The thesis.
Why we do the work we do, why the model looks the way it does, and why the same four gaps keep showing up in every business we’ve ever looked at.
We spent a long time
looking for companies
to buy.
That was the original idea. Buy good companies, run them better, compound the returns.
What we kept finding surprised us. The deals weren’t the hard part. The target companies were. Every business we looked at, regardless of industry, revenue, or how long it had been running, shared the same operational weaknesses. Not similar. The same.
All companies have bad operations. Not some. All. And the back-end work required to fix a business after you buy it is the real job. The deal is just the signature at the top of the contract.
Fixing a company after you buy it is the hardest way to fix a company.
You’re fighting the existing culture the entire time. Even after the operation stabilizes, even after it starts making money again, it lives in a permanent state of volatility, because you’re pushing against habits the team has had for years.
A fixed-post-acquisition business is not the same as a company that was fixed before it broke. The first is fragile. The second is an asset. The difference compounds.
So we built the firm that does the second.
Fix it
before it breaks.
The Very Good Guys is the operating firm we wish had existed before we ever tried to buy anything.
We embed inside your business, do the work a serious acquirer would do in the first 18 months after close, and do it with you at the helm instead of us. You keep running the company. We install the systems. You make more money now, and the business becomes a real operating asset in the process.
If you ever want to sell one day, fine. If you never do, also fine. The work makes the business worth more either way.
JJ spent 10 years
inside other
people’s companies.
Operations, project delivery, change management, systems work, across industries. A decade of being the person brought in to figure out what was wrong and get it running again.
He holds a master’s in organizational change and project management, which is less about the credential and more about the vocabulary. It names what you see on the ground: where the friction lives, why the org chart doesn’t match the work, what’s actually causing the revenue plateau that leadership keeps mistaking for a market problem.
After enough of those engagements, a pattern was impossible to miss. Every company, every time, was stuck on one of four things.
The same four gaps
that stop you at $2M
keep you stuck at $200M.
The scale changes. The shape of the problem doesn’t. Close these four and the business moves. Leave any one of them open and the growth stalls, no matter how much demand you generate.
The founder is the bottleneck.
Every decision, every hire, every fire runs through one head. The business can't grow past the bandwidth of the person at the top.
The business runs on tribal knowledge.
What makes the company work lives in two or three heads. One resignation, one bad Monday, and the operation degrades for a quarter.
Systems that should be automated aren't.
Dispatch, reporting, follow-ups, attribution, onboarding. Manual work that should have been software five years ago is still eating hours every day.
Nobody is installing the change.
SOPs exist. Playbooks exist. They're not being used. No one owns adoption, so nothing sticks. The binder gathers dust, the behavior doesn't change.
SOPs plug
into the P&L.
Most operational work floats. A binder over here. A dashboard over there. A training video nobody watched.
Our job is to wire the work together. The SOP connects to the scorecard. The scorecard connects to the role. The role connects to the unit economics. The unit economics connect to the top-line P&L. When all four gaps are closed, the chain holds, and the business stops being a collection of disconnected activities.
That’s when growth stops being a function of how hard the founder is willing to push, and starts being a function of how well the system runs.
Instead of buying companies that are fundamentally broken, we fix them, and we prove their value in the process.
Start with the diagnostic.
30 days, embedded, no commitment past it. You leave with the four-gap map of your business, the top three leaks ranked by dollar impact, and the plan to close them.