PRIVATE ADVISORY FOR FOUNDER‑LED COMPANIES
Close, personal counsel — diagnosing how each business actually runs, and rebuilding it for the stage it has reached.
02 — THE SITUATION
The companies Ashthorne works with are rarely struggling. They have grown, built real teams, and are led by founders who are exceptional at what they do.
The difficulty is underneath. The business grew; the way it operates did not. Processes accumulated rather than being designed. Critical knowledge exists only in one person’s head. Decisions that once worked on instinct are now made without enough information.
Senior people doing work that belongs elsewhere.
Procedures no one questions, because that is how it has always been done.
Meetings that exist because another meeting created them.
Sometimes this surfaces all at once: an audit, a key departure, a compliance problem, a funding round that stalls.
More often it arrives quietly. The company is larger, everyone is working harder, and progress feels more difficult than it used to.
Ashthorne exists for that moment.
03 — PERSPECTIVE
The problems a founder brings are real. They are rarely the underlying cause.
We need more hands.
The workflows don’t need to be this complicated.
Our industry doesn’t suit systems.
It needs systems that leave room for judgment.
We need better people.
Your people are capable. The systems are burning them out.
Growth for its own sake is not the objective. A stronger company is: more resilient, more profitable, easier to understand, and better for the people inside it.
The answer is rarely more. It is usually simpler.
04 — THE WORK
Ashthorne is neither the strategist who recommends and disappears, nor an extra pair of hands waiting for instructions. The work happens at the level of the founder and leadership team: forming an independent view of what needs to change, designing it, and staying close enough to implementation to make sure it takes hold.
Order of operations
How the company really functions. Time with the founder, and with the people closest to the work — where the real answers usually are.
What is causing the friction, which is often not what is most visible.
A better way of operating, built for the company and team as they are today. What works at $1M rarely holds at $7M.
Alongside the team, over time — not handed over in a document.
Through enough real cycles to prove what works and what doesn’t, adjusting as it runs.
Refined and documented, with the team trained to own it.
The deliverables may include procedures, process maps, controls, automation, training, or changes to who does what. They are not the product. The product is a stronger business — and a team that understands not only how it works, but why it was designed that way.
The work is successful when the company no longer needs Ashthorne.
05 — THE PRINCIPAL
Principal, Ashthorne Advisory
Garrett has founded and operated seven businesses. He built one, Southern PianoWorks, over sixteen years before exiting. He is currently building Colorado Sock Co. in e-commerce and Wayborne in software.
He has worked inside other companies as well as his own, from early stage to eight figures in revenue, and has lived with the consequences of business decisions rather than only recommending them. That breadth has become pattern recognition. The same structural problems appear in a restoration workshop, a professional services firm, and a software company, dressed differently each time.
Garrett and his family travel full time. His own businesses run without him in the room, by design.
“I’ve built businesses and personally made many of the mistakes I now help founders avoid. What I bring is not a method applied the same way to every company. It is the ability to see how work actually moves through a company, where it gets stuck, and what it costs the people doing it.
The goal is not to make myself indispensable. It is to leave your business running better — without me.”
06 — SELECTED WORK
An eight-figure professional services firm engaged Garrett for a narrowly defined operational role. The work soon grew well beyond its initial scope: documenting how the company ran, rebuilding financial approvals, redesigning hiring processes, and mapping a path through employment obligations in multiple countries.
A boutique firm serving medical practices. The team was small and capable, but very little in the business existed by design. Garrett built its full operating foundation: client and team onboarding, communication protocols, HIPAA-related processes, documentation, and the handoff from sales to operations. In the year that followed, revenue doubled, client retention held above 95%, and headcount did not increase.
Client engagements are confidential; details are described in general terms.
07 — ENGAGEMENT
Ashthorne works with two or three companies at a time, and not with every company that asks. The work requires direct access to the founder, time with the team, and enough regular contact to understand how the company runs. That isn’t possible across a long client list, and it isn’t worth doing where the fit is wrong.
The terms
Ashthorne works with founders who are willing to make fundamental changes to build a stronger business, not simply patch the problems and move on.
08 — CONVERSATION
You don’t need to have the problem figured out. Knowing something isn’t working is a place to start.
Send a few lines about your company and what’s going on. I read every note myself and reply within two business days. If it looks like a good fit, we’ll set up a call and talk it through together.
— Garrett
Thanks — your note is with me. I’ll reply personally within two business days.
— Garrett
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