Not your typical advisory
Advisory for founders, by founders.
Most people advising you have read about this. We've lived it — payroll, hiring, the bad quarters, the calls you don't want to make. We work with owner-run companies that have built something real and hit a ceiling.
This isn't a career in consulting. We build and operate businesses ourselves, with our own capital at risk.
You won't get a slide deck and an invoice. You'll get a straight answer and someone in the room for it.
We turn down work that isn't a fit, and we tell you on the first call rather than after you've paid.
What we work on
Three things, because they're the three that move the number.
They're not separate projects. A sales problem is usually a marketing problem wearing a disguise, and both are usually a people problem underneath.
Pipeline that doesn't depend on you
Process, pricing, and the uncomfortable question of whether the people you have can actually close. We've built sales operations and run them. We'll tell you what we'd change in the first two weeks, then help you change it.
Clarity before spend
Most owner-run businesses aren't under-marketed, they're unclear. We work out what you actually are, who specifically needs it, and the handful of channels worth your money. Then we cut the rest.
The part owners avoid
Hiring, accountability, recognition, and the standards that slid while you were busy. Growth breaks on people before it breaks on demand. This is usually the part that pays most.
You can't diagnose an operation from a conference room. So we don't.
How it goes
No proposal decks. No discovery phase you pay for.
A conversation
Forty-five minutes, no charge, no pitch. You tell us what's happening and what's been frustrating you. We'll ask a lot of questions. By the end we'll both know whether there's something here.
We come look
Not a survey and not a data request. We spend real time in the business — with your team, on your calls, in your numbers. Remote where that works, in person where it doesn't.
What we'd actually do
A straight read, written down: what's working, what's costing you, and the specific moves we'd make in what order. You own it whether or not we keep going. Some owners take it from here themselves, and that's a fine outcome.
In it with you
If we both want to keep going, we stay involved — in the room for the hard conversations, on the hiring calls, in the pipeline reviews. Monthly, defined scope, either side can end it with thirty days' notice.
Fit
We'd rather tell you no early than bill you for a bad fit.
This is for you if
- You own the business and can decide things without a committee
- You're past survival and into the part where growth got harder, not easier
- You're doing somewhere between $1M and $25M and want the next step to be deliberate
- You want advisors who'll disagree with you out loud
- You're prepared to change how you operate, not just hear ideas about it
This isn't for you if
- You're pre-revenue and looking for a co-founder
- You need a deck to show a board or a lender
- You're shopping for the lowest hourly rate
- You want a marketing vendor rather than a second opinion
- You've already decided what you want to hear
Who you'd be working with
We're not consultants who read about operations. We run them.
Hartshorne Partners was founded by Kris Basmagy, an operator who builds and runs businesses across several industries — logistics, professional services, and M&A advisory among them. The common thread is ownership: payroll, hiring, margin, and the decisions that don’t have clean answers.
That’s the entire reason this practice exists. When something isn’t working in your business, odds are we’ve faced a version of it ourselves and had to solve it with our own capital at risk. We know what advice sounds like coming from someone who’s never had to make payroll, and how quickly an owner stops listening to it.
Operating across different sectors is part of what we bring. The patterns that break a growing company are remarkably consistent — the founder as the bottleneck, a sales function that only works when the owner runs it, a team hired for where the business was rather than where it’s going. Seeing that play out in several industries makes it faster to recognise in yours.
We work remotely with owner-run businesses anywhere in the country, and we get on a plane when a business needs to be seen rather than described over a call. We work hands-on rather than at volume — genuinely present in the businesses we take on, and only taking work where we’re confident the fee comes back several times over.
Start a conversation
Tell us what's going on.
Takes about two minutes. We read every one and reply within two business days — including when the answer is that we're not the right fit.
Or reach us directly:
kris@hartshornepartners.com
(555) 000-0000
Got it.
Thanks for the detail — it helps. We'll read this and come back to you within two business days.