For owners of working SMBs with real operations, employees, customers and data. Data-driven, CRM-agnostic, measured by outcomes.
Pick the area. Every problem below comes with the solution category and the measurable result.
The company runs, but only because the owner keeps supplying decisions, approvals and attention.
The company functions because you continuously supply decisions, approvals, information, relationships and attention.
Pricing, exceptions, hiring, difficult clients, vendor decisions and internal problems all end up on your desk.
Quotes, decisions, escalations and important relationships wait for you.
You hire for leverage but end up answering more questions, resolving more ambiguity and supervising more work.
New employees depend on apprenticeship, tribal knowledge and repeated explanations from senior staff or you.
The company is too small for a full-time CFO, COO, HR or analyst, so those functions are informal or done by you.
Critical processes or knowledge depend on one person, exposing you to resignation, illness or poor performance.
Performance gets confused with accumulated tribal knowledge or control over critical information.
Demand exists, but the path from lead to closed order leaks time, margin and information.
Leads sit unanswered, managers forget follow-ups, and some leads disappear without a clear reason.
You cannot reliably tell whether the gap comes from skill, lead quality, pricing, discipline or luck.
Lost deals are logged as “didn’t buy” or “too expensive”, hiding the real cause: pricing, response time, qualification, execution or bad-fit demand.
Similar jobs get different prices depending on judgment. Discounts are arbitrary and quotes end up on your desk.
Sales says customers reject the price, but you cannot separate true price sensitivity from weak selling, slow response or bad leads.
Top-line revenue hides falling order volume, conversion, repeat rate or customer count until revenue finally drops.
Customers are paid for once and rarely engineered into a future revenue base.
Revenue depends on continuously finding or re-closing customers. Existing relationships are not engineered into a future revenue base.
The business keeps reacquiring demand instead of compounding value from customers it already paid for.
One or a few customers account for enough revenue that losing them threatens profitability or survival.
Important relationships depend on you personally. If you step away, those customers may weaken or leave.
Revenue is visible; cash timing, real margin and true profit are not.
The business produces revenue, but cash inflow is volatile and hard to forecast.
Growth increases receivables, inventory, payroll and purchasing before customer cash arrives.
Weak payment terms, delayed collection and inconsistent enforcement mean you are financing your customers.
The business leans on your savings, credit card or personal guarantee whenever cash gets tight.
You know sales and the bank balance, but not which customers, products, channels or jobs actually create profit.
High-revenue customers or jobs can consume disproportionate labor, support, discounts, rework or capacity.
Reported profit ignores the market cost of you performing several executive and operating roles.
Costs are incomplete or aggregated, so loss-making work is discovered late or not at all.
More orders create more coordination, firefighting and owner involvement.
Higher volume produces more coordination, mistakes, firefighting and owner involvement.
Each customer or order creates a new exception, so selling more also creates more custom coordination.
Missed follow-ups, margin loss, overdue work or bad quotes surface only after a complaint, delay or financial loss.
Incidents get fixed, but nobody checks whether the standard, estimate, process or threshold itself is wrong.
Order status, priorities, assignments and deadlines live in spreadsheets, messengers or memory.
The data exists in CRM, spreadsheets and chats, yet basic management questions need people and manual work.
CRM, spreadsheets, accounting and chats hold the information, yet basic management questions take several people and manual work.
Won orders, failed estimates, internal work, duplicates and incomplete loss reasons are mixed together.
Decisions follow whoever complains loudest, personal impressions or isolated incidents.
The state of the business is not directly observable.
Too much of the business depends on one person, client, supplier or channel.
Too much value depends on too few nodes: a founder, employee, client, supplier, channel, marketplace, payment provider or machine.
A supplier failure can block delivery or destroy margin because alternatives are unknown or unavailable.
A ban, algorithm change, ad-account loss or channel decline can abruptly remove most new business.
Customer relationships, pipeline and sales knowledge sit with one individual.
Growth costs proportional owner time or headcount, and the company is worth little without its founder.
Every increment of revenue requires proportionally more owner involvement.
Output scales linearly with people because process, tooling, knowledge and decision design give little leverage.
If you stop working, the business loses customers, decisions, knowledge or operating capacity.
Relationships, knowledge, approvals and core operating capability are inseparable from you.
Demand is proven, but the limiting factor could be sales, pricing, your bandwidth, delivery capacity, cash, people or concentration.
Four stages. Implementation scope depends on the engagement.
Data, workflow, people and economics as they actually run. Nothing is assumed from the org chart.
Identify the actual constraint and quantify what it costs in hours, margin and risk.
Define the target state and the measurable changes required to reach it.
Build or oversee the change. Scope depends on the engagement.
Only real, verifiable material. Each card says what kind of evidence it is.
Slot for measured results from delivered work. Numbers are inserted only once verified with the client.
Slot for a quantified finding from a completed diagnosis, with confidential details removed.
Slot for a redacted view of a control dashboard or diagnosis output.
Matvey Zakharov. Solo consultant working at the intersection of data analysis, corporate finance and systems engineering. I diagnose from your actual data, not from interviews alone, and I build the controls that keep the fix in place.
Horizontal by design: I connect sales, finance, operations and people into one measurable picture rather than going deep in one silo.
A short conversation about your business, then a scoped audit proposal.
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