50 Years in the Arena

Your business has a number nobody's talking about. I find it.

I've spent fifty years building, diagnosing, and exiting businesses. The expensive problem is never where the founder thinks it is. I built AltLevel™ to show you where it's hiding — and what it's costing you at exit.

A Story from the Golf Course

I was playing golf a couple of years ago. Random pairing on a Tuesday tee time. Nobody knew anybody.

Somewhere around the fifth hole, two of them started talking about their business. Manufacturing company in the Midwest. Good friends. Long relationships. The kind of book most people would trade their best year for.

But their margins were shrinking. Had been for three years. Revenue kept going up, and profit kept going down, and they couldn't figure out why.

More revenue. Less profit. The classic trap.

After the round, they invited me to lunch. I asked them to walk me through their customer base. Not the big picture. The specifics.

Who's paying what? Who takes the most time? Where does the actual margin live after you account for hand-holding, rework, slow payers, and accounts that chew up your best people for the lowest return?

They'd never done it. Not once.

Twenty minutes. That's all it took. Three clients were eating them alive. Looked great on the revenue line. Terrible on the margin line. They were literally paying to keep those clients.

When we ran the numbers, $200K in annual margin was sitting in five clients they thought were their best accounts. One of those clients was actually costing them money. Not breaking even. Costing.

The money was always there. They just couldn't see it.

This is what I've done for 50 years. Walk into a business, ask the questions nobody else thinks to ask, and find what the owner has been walking past every single day.

What 50 Years of Looking Reveals

Every business I've looked at has at least one of these hiding in plain sight.

$200K in annual margin buried in a client base the owner thought was healthy.

45 days of cash stuck in receivables because nobody renegotiated payment terms.

$40K/year in loans to vendors because the owner felt guilty about payment timing.

A pricing structure that hadn't been updated since the business was half its current size.

A founder closing every deal while a team of ten waited for instructions — and a buyer would see that as the single biggest risk in the business.

Three handshake contracts worth 40% of revenue with no documentation — a deal-killer in due diligence.

The money is almost never missing. It's stuck. In timing. In clients. In deals that made sense three years ago and don't anymore. In founder dependence that looks like hard work but reads as risk to a buyer.

The Real Problem

Success hides the number. The bigger the business, the harder it is to see.

Here's what nobody tells you: the skills that got you to $1M are the same skills that will keep you stuck at $3M. Your confidence — the thing that built everything — becomes a cage. You stop questioning what's working because it got you here. But "here" isn't "there."

And there's something worse. The things suppressing your company's value — the fact that the business still runs through you, the profit leaking in contracts you haven't repriced, the clients who'd leave if you did, the systems that exist in your head instead of on paper — none of them feel like problems. They feel like normal operations.

They ARE normal. They're also costing you money every month and compressing what your business is worth at exit.

A buyer's due diligence team will find every one of them in the first week. The question is whether you find them first.

Five Places Value Hides

Five things quietly making your business worth less.

Value Drag

What's reducing what a buyer would pay? Weak differentiation, stale pricing, low recurring revenue quality.

"You haven't raised prices in two years. Your costs went up 23%."

Founder Dependence

What still runs through you? Sales, decisions, client relationships that live in your head instead of in the business.

"You close every deal. Your team waits for instructions."

Margin Drag

Where is profit leaking? Scope creep, underpricing, stale contracts, costs rising faster than revenue.

"Scope creep on your best accounts. Stale contracts nobody renegotiated."

Transferability Risk

What makes the business harder to sell? Undocumented systems, no second layer of leadership, knowledge that lives in people's heads.

"Your foremen know the systems. None of it is written down."

Stakeholder Misalignment

Where are your people and your numbers pointing in different directions? Team rewarded for activity, clients paying for the wrong thing, decisions optimizing this quarter at next year's expense.

"Team rewarded for activity. Clients paying for the wrong thing."

Find out which ones are hiding in yours.

The Exit Readiness Scorecard takes 90 seconds. Eight questions about your business. You'll see instant scores across all five value-drag categories — and you'll see which numbers are red.

The red number has a dollar figure behind it. Most founders have never seen it.

See Your Exit Readiness Score →

8 questions. 90 seconds. Built for founders running $500K–$10M.

The Man Behind the Scorecard

Will Gregg

50 years in the arena. Not the bleachers.

Built a performance materials company from nothing. Grew it into a global operation spanning four continents. Patented technology portfolio used by major players in eyewear, aerospace, and automotive worldwide. Led a management buyout in 2004. Sold to a $15 billion Japanese conglomerate in 2008.

After the exit, spent three decades as a private strategic advisor to CEOs and founders — working across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Not coaching. Not courses. Across-the-table problem solving for operators who needed someone who'd actually been in the chair.

The Exit Readiness Scorecard and Diagnostic Report are a refined version of the exact process I ran with clients in $100K engagements — the same questions, the same pattern recognition, designed to find the one thing businesses can't see — the value drag their own success created.

CEO, SDC Technologies (Global)Nine-figure exitAcquired by $15B conglomeratePrivate advisory, $100K/yearClients across 4 continents50+ years building & fixing businessesAltLevel™ FounderScottsdale, Arizona

What Happens When You Find the Number

Three levels of depth. You choose how far you want to go.

Step 1

The Scorecard

Your honest answers

See which numbers are quietly working against your exit. 8 questions. 90 seconds. The red numbers tell you where to look.

Your honest answers are the price of entry.

Take the Scorecard →

Step 2

The Diagnostic Report

$997

The Scorecard shows you which numbers are red. The Diagnostic Report shows you exactly what they're costing you — every hidden liability, every margin leak, every transferability blocker in your specific business type and revenue range. Measured. Explained. Delivered to your inbox within minutes of payment.

The report finds the problems. It does not fix them.

Step 3

The Teardown

$5,000

This is where I get involved personally. Five layers deep into your specific business. Every gap found. Every dollar accounted for. A 90-day strategic roadmap to fix what's suppressing your valuation. This is what a buyer's due diligence team would find — except you see it first, and you get the plan.

I run a handful of Teardowns per month.

What Founders Are Saying

The first founders are running their Scorecards now. Their results will be here soon.

Who This Is For (And Who It's Not)

This was built for a specific kind of builder.

You're running a real business. $500K to $10M in revenue. You have clients, a team, and something's off and you can't name it. Revenue is growing but profit isn't keeping pace. Or you've hit a ceiling and the old approach isn't breaking through it.

You're probably thinking about what this business looks like in 3 to 5 years. Maybe you've started thinking about what it's worth. Maybe you haven't said the word "exit" out loud yet. But you know you're building toward something — and you want it to be worth more when you get there.

This IS For

Businesses doing $500K–$10M who know something's off but can't name it
Founders thinking about what the business is worth in 3–5 years
Operators ready to act on what the numbers reveal
Builders who want a specific fix, not a generic framework

This Is Not For

Pre-revenue startups or side projects
Businesses under $500K (the diagnostic assumes operating complexity)
Anyone looking for validation instead of truth
Anyone who wants a report instead of a result

I spent 50 years doing this in boardrooms, on golf courses, and across tables from founders who couldn't see what was right in front of them. Now the same diagnostic runs in a conversation you can have from your desk.

Eight questions. Your honest answers. A scorecard that shows you where the money is hiding — and what it's costing you at exit.

If the scorecard doesn't show you something about your business you didn't already know — I'll be the first to tell you. Just the truth about what's there.