give us the general ledger, the bank statements and an hour with the person who actually runs operations.
You need it in a week. Three weeks is the floor for work that will hold up under a buyer's diligence.

It rarely announces itself. Revenue is up for the fourth year. The P&L looks fine. And yet the line of credit that was supposed to be seasonal never quite clears, payroll is a conversation instead of a transaction, and the owner has started checking the bank balance before opening the financials — because the balance is the only number that has not disappointed him.

Underneath it is usually the same handful of things. A customer that has quietly become a third of the business. A product line running at negative contribution that nobody has measured since the price was set. Terms that were extended to win an account and never pulled back. Inventory or work-in-progress absorbing every dollar the business earns. An entity and contract structure built for a company a quarter of the size.

None of these are failures of effort, and none of them show up in a monthly close. They show up when a lender re-prices the facility, or when a buyer’s diligence team finds them first and takes the difference out of the number on the table.

We have been on every side of that moment — running the company, signing the financials, sitting on the board, and buying the business from the other side of the table. This is the work we built the firm to do.

A ranked set of decisions.
Not a set of observations.

Fee

$40,000

Fixed. No hourly, no overage.

Duration

Three weeks

From records received.

Your time

About six hours

Across the whole engagement.

If we are wrong

You pay nothing

Under three times the fee in addressable value, the fee is returned.

Week one
Everything on the table
The general ledger, the last three years, the bank and debt structure, the customer and product margin detail, the contracts that carry real obligations. Interviews with you and the three to five people who actually run the place. We work from source documents, not from a management summary.
Week two
Where the money actually is
We rebuild the unit economics from the bottom up and find the gap between what the business earns and what it keeps. Cash conversion, pricing and margin by customer and by line, the cost of the working-capital cycle, the concentrations that a buyer will price against you, the structural risk sitting in the entity and contract stack.
Week three
The decision, not the observation
Every lever we found, ranked by the value it carries and the effort it takes, each with a number attached and a named owner. Delivered in person, working session, not a PDF in your inbox. You leave the room knowing what to do first.

And so there is no confusion, it is not

A strategy deck.
A valuation or a fairness opinion.
A benchmarking study against companies that are not you.
Legal, tax or securities advice.
A junior team learning your business on your money.

One more thing, because it changes the arithmetic: if you engage us afterwards to execute what we found, the entire $40,000 credits against that work. The diagnostic is how we meet. It is not how we make our living.

Answered here, so you do not have to ask.

Forty thousand dollars is a lot for three weeks.

It is roughly half of what a Big Four transaction advisory team charges for the same scope, and you get principals instead of a manager and three analysts. Measure it against the thing it is actually competing with, which is not another consultant — it is the cost of running another four quarters on numbers you do not trust, or of taking an offer priced against a weakness nobody named. And if we do not find at least three times the fee in addressable value, you do not pay. We are the ones carrying that risk.

I do not have three weeks of my time to give this.

You do not need three weeks. We need about six hours of yours across the engagement, and access to your people and your records. The work is ours. If we needed you in the room for all of it, we would be charging you to teach us your business.

Blackfriar is new. Why would I trust you with this?

The firm is new. The people are not, and that is the only part that matters at this size. Reif acquired a specialty finance company from an institutional owner, financed it, closed it, and then ran it as chief executive. He has been chief financial officer of an oil and gas company, president of a family office, and president and in-house counsel of a public financial services company. He trained as a corporate, securities and commercial real estate lawyer, and has built and exited operating businesses. You are not hiring a firm's brand. You are hiring the two people who will be in the room, and they have sat in your seat.

What stops this from being a report that sits on a shelf?

Three things. It is ranked, so there is a first item rather than a list. Every lever has a number and a named owner, so it is a decision rather than an observation. And it is delivered as a working session, where we argue about it with you until you either commit to the first three or tell us why they are wrong. If you want help executing it afterwards, we do that too, and the full fee credits against it. If you do not, you keep the work and we are done.

My CPA already tells me all of this.

Your CPA tells you what happened, correctly, and has a professional obligation not to speculate about what to do next. That is a different job and a good one. We are looking at the same records to answer a different question — where the value is trapped and what it would take to release it. If your CPA is already answering that, keep them and do not hire us.

I am not sure I want to know.

That is the most honest objection on this page, and it is usually the one underneath the others. The thing you are avoiding does not get cheaper. It gets priced by somebody else, at the worst possible moment, usually by a buyer with better information than you have.

We have held the seats, not advised them.

The seats, held

Chief executive officer. Chief financial officer. President. In-house counsel. Board member. Across specialty finance, oil and gas, a family office, and a public company. Not advised — held.

Principal, not adviser

Reif acquired a specialty finance company from an institutional owner alongside a partner, then ran it. Underwriting, financing, closing and then owning the consequences. Most advisers have never been on that side of it.

We carry the risk

The money-back gate is not a marketing device. It is the only credential a new firm can offer that costs it something. If we are wrong about your business, we are the ones who pay for it.

Regulated, capital-intensive, cash-cycle-sensitive

The businesses where the finance function and the legal structure are load-bearing rather than administrative — and where getting them wrong shows up late and expensively. That is the whole career, not a practice area.

Blackfriar is a new firm and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We have no client list to show you and we will not invent one. What we have is the record of the people doing the work, and a fee we will return if we are wrong.

One call. Thirty minutes.

1
You write two or three sentences about what is changing and what is at stake. That is the whole application.
2
We speak for thirty minutes — a principal, not an associate. We will ask what your cash conversion cycle looks like and what your largest customer represents. If you do not know, that is information, not a failure.
3
We tell you on that call whether the diagnostic is worth your money. If it is not, we will say so and tell you what to do instead. That happens often enough that we planned for it.
4
If it fits, you have the engagement letter that day and we start when your records arrive.

Two principals. We run three diagnostics at a time, because we deliver them ourselves. That is the only scarcity here and it is arithmetic, not pressure.

Start a conversation

And to say it once more plainly: if the diagnostic does not surface at least three times its fee in value you can actually reach, you pay nothing. You are risking a conversation.

The gate is written into the engagement letter, not implied here. “Addressable” means value you can reasonably act on within twelve months, evidenced in the report, and you make that call in good faith within fifteen days of delivery. We would rather you read the clause than trust the sentence.

Your business is profitable.So where did the money go?