I was the undersized kid on the team. The coach made me captain anyway, and I earned it on loose balls and offensive rebounds, the ones nobody else wanted to fight for. One game I spent the whole night on the other team's best player and shut it down. Walking off, the coach said good hands today, well done. I have thought about that phrase ever since.
The first business I ran was a kid's business in the neighborhood. I paid my brother three dollars a job, flat, whether the job was worth fifteen dollars or thirty-five. I saw the problem fast. The pay had nothing to do with what each job was worth. I changed the deal, and I have been changing that deal in one form or another ever since.
I have lived inside P&Ls and spreadsheets since I was a teenager. That has a cost. I talk about levers the way most people talk about weather, and I assume the room sees what I see. Years later, helping run a much bigger business, I put an incentive on customer satisfaction scores. I meant it to buy better service. What it bought was people leaning on customers to change their scores. The scores went up. Churn went up with them, two or three points of it, which is a lot of money walking out while the dashboard said things were improving. The plan did exactly what it paid for. I had assumed it would do what I intended.
The best CEO I have worked for pulled me aside around then. Slow down. If they can't explain it back to you like they're five, they don't understand it, and you haven't done your job yet. I still hear that in most meetings.
I am not an accountant, and I have never wanted to be one. I have worked with CPAs who find things in the actuals I would walk right past. They can reconcile a revenue line and enjoy it. I would rather read what they found and decide what it means. When there is revenue to reconcile, I want one of them in the room.
For ten years I ran a service company. Every year had a month where the cash went out before any came in: payroll, equipment, the vehicles back on the road, all of it due before the first invoice cleared. I would stare at that hole every time. A fifth of the customers left each year for ordinary reasons, so growing at all meant replacing them first. Cash first, every week. I learned it there.
Then seven years at FTI Consulting, thirty companies through restructurings and transactions. One was a retailer with revenue in the billions. It had four ways of quoting gross margin percentage. I asked around the executive team and the finance team and no two people gave me the same number. Each one was defensible. None of them had an owner, so the true margin drifted lower every quarter while everyone watched the sales line, and discounts and returns both crept up underneath it. The metric that mattered was gross margin dollars against last year, and what moved them: mix, rate, discounts, promotions, returns. A $20M business has one definition of margin, and often nobody is watching it either.
Today I am the number-two executive at a $750M global business. I own pricing and incentive strategy end to end and report to the owners. I still hold that job and I like it. So my name stays off the site for now. You get it on the call, first thing.
Good Hands Capital is what I do with the rest. I take a handful of situations a year and I do the work myself. I read your business the way I learned to read mine. I find the levers and put a number on each one. Then I stay for the part where the money has to show up in the P&L. The fee follows the number.
The call is fifteen or thirty minutes. Bring the number that bothers you.