Forgewright Advisors

Who this is for

You run the jobs.Who is watching the whole business?

We work with owners whose companies have grown past what one person can track by memory. The review shows where the numbers, decisions, and handoffs no longer line up.

$1–10M

The usual Diagnostic conversation, not a cutoff for every service.

5–50

People. Past the point where everything fits in one head.

Owner-led

You're still in it daily, and most decisions still route through you.

No CFO

No COO either. Nobody's full-time job is to notice what's drifting.

Why construction businesses. The money moves through estimates, work performed, billing, cash timing, people, contracts, and coverage. We examine the operating model you actually run: project/install, service/repair, maintenance, or a mix. We ask which work earned what you expected, when you knew, and what the records can prove.

And usually one of these four things just happened.

The growth wall

Revenue is up, profit isn't, and you can't point at why.

New weight

Fresh debt, a new partner, a first big contract, a first real hire.

The handoff

Thinking about selling, bringing in family, or stepping back.

A near miss

A claim, a lawsuit, an audit, a partner scare that almost landed.

Who it isn't for. Under $1M in revenue, the full Diagnostic is often premature; tell us the decision you face and we will say plainly whether a smaller review fits. An active partner dispute needs a lawyer. A review also needs records suited to the question. Businesses outside construction and the trades need a different review. The public calculator uses residential builder benchmarks only; we do not apply those numbers to service or specialty trades.

Where we work. The work is done from your documents, wherever you are — most engagements never need a site visit, so distance doesn't change what you get. If you want someone on the ground, we quote it before you commit, and we don't bill mileage, meals or time in the truck on top of it.

How it works

Find it. Price it. Put it in order.

The Diagnostic is one focused engagement: eight checks across the business, a written Build Plan, and a plain first-thirty-days list. The fixed price is on this page. Other programs have their own scope and agreement.

The engagement

The Diagnostic

$2,500 · two weeks

Eight checks across one operating unit. A written Build Plan with dollar findings quantified, material risks ranked, and the source for each finding identified — including what we recommend you ignore. The plan is part of the fee; we don't charge you to explain your own findings.

Need a focused answer, implementation, monthly care, or a later recheck? Explore all Forgewright programs and prices, then get in touch to see what fits.

The eight checks

Your coach looks at your funnel.We look at your funnel, your books, your entity and your insurance.

Money leaves a business in eight places. Most advice only covers three of them — the ones that are fun to talk about. The other five are where the expensive surprises live, and nobody has a symptom that tells them their operating agreement went stale.

The foundation — what everything sits on

Structure

Entity, operating agreement, ownership, personal guarantees, what happens if you're not here Monday.

Money

Books, real job costing, cash timing, debt and rates, and whether the numbers can be trusted.

Exposure

Coverage against actual risk, contracts with teeth, licensing, classification, single points of failure.

People

Who does what, decision rights, handbook, documented terminations, and who else could do the critical job.

The chain — how work comes in and goes out

Get found

Where work actually comes from, what a lead costs, and what happens if one channel stops.

Close

Response time, quoting, close rate, discount discipline, and when prices last moved.

Deliver

Margin at completion against margin as sold, changes, rework, capacity, and what's written down.

The owner

The most important asset in the business, and the only one nobody measures. How many days you've genuinely taken off. How much of your week goes to work someone else could do. Whether you'd sell it tomorrow at a fair price. We ask because the answers have business consequences with dollar figures attached — not because we're going to coach you. Anything past that, we refer out, and we don't take a fee for it.

The Diagnostic

Two weeks. Two payments. A plan built from your records.

No retainer, no meter running, no year-long commitment. You get a written document and a conversation, and then you decide whether you want anything else. Most of what's in it, you'll be able to do yourself.

$2,500

Flat · half on signing, half due within seven days after delivery

Eight checks, run in a fixed order
15–20 hours of work on your business
Every dollar finding quantified, with the arithmetic shown; material risks called out separately
Delivered live and walked through — by video, or in person if you'd rather
Two 60-minute meetings, plus the time to pull the records — one at the start, one at handover; two 30-minute follow-ups are included
Target delivery fourteen days after signed paperwork, cleared deposit, secure channel, and required records are complete

01The number. What's recoverable in the next twelve months, totalled, with each figure sourced to a document.
02First thirty days. Three to five things to do now, at least one of which you named yourself.
03What to ignore. The findings not worth your time, said plainly. Every report has them.
04What's coming. The next transitions your business will cross, what usually breaks at each, and the cheap thing that prevents it.
05Who to call. Anything outside our lane goes to a named professional — and we make nothing on the introduction.

The guarantee

If the Build Plan's non-overlapping, document-sourced dollar findings do not identify at least $2,500 reasonably recoverable or avoidable over the next twelve months, you owe nothing for the Diagnostic and we refund what you paid. Estimated, benchmark-based, risk-only, and duplicate figures do not count. Give written notice within fourteen days of delivery; the signed agreement contains the complete procedure and the narrow records-gap exception.

And we come back twice, free. Thirty days after delivery we spend half an hour on whether the first list actually got done. At ninety days we re-run both headline numbers against your books — by then closed — at no charge. Both are booked before you decide about anything else. The most common complaint about consultants is that they hand over a report and disappear.

One operating unit. The launch Diagnostic covers one division, market, entity, or office with its own profit-and-loss and manager. Multi-unit engagements are not currently offered.

What isn't included. Implementation, ongoing management, bookkeeping, or preparing financial statements or tax filings. Legal, tax, accounting and insurance matters get identified and routed to a named professional with the question already framed — and we make nothing on the introduction.

The alternatives

What else you could do with the money.

Worth seeing side by side, because the differences are structural rather than a matter of taste. Most of these need a year and five figures before you learn anything.

The option	What it focuses on	Typical costMarket range, not a quote	Commitment
Operating-system implementerA quarterly rhythm and a scorecard	Meeting rhythm and accountability — process, not diagnosis	$58K–$86K over two years	Multi-year
Peer group or coachA monthly meeting and an outside voice	Accountability, peer advice, general frameworks	$20K–$30K a year	Annual
Fractional COO or CFO	Hands-on leadership, embedded in the business	$5K–$15K a month	Ongoing
Trade-specific coachingA membership and a playbook	Sales and marketing playbooks for your trade	$1.4K–$3.2K a month	Membership
A consulting firm	One lane at a time, varies widely	$5K–$15K per project	Project or retainer
ForgewrightThe Diagnostic	All eight — structure, money, exposure, people, and the whole chain	$2,500 flatOne operating unit	Two weeks · no retainer

Read the last row against the others. The cheapest serious alternative is a consulting project at $5K–$15K, and it looks at one thing. We're at $2,500, we look at everything, and if we don't find at least that, you don't pay. We also publish the price on this page. The figures in that table are market ranges we had to go and find — not numbers this industry prints on its own site, which is the difference. We have deliberately not named the firms behind each row — the categories are what matter, and pricing inside each one varies by market and by franchisee.

The rules we work under

Five things we will never do.

Every one of these costs us money. That's rather the point — a promise that costs nothing to keep isn't worth reading.

01Never bill hourly. Not once, not as a favor. Hourly billing punishes the speed that comes from having seen the pattern before, and makes getting faster cost us money.
02Never take a referral fee, commission or revenue share from anyone we send you to. It's a term of our engagement agreement, not a line on a website. If a professional offers one, we decline it. You are the only party paying us.
03Never take a percentage of your gross. It's charged on your revenue and paid out of your profit, it grows every year whether our work does or not, and nobody can tell you which part of it you caused yourself.
04Never discount the price. If the Diagnostic is not the right fit, we say so rather than make the price or scope soft.
05Never give legal, tax, accounting or insurance advice. We identify those matters and hand them to someone licensed. That boundary isn't a hedge — it's why you can trust the parts we do answer.

Who you'd be working with

You'll work with an operator, not an advisor.

Chip Hayes · Founder

Forgewright exists because nobody did this for me.

Twenty-plus years in construction, development and the trades — sales and marketing organizations built and led across residential land development, home building and home services, including a master-planned marina community where I was a development partner. For the last eight years I've run a land developer, licensed brokerage, general contractor and rental operation under one roof, across four communities. Eight years is a full cycle — the shutdown, the boom, the rate shock, and whatever you'd call the last two.

I've also been through the correction that comes when growth outruns the systems underneath it — financing that costs far more than the paper says, jobs that turn out to have lost money only after they're finished, cash that disappears into the growth that created it. That's not a comfortable thing to put on a website. It's also the single most useful thing I know, and it's why the eight checks are the eight they are.

Those are my claims about my own past — weigh them the way you'd weigh anyone's. Every number in your Build Plan will trace to a document you handed me. That's a different standard, and it's the one that matters.

—Operator, not a consultant. I've never sold advice for a living before this. I've spent it.
—I've run every function these checks examine. Entity structure, financing, job costing, insurance, hiring, marketing, sales, delivery. Not studied — run, with my own name on the guarantees.
—Both halves of a building company. Land, entitlements and development on one side; construction, sales and closings on the other. Most of what goes wrong in a builder happens at the seam between those two, and I have run both sides of it.
—You get me, and I have no hammer to sell. Not an associate, not whoever's free in your territory — and no referral fees, no software, and I'll tell you plainly when the answer is to do nothing.

How the work is actually done

Nothing here grades its own homework.

Most of what makes a diagnostic wrong is a single confident pass with nothing to disagree with. So the eight checks are run independently and blind to each other — none can see another's answer, which means when two of them price the same dollar from different angles, the collision is visible instead of silently doubling your total.

Then every dollar finding goes through a separate pass whose job is to destroy it — re-derive the arithmetic from scratch, confirm the cited document actually says what the finding claims, and ask whether a hostile CPA would arrive at a smaller number. When it's uncertain, it throws the finding out. A finding we lose costs us one line. A finding that collapses in front of you costs the whole report.

Eight, run blind

Each check sees your records and nothing else — not the other checks, not their conclusions. Independence is what makes disagreement visible.

Every number attacked

Separately, and by something that didn't produce it. Anything that can't survive a skeptical read is cut before you ever see it.

The cuts are shown

If a bigger figure was calculated and struck, the report says so. You get the number that survives, and you get told what didn't.

In the sample Build Plan below, this isn't theoretical. The margin finding was first measured against a 22% bid margin — a figure that company had never once achieved in any year on record. Measuring to it would have overclaimed by $94,638. The report shows the full subtraction on the page: $622,600 at the bid margin, minus the $94,638 struck for the unattained target, minus $397,800 of actual gross profit already booked, leaves $130,162 — the historical gap that survived the check, cut on purpose before it reached the client. A firm that only ever revises its findings upward isn't checking them.

See the work

Read the deliverable before you buy it.

See a worked Build Plan before deciding whether to engage us: how figures were built, what remains unresolved, the first thirty days, and what the owner can ignore.

It's a worked example on a composite business, not a client. The financials are constructed rather than redacted — we have not published anyone's engagement. The format demonstrates the review, while a real engagement depends on its own records.

Forgewright Advisors · Worked example Caldwell Custom Homes LLC Diagnostic · Composite business

This is a worked example. It is not a client.

1 · What you said

“We did more volume last year than we've ever done and I took home less than I did in 2022.”

2 · The number

$145,475 in historical differences to investigate before overlap.

Read the complete Build Plan →

Worth reading for one thing in particular. The strike described above isn't summarised in the document — the $94,638 and the $130,162 are both on the page, in the report itself, where you can check the subtraction. That's the difference between a number you can defend across a table and a number that sells.

Read the sample Build Plan

Start here

Find out what your business is capable of.

Eleven questions, five minutes, no email required. It gives you a number and shows you every calculation, so you can argue with it. If it comes back small, your business is running well and you don't need us — which is a real outcome, and we'd rather you found it there than paid us to tell you.

Run the numbers Write in

The whole business

The Diagnostic

$2,500 · two weeks

For an owner who can't say where the money is going. Eight checks across one operating unit, then a written plan that quantifies dollar findings where the records support them and identifies the source for each finding.

You send: A short records list we build after we talk — the fewest documents that can carry the findings
You get: The Build Plan: the number, what has a clock on it, the first thirty days, who to call, and what to ignore
Your time: Two 60-minute meetings and two 30-minute follow-ups, plus the time to pull the records
Delivered: Targeted for fourteen days after the signed paperwork, cleared deposit, secure channel, and required records are complete, live and walked through, with a free 30-day review booked before you decide anything else
Payment: $1,250 on signing and $1,250 due within seven days after delivery, subject to the Fee Guarantee. We issue a Stripe invoice after the signed agreement; there is no charge to apply.

The guarantee. If the Build Plan's non-overlapping, document-sourced dollar findings do not identify at least $2,500 reasonably recoverable or avoidable over the next twelve months, you owe nothing and we refund what you paid. Estimated, benchmark-based, risk-only, and duplicate figures do not count. Give written notice within fourteen days of delivery; the signed agreement contains the complete procedure and records-gap exception.

Apply for the Diagnostic

What happens after you write in

I read it myself and reply the same day, or first thing the next.
A short call — fifteen minutes — to understand your decision and which program, if any, fits. If none does, I'll say so.
If it's a fit: paperwork, then a records list built from what we discussed. Nothing is read before an NDA is signed, both ways.

Your name Company

Email Phone

What are you after? One sentence on what's going on in the business

Do not send records here. Please do not include financial statements, payroll data, tax documents, account numbers, passwords, health information, or other sensitive information. If we proceed, you will receive a separate secure channel after the agreements are signed. See the Privacy Notice.

I read these myself. You'll hear back the same day.

Got it.

I'll come back to you the same day — or first thing tomorrow if it's late.

Email chayes@forgewrightadvisors.com Phone (615) 241-0937

You've built the work.Now build the business behind it.

What needs attention right now?

Second Opinion

Diagnostic

Fix

Run

Annual re-Diagnostic

You run the jobs.Who is watching the whole business?

The growth wall

New weight

The handoff

A near miss

Find it. Price it. Put it in order.

The Diagnostic

Your coach looks at your funnel.We look at your funnel, your books, your entity and your insurance.

Structure

Money

Exposure

People

Get found

Close

Deliver

The owner

Two weeks. Two payments. A plan built from your records.

What else you could do with the money.

Five things we will never do.

You'll work with an operator, not an advisor.

Nothing here grades its own homework.

Eight, run blind

Every number attacked

The cuts are shown

Read the deliverable before you buy it.

Find out what your business is capable of.

The Diagnostic

What happens after you write in