I study how businesses work. Sometimes I help one grow.
This is the applied side of Business Topologies — the part where the research gets pointed at a single business: yours. It's for the owner who has built something real and now needs to work on the business instead of in it.
How this started
Business Topologies is a research project. The question underneath it is simple and very large: how do businesses actually work — not how they describe themselves, but the real structure underneath the description. I study that in public. The essays, the experiments, and the framework library are the record of the work.
What I didn't plan on was the knocking. As the research accumulated, owners started asking the same thing in different words: this is interesting — can you point it at my business? Enough of them asked that it became a real part of what I do. This page is that part.
I'd rather be plain about the sequence. The research comes first; the help is what falls out of it. That order isn't a marketing posture — it's the reason the help is any good.
Who this is for
The work fits a specific moment. You've already proven the thing — there are customers, there's revenue, there's a model that holds together. The danger now isn't whether it works. It's that the whole thing still runs through you: you are the strategy, the bottleneck, and the project manager, all at once. You're working in the business at exactly the point it needs you working on it.
This is for you if
You own a business that already works, you want to grow it deliberately rather than by reflex, and you're willing to look squarely at its actual structure — including the parts that aren't flattering.
This isn't, yet
If you're pre-revenue and still searching for the model, or you want someone to take the business off your hands and run it, that's a different engagement than this one. The work here assumes an owner who intends to stay the owner.
How it works
We begin the way the research begins: by mapping how your business actually operates. The same instruments I use on the businesses I study — value chains, the business model canvas, positioning maps, unit economics — get pointed at yours. Not as an academic exercise, but as a way to see plainly where value is made, where it leaks, and where the real constraint on growth is sitting. The toolkit isn't proprietary or hidden; it's the public framework library.
A map is useless if it stops at strategy. The work runs from the high-level question — what are we actually optimizing for — down to the specific, unglamorous execution: what gets done this month, in what order, by whom. The same person holds both ends. That's the difference from a deck that gets admired and shelved.
This is the function a large company rents from McKinsey or BCG: a clear outside read on where the business can grow, and a plan to get there. What changes is the shape. No team of associates, no engagement built to bill hours — one person who comes to know your business in detail and works directly with you. The cost structure that keeps this kind of thinking inside the Fortune 500 is the thing being removed.
As the structure of the business gets clearer, so do the places it can run without you. Wherever the same decision is being made the same way, again and again, it can usually be handed to a system. That's the quiet aim under all of it: move the repeatable work off the owner's desk so your attention goes to the parts that actually need an owner — judgment, taste, the next bet. The tools to do this are better now than they have ever been. They are a means to that end, not the point of the exercise.
The proof is public
None of this asks for trust on credit. The research is public, and it's the same research — read it and decide for yourself whether the way I think about businesses is the way you want yours thought about. Three doors into the same work.
The thinking
The framework itself, argued in public — falsifiable claims about how organizations actually behave, not advice.
Open essays → II.The experiments
Live tests of the framework against real businesses, with the results observed and reported however they land.
Open work → III.The toolkit
The actual instruments — the same ones I'd point at your business — explained, and shown applied in public.
Open frameworks →Where to start.
If that's your situation — a business that works, and an owner who wants it to work better and ask more of itself — write to me. Tell me what you've built and where it's stuck. The first conversation is just that: a conversation, and an honest read on whether I think I can help.