A few rooms a quarter, with operators worth the time.
I run a full commercial P&L by day. In my free time I take on a small number of advisory conversations with founders and operators I find genuinely interesting. No retainers I cannot honor, no client list to pad. Just a few rooms a quarter where I can actually move the number.
Why so few. The thinking is the part that does not scale. I would rather go deep with three operators than skim across thirty, so I keep the list short on purpose and only take work where the commercial architecture is the real lever.
Past product-market fit, and the founder is still the engine.
The pattern is almost always the same. The product works, the early customers love it, and every deal still runs through one person. The calendar becomes the ceiling. That is a commercial-architecture problem, not an effort problem.
Three things, most often.
Commercial architecture
The wiring underneath the number. How demand, pipeline conversion, retention, and expansion fit together, and where the system is actually leaking. We find the broken layer before touching the activity. You cannot fix a broken engine by stepping on the gas.
Distribution and channel
How to select distributors, and the harder part, how to manage them after you sign them. Onboarding, scorecards, QBR cadence, comp alignment, and knowing when to remove a partner that is not pulling weight. This is the arena I came up in.
Operator discipline
Forecasting you can trust, a KPI hierarchy that points at one number, and a 90-day playbook for any new mandate. Owner instincts applied to a division, a region, or your own company.
Fifteen years, one discipline, in the hard arena.
Capital equipment into hospitals and governments, sold through distributor networks and public tenders, where the buyer is a committee and the cycle runs for quarters. The commercial architecture is the same whether the customer is a health system or a SaaS company.
Think your number is an effort problem? It is usually a system problem.
Start with the seven-question diagnostic. It maps where your revenue engine is leaking, across the four value drivers, in about two minutes. If it surfaces something worth a conversation, you will know where to find me.
I take on a small number of conversations and I read everything. If it is a fit, we go deep. If it is not, you keep the read either way.