In many ways, I found religion within their thinking and came to believe that if you give people something they truly need, you can get the world to show up at your door.

That’s where my infatuation with business took-off and why 15 years ago, I jumped at an opportunity to become an IT consultant in Chicago. During my first week on the job, my company’s management was fretting over the best way to handle an unhappy client in the midst of a staffing pinch. I volunteered to step in and two days later, I was on the earliest flight to Atlanta. By the end of the day, the project was back on course and the client was happy once again.

With that dramatic early success, my career advanced quickly. However, as I came to understand the inner workings of the professional services industry, I grew disillusioned by the guesswork that many business decisions were based upon. An executive’s experience is valuable, but most businesses have too much activity and complexity to make decisions based on experience alone. I became convinced that this illogical thinking, which Warren Buffet dubbed “the institutional imperative”, wasn’t what businesses needed.

Then, a key client that I had spent years cultivating into one of my firm’s largest, asked for my replacement with someone who “advocated for their decisions”. Although I was reassured that philosophical differences were not a reflection of my abilities, I fell into a deep crisis about whether I had chosen the right career. IT services was a growing and prosperous industry, but my belief to provide what was truly needed seemed increasingly at odds with the industry norm. It was time to chart a different course.

When I launched KGK & Company, I continued my work in revenue-side business improvement, but I didn’t have a clue how to evaluate the weightier issues I suspected were holding back my client’s success. Still, I was determined to figure it out. Fate connected me with Jed Jacobs, who had recently retired after 40 years as a CEO, CFO, head of sales, and turn-around consultant. He became my mentor and trained me to think like a CEO – strategically, financially, and aware of all moving parts within a business. He also taught me his method, which he had meticulously refined over his career, for comprehensively reviewing a business and pinpointing where it can extract more earnings.

When the opportunity finally arrived to try out this new approach, I was blown away by the results. The 50-year-old business, which had always steadily grown, had stopped growing in the past 2 years. By connecting the trove of information buried within their company, we proved why revenue had stalled and designed a roadmap for emerging from their no-growth funk. On top of that, we uncovered how contracting practices were unnecessarily costing them $2M per year! Quite a feat given their pre-tax profit was already an impressive 32%.

None of my earlier work could come close to touching the type of value we had just delivered, and I knew that my future lay in applying this new ability. Over the course of the following year, I designed a consulting service based upon Jed’s methodology (the PRISMTM Business Review) and transformed KGK into a firm that gives companies a way to make more informed, and far more profitable decisions.

Today we are quickly becoming a pre-eminent resource for business owners and savvy executives who are tired of wasting energy on low-return investments and are ready to make more informed decisions about their best path to earnings growth.