Find your biggest bottleneck for free.
Fix it yourself, or
let us.
We look at how your business runs today, tell you in writing what’s costing you the most, then fix it: a process change, the right hire, an agent, or new technology, whatever it takes.
Ten minutes, and your answers are saved if you step away. A real person reads it; brief back within 24 hours.
Where we start
Most owners can already feel where it hurts. The hard part, from inside a business you’re also busy running, is proving which piece of it is costing the most, and knowing what to change without breaking something else in the process.
Some of the problems we can help solve
Every business has something getting in the way.
We work with service businesses: professional and technical firms, agencies, IT and managed services, home and commercial services, property and multi-location operators. Within that, industry matters less than you’d think. What differs is where the bottleneck sits in the business, what’s actually causing it, and what it’s costing you.
Pick the one that’s costing you the most.
Tapping it starts your free diagnosis on that problem. It’s the first question we’d ask you anyway.
Leads That Go Nowhere
Inquiries come in, and some of them quietly die. Follow-up depends on who happens to catch it, and by the time anyone notices, the prospect has moved on.
What the diagnosis would pin down
What actually happened
Tue 9:14am
Inquiry arrives — referral, mid-size job
Tue 6:00pm
Still unread. Everyone was on site.
Thu 11:20am
Someone finally replies
Thu 2:00pm
"We’ve gone with someone else."
Work That Gets Stuck or Runs Late
Jobs stall between steps, and you find out late. Status lives in meetings, email, and spreadsheets instead of one place anyone can check.
What the diagnosis would pin down
What actually happened
Mon 3:40pm
Drawings ready, waiting on a client sign-off
Mon 3:45pm
Filed. No one owns the follow-up.
Day 9
Client asks why the job hasn’t started
Day 9
Nine days gone, and the client noticed first
Requests That Pile Up
Customer requests and issues arrive faster than they get resolved. Some sit for days before anyone owns them, and you usually find out something slipped when the customer chases you first.
What the diagnosis would pin down
What actually happened
Mon 1:15pm
Tenant texts about a broken laundry machine
Mon 1:15pm
It lands on one person’s phone. No ticket, no owner.
Day 8
Tenant calls the office, angry
Day 8
First anyone else had heard of it
Money That's Slow or Missing
Work goes unbilled, invoices go out late, scope changes disappear into free work, and nobody has one clean picture of where the cash actually stands.
What the diagnosis would pin down
What actually happened
March
Job finishes. Material costs scattered across receipts.
March
No one assembles the invoice
April
Someone finally pulls the costs together
April
Invoiced 34 days after you paid for the materials
Everything Runs Through One Person
Too much waits on one person’s time, memory, or approval — often you. Dashboards everywhere and you still can’t say, with confidence, what’s actually constraining the business right now.
What the diagnosis would pin down
What actually happened
Mon
A pricing question comes in on a live quote
Mon
Only the owner can approve the number. They’re away all week.
Next Mon
Owner is back, answers it in four minutes
Next Mon
Seven days of a stalled quote, on a four-minute decision
Hiring That Takes Forever, or Doesn’t Stick
Seats sit open for months with no one owning the search, new hires take too long to become useful, and when someone leaves, what they knew mostly leaves with them.
What the diagnosis would pin down
What actually happened
Week 1
A seat opens up. Everyone agrees it’s urgent.
Week 6
Still screening. No one’s driving it forward.
Week 14
Someone starts, and needs months to be useful
Month 5
The seat was open longer than they’ve worked there
Rules You’re Trusting Someone Remembers
Licenses, filings, certifications, and safety requirements live in someone’s head or a folder nobody checks — and you find out something lapsed once it’s already a problem.
What the diagnosis would pin down
What actually happened
Jan
A certification renews. The date goes in someone’s calendar.
Month 11
That person leaves. The calendar goes with them.
Month 13
A client asks for proof it’s current
Month 13
It lapsed two months ago and nobody noticed
Illustrative: one example of how each shows up.
How we work
Nothing here is improvised.
Each step runs on a published method: the kinds of friction to look for, one sentence that separates a real constraint from an everyday annoyance, and the fixes to try before technology is on the table at all. We wrote all of it down, so you can check our work while we do it.
01
FreeFind it
We reconstruct how one process actually runs from your own evidence, then look for the kinds of friction that show up in every business: waiting, handoffs, rework, exceptions, bottlenecks, and one-person dependency.
Friction finder
02
FreeUnderstand it
Most friction is just annoying. We test each candidate against one sentence: “if we fixed this, the business would be able to ___.” Then we keep asking why until the answer is a rule, a capacity limit, or an ownership gap.
Constraint test
03
FreeDesign the fix
Cheapest fix first: delete the step, simplify it, give it one owner, rewrite the rule, fix the information, build something. We stop at the first that removes the cause. The brief names the fix, whether it’s operational or technical, and the price. Your free brief ends here.
Intervention ladder
04
PaidMake the change
Only if you want us to. Operational work: we redesign the handoff, write the rules down, train the team, or help you hire. Technical work: we build the automation, integration, or agent the brief calls for. Either way, the smallest version that proves the diagnosis goes in first.
Smallest change first
05
PaidPut it to work
We write down what should change before we change anything, then measure it against that baseline once the fix is in. If the number didn’t move, we go back to the diagnosis before touching anything else.
Baseline test
Steps one to three are the diagnosis, and they’re yours whether or not you ever hire us. Four and five happen only if the brief lands on something worth doing and you decide you want us to do it.
Free Audits
It’s called the Catalyst Operating System, and it’s all public.
Every method behind those five steps lives there: how to separate friction from what’s actually limiting the business, how to get from a symptom to a cause, how to choose a fix before choosing a tool. It’s six audits, each one telling you what to pull out of your own systems and handing you a prompt you can paste into any AI assistant and run on your own business tonight.
Six audits, free to run
- 01
Operations
What’s slowing the work down, and why
- 02
Advertising Waste
Which ad spend is not buying customers
- 03
Process Waste
The admin nobody chose and nobody needs
- 04
Sales Pipeline
Where deals actually go quiet
- 05
Customer Acquisition
What a customer really costs to win
- 06
Technology Waste
Seats, overlap, and tools nobody uses
What you get first
You’ll know what’s actually wrong, and what it’s costing you.
Answer the questions and you get a short written brief: what we think is happening, what’s causing it, what we’d change, and what we’d expect to move as a result. It’s specific enough to hand to someone else and act on.
A brief that sends you off to fix it yourself gets written with the same care as one that ends with us doing the work. It’s the same job either way.
If you want us to fix it
One working session
We confirm the brief against how things really run, usually 60–90 minutes with you or whoever owns the process.
Scope, timeline, price in writing
You approve it before anything starts. Operational work is $2,500, technical work is $7,500, and the brief tells you which one you need.
We do the building
Your team’s job is to answer questions and sign off. We run the project.
How it works today
Your current process, mapped out — not the version on paper
What we found
The specific things costing you time or money
What we ruled out, and why
The cheaper fixes we considered and set aside
What we’d change
The fix we’d propose, and what’s deliberately out of scope
How you’d know it worked
The metrics we’d track, and the baseline we’re starting from
What we’d still confirm
Before any work starts
Illustrative preview. Every brief is built around what you tell us. See a Diagnostic Brief →
What it costs
The diagnosis is free. The fix is priced by what it is.
A process change and a piece of software are different kinds of work, so they carry different prices. The brief tells you which one you need. Fixed scope, fixed price, in writing, before anything starts.
Nothing to buy
Plenty of briefs end with a step to delete, a rule to write down, or a decision that needs one clear owner. You have everything you need to make the change yourself.
- Full rigor, same as the paid tiers
- Specific enough to act on without us
- No follow-up sales process
Operational work
We fix the process, roles, rules, or skills behind the problem: redesign a handoff, write the operating rules, train the team, set up how something gets measured, help you hire for a gap.
- Implemented with you, then handed over
- Runs in weeks
- A second problem, same price again
Technical work
We build the software, automation, integration, or AI system the fix calls for: an agent that does the chasing, two systems connected, a manual step made automatic.
- Yours to keep, with no licence to renew
- AI usage billed at what the provider charges, with no markup
- Larger builds are scoped and quoted separately
Some problems need both: the process fixed first, then the software that runs it. The brief says so up front, and the two prices simply add.
The team
The right expert for the problem in front of you.
Mike leads the diagnosis. Adam leads delivery. When the fix calls for deep technical work or licensed domain expertise, they bring in specialists from Catalyst's bench: people doing that work today, in the field the problem sits in.
Partners
Mike Anderson
Partner, Diagnosis & Strategy
Mike has spent his career finding waste and inefficiency inside large organizations, then removing it. At EY, he ran a Six Sigma initiative that cut more than $5M in operational waste from a 100-person quality organization. At Freedom Mortgage, he led an operational overhaul of a 400-person organization across 24 teams, redesigning how the group worked to make it faster and leaner. Fifteen of those years were also spent building and running his own businesses.
Background
Adam Elfiky
Partner, Delivery & Client Success
Adam has spent his career leading delivery and driving customer success inside the world’s largest financial institutions and professional services firms. As a Director at KPMG, he owned client engagements from kickoff to close, aligning with client leadership, managing delivery teams, and holding outcomes to schedule and budget. Earlier, he led enterprise program delivery for Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays Wealth Management.
Background
Advisors
Eric Chu
Responsible AI Advisor
Rob Levin
Growth & Marketing
Liz Cuccinello
Legal Advisor
Eric Harlovic
Finance Advisor
Technical specialists
The two people we bring in when an engagement’s constraint is technical — security, data, or integrations that don’t exist yet.
~20 years in cloud and infrastructure architecture, including a decade-plus at a top consulting firm. Brought into engagements where the constraint is technical: securing sensitive data, recovering from failure, and deciding exactly what an AI agent is allowed to touch.
Where they get pulled in
7+ years as a full-stack engineer, currently building AI-powered features on a healthcare data platform in production. Brought in when the fix means connecting systems that were never built to talk to each other, or building something that doesn’t exist yet.
Where they get pulled in
The right expert, whenever the problem calls for one.
Catalyst keeps an ongoing bench of practicing CPAs, attorneys, fractional COOs, and specialists across marketing, operations, and compliance. They join engagements to help diagnose what’s actually broken and shape the fix in their field, then keep reviewing the system’s logic for as long as it runs. When something needs a license Catalyst can’t hold, they take it on directly, at their rate, and Catalyst never takes a cut of it.
FAQ
Common questions.
What the diagnosis involves, what it costs, and what happens after. Questions about the platform itself are answered on the platform page.
Get started
Tell us what’s slowing you down.
A few focused questions about the problem. We review every submission personally, and if we need anything more to finish your brief, we’ll follow up by email with specific questions instead of guessing.
Prefer to talk it through first? Grab 20 minutes on the calendar.
Why it asks for ten minutes
It reconstructs one process end to end. That is what makes a brief specific enough to act on instead of advice you could have got anywhere.
Every question changes the answer. Each one is here because it separates two different diagnoses. Anything that didn’t is not in the form.
You check our work before you send it. The second-to-last screen shows everything we concluded from your answers, and you can correct any of it.
It saves your place. Close the tab and come back on the same browser; your answers are still here for a week.
Step 1 of 10
Where does it show up?
Pick the one that’s costing you the most. We’ll get specific next.
Most businesses have more than one. Pick the expensive one.
Haven’t got ten minutes right now?
We’ll email you a link so you can do this tonight or at the weekend. Same diagnosis, same free brief.