EDGE-UCATION

Same repair. Same parts. Same two hours in the truck. One quote is $445. The other is $700. Christian and Stephen on where a price actually comes from — your costs, the other guy’s price, or what the problem is worth to the customer — and why nearly every operator uses the first one while...

The post What You’re Actually Charging For first appeared on SCG Global.

Ask an owner to describe their market and most of them name a city. Christian and Stephen get underneath that answer: the zip codes actually doing the work, the ones next door you’ve never touched, and what you’re selling in each. Why thirty miles in one direction is a completely different business than thirty miles...

The post Your Market Is Smaller Than You Think first appeared on SCG Global.

Your overhead runs twelve months a year. Your revenue runs six to nine. Stephen has run two seasonal businesses — an exterior home maintenance company where the phone stopped the day the trees went bare, and a roll-off dumpster company tied to roofers who shut down in November. This episode walks both of them: what...

The post How to Make Seasonality Work for Your Business first appeared on SCG Global.

Thirty minutes into a conversation with a business owner, we usually know. Not from the financials — from the way the owner answers. Christian and Stephen each walk through their top five red flags: the specific things that make an advisor quietly reclassify a business from healthy to fragile. After each one, the other host...

The post Red Flags: What We See That Owners Don’t first appeared on SCG Global.

Most business advice gets repeated until nobody checks whether it’s still true. Today we check. Christian and Stephen put eight pieces of conventional wisdom on the table and argue them out. Revenue is the most overrated number in business. You should think about your exit from day one. Hire slow, fire fast. Your bank is...

The post Hot Takes: The Rules Smart Operators Break first appeared on SCG Global.

We talk about capital deployment, deal structure, and business strategy every episode. Today we’re putting our money where our mouth is. Christian and Stephen each walk through exactly where they’d deploy $1 million into a business right now. Where does the first dollar go? What would they never do with it? And what’s the highest-leverage...

The post What Would We Do With $1 Million Tomorrow? first appeared on SCG Global.

Imagine you just won the biggest contract your company has ever seen. Your team can handle it. Your reputation earned it. And you’re about to run out of money — not because anything went wrong, but because the cash goes out on Day 1 and the client doesn’t pay until Day 90. That 90-day gap...

The post When Your Business Outgrows Its Money first appeared on SCG Global.

This week, Nvidia helped its customers finance $500 billion in AI infrastructure. The Los Angeles Lakers sold for a record $12.5 billion. And Berkshire Hathaway deployed $39 billion after sitting on nearly $400 billion in cash for years. Most people treat those as rich-company stories. This episode treats them as operator playbooks. In this solo...

The post What Nvidia, the Lakers, and Berkshire Just Taught Small Business Owners first appeared on SCG Global.

Private equity firms are paying 4x earnings for individual businesses in fragmented markets — then selling the combined platform for 10x. Same businesses. No magic. Just scale. But here’s what most operators miss: you don’t need a PE firm to run this play. You can do it yourself — with your existing business as the...

The post The Consolidation Play & Due Diligence first appeared on SCG Global.

Mailchimp raised zero dollars in outside capital. Zero. And sold for twelve billion. WeWork raised twenty-two billion dollars. And filed for bankruptcy. Both companies were growing. Both had revenue. The difference wasn’t the product, the market, or the timing. It was readiness. Capital amplifies what’s already working — or funds what’s already broken for longer....

The post How to Know When You’re Ready to Raise Capital first appeared on SCG Global.