Small business consulting

So you can get back to why you started.

I spend time inside your business and find what's eating your hours and your money. Then you can put both back into the reason you started it.

An outside look at how your business runs day to day

The premise

Every business looks different from the inside. You stop noticing the thing you walk past every day. So I walk in, watch how the work moves, and tell you what I saw. Half the time the fix isn't software at all.

How I work

Nothing gets sold on the first visit.

  1. A conversation, first

    We sit down and talk through how the business runs. The till, the schedule, the inventory count. No pitch deck, no audit form, and no proposal until I've heard all of it.

  2. Time inside the business

    I spend real time where the work happens. A day on the floor beats a week of guessing at it from outside.

  3. Straight talk on what I find

    I tell you plainly what's costing you time and where it's coming from, so you can decide what's worth fixing.

Most conversations start with the assessment below.

The assessment

Find out where the time is going.

I built an assessment that looks at how work moves through your business. Twelve areas, six questions each, and every question is a situation you'd recognize from your own week. You answer, I read it, and you get back a written report on where the hours are going and what's worth doing about it.

The twelve areas

  • Sales & customer follow-up
  • Customer service
  • Marketing & advertising
  • Inventory & ordering
  • Finance & bookkeeping
  • Staff & hiring
  • Day-to-day operations
  • Shipping & logistics
  • Product development
  • Online store & sales
  • Training & know-how
  • Pricing & quoting
  1. Four areas

    Four areas of your business, looked at properly. Same questions and the same written report as the above tiers, just a narrower slice.

  2. Six areas

    The previous four, plus two more. For when the first pass turns up something you want followed further into the business.

  3. All twelve areas

    Every function in one picture, including how they hand work to each other. Most of what owners find surprising lives in those handoffs.

You could run this yourself. The tools exist, and plenty of owners are already using AI to do it. It takes most people five to ten hours and a paid subscription to get to something useful, call it five hundred dollars of your own time. Mine is free right now, and the recommendations and the implementation plan come with it.

If you'd rather I did the fixes than hand you a list, I quote that separately once you've seen the report.

Start the assessment

Sixteen to twenty-four questions, about five minutes.

About

An outside view built from a lot of insides.

Fresh Eyes is one person. I've spent my working life inside businesses of every size, on both sides of the counter, and the same habit followed me through all of them: watching how the work gets done. Here's where it came from.

  1. My targets came from a Fortune 500 head office, but my accounts were bars, corner stores, and independent retailers. Every day was spent translating between the two. I learned how big companies think, and how small business owners actually live with those decisions.

  2. Mica was a small business that held the exclusive Canadian rights to a major global sporting brand. I worked the dealer network from the distributor's side, where allocation and pricing decisions ripple out to retailers across the country. It showed me how much of a small company's success rides on the systems nobody sees.

  3. A local storefront selling big-name brands. I learned the business from behind the counter, where inventory, scheduling, and the customer standing in front of you are all competing for the same hour. Retail teaches you fast where the time actually goes.

  4. The closest thing to what Fresh Eyes does now. I rebuilt their event scheduling and planning workflow using tools they were already paying for, put front of house and back of house on one shared calendar, and started them on a proper CRM and event management platform. The changes stuck because they fit how the business already ran.

  5. Right now I sell marketing and sales folks on the importance of showing up at trade shows with an impactful booth. The company I do it for is an extremely successfull small business, but I still see things every week that could run better. Currently piloting a sales automation platform that im "building" from scratch using claude, apollo, and all sorts of connectors and skills. That's the vantage point Fresh Eyes is built from. Even the good ones lose hours nobody's counting.

Questions

Before you reach out.

  1. Fresh Eyes is one person. When you email hello@thefresheyesconsulting.com, I'm the one who reads it, and I'm the one who shows up. No account manager, no handoff to a junior consultant.

  2. A written report on your business, built from your answers to eighteen questions across the areas you pick. Every tier gets the same depth of report, just a different slice of the business.

  3. Both. You start with a short form, and I follow up to set up a time to walk through the assessment together, in person. The report comes back in writing after that.

  4. I read every submission myself, so give me a day or two. If something in your answers needs checking before I write the report, I'll email you first.

  5. The report is the list and the plan. If you'd rather I did the work than hand it to you, I quote that separately once you've seen what's in it. No pitch built into the assessment itself, either way.

Get in touch

Tell me about your business.

No pitch and no commitment. Send this over and I'll set up a time to walk through the assessment together, in person.

Prefer email? hello@thefresheyesconsulting.com

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