A ten-year-old product fulfillment and warehousing company, five locations across the Nashville area, was doing about $25 million a year in revenue at a healthy 10% margin, entirely without a defined culture, a current org chart, or complete job descriptions. The two 50/50 partners had built something genuinely strong on relationships and instinct, but the senior team was working brutal hours filling gaps the business had simply never closed.
The business was doing extremely well without a defined company culture, terrible management systems, and a two-year-old org chart.
The fix started with the unglamorous basics: an updated organizational chart, real job descriptions, a documented vision, mission, and set of core values, and a fixed schedule of monthly all-company meetings. A weekly one-hour meeting for senior managers, structured around what's working, what's not, and what's next, replaced ad hoc problem-solving with an actual system. Along the way, the engagement surfaced something the partners hadn't realized: they were capturing roughly 8% of a market that was far larger than they'd assumed.
of businesses have no formal succession or exit plan in place. Fiffik Law Group →
Profits ticked up and the company's value became clear: an independent valuation put the business at $11 million, roughly double what the partners had assumed, and a $500,000 sale-leaseback on a property they owned put fresh cash straight into the business. A succession plan for a partial equity sale followed naturally once the structure was in place to support one.
