15 Types of Business Advisors a Private Equity Owner Has to Judge

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Having launched 3 seven-figure companies from scratch – including a successful agency and a consulting firm – I work with hundreds of founders and executives solving complex problems in management, operations, growth, martech, business strategy.

If you have just closed on a company, or you are underwriting one, the advisory bench you inherit is rarely a line you scrutinize. It should be. Every advisor attached to a portfolio company is either compounding enterprise value, sitting idle as a cost centre, or quietly carrying a risk that surfaces in diligence at exit. The question is not what these people do. The question is which of them moves EBITDA, cash flow, or the multiple, and which of them you cut.

If you are deciding which seat to fill first, the guide to hiring a fractional executive for a portfolio company compares a fractional CTO, an operating partner and a board advisor.

Portfolio companies often inherited their advisors piecemeal, each hired to address a specific business challenge at a moment when nobody was accountable to a value-creation plan. Your job in the first hundred days is to map that bench against the thesis and decide what each seat is worth.

The landscape of business consulting encompasses a wide range of expertise, from financial advisors who help manage resources and investments to marketing advisors who craft compelling strategies to engage customers. What is a business advisor worth to you is a different question than what a business advisor does, and it is the one an owner has to answer.

Each of these standalone categories maps to a different lever in the value-creation plan. Strategy advisors shape where capital goes and how the thesis gets executed. Operations advisors compress cost and shorten cycle time in the day-to-day. When you are deciding whether to keep, replace, or add a seat, ask which line of the P&L or which diligence risk it touches, and drop the ones that touch neither.

In fact, a study by Startup Genome found that startups working with expert advisors raise seven times as much money and get 3.5 times better user growth than those without.

Moreover, as capital gets more disciplined, identifying the right types of small business advisors becomes the difference between an advisory bench that funds itself in enterprise value and one that quietly drains fees. This piece walks the fifteen seats you are most likely to inherit, and tells you what to inspect and what decision each one drives.

List Down the Value Gaps First

One of the common obstacles I see often with younger entrepreneurs seeking mentorship, consulting, or coaching help is the lack of clear vision for the type and level of insights they want to receive as an output.

For an owner, the equivalent failure is retaining advisors against no defined outcome. Failing to convey the right problem during a session with the expert will send the wrong signals and won’t help. If a seat cannot be tied to a number in the value-creation plan, it is a fee, not an investment.

This is why I’ve been building facilitator tools that refine the strategy and generate additional ideas first that we can brainstorm on and refine further. This saves some time on bridging the gap between revenue generation or scalability problems.

Here’s my Strategic Positioning tool for building new offers as an example:

Before you renew a single retainer, write down the three to five value gaps the thesis depends on. Then, and only then, ask which advisory role is best suited to close each one.

1. Strategy Advisors

Developing a business strategy includes planning, workflows, action plans, and projections across every discipline of running your business.

Strategy is the high-level component of launching new products, opening new departments, hiring key leadership roles, and entering new markets. For a sponsor, this is where the thesis either has a route to execution or it does not.

Due to the broad set of disciplines covered in the scope of business strategy, advisors focus on the bigger picture. They often work alongside the CEO or the COO and collaborate with other niche consultants for specific initiatives (which we will review further).

The most important reasons portfolio companies retain strategy consultants are:

• Employing the right processes in new ventures
• Aligning and optimizing processes or resource allocation internally (often together with operations consultants)
• Safely launching new ventures without harming the rest of the organization
• Validating initial concepts and business plans proposed by senior management

A key component in applying business strategy workshops successfully is conducting SWOT analysis horizontally (across the entire organization) and vertically (focusing on upcoming ventures or initiatives on the roadmap).

Running a business solo (or even with a co-founder) is not an easy feat.

The decision this drives: keep a strategy advisor only if their output reconciles to your value-creation plan. If the deck does not tie to revenue growth, margin, or the exit narrative, you are paying for slideware.

2. Marketing Advisors

In Greg’s Letter, Greg Isenberg’s highlights the rise of “creative founders” who combine technical and creative skills to drive startup success. Advisors should support this trend by helping founders leverage modern tools, foster community engagement, and focus on branding and storytelling. This approach enables advisors to offer more strategic guidance to today’s innovative entrepreneurs.

Skilled marketing advisors profile in customer behavior, identifying unique selling propositions, and packaging them across the right channels. For an owner, the test is whether that translates into pipeline and CAC-to-LTV you can defend, not impressions.

There are multiple approaches to marketing. While consultants in the field are generally familiar with the broader categories, specialization is often applicable.

• Some advisors in marketing work with mom-and-pop shops or restaurants on local marketing.
• Digital marketing consultants help to develop a digital strategy or lead digital transformation initiatives.
• Outbound marketers often engage in advertisement activities or PR campaigns.
• Branding advisors shape the business’s messaging, slogans, digital identity, the company’s vision and a lot more required to grow a team successfully, attract the right talent, and amplify messaging for the right customer audience.

Marketing advisors can help with both traditional marketing initiatives and shifting into digital marketing as well. Proficient marketers are well aware of your industry, being able to identify new monetization channels, partnership opportunities, and the most effective short-term and long-term strategies to skyrocket your business in the coming months.

As a HubSpot agency partner and a Semrush partner, DevriX has spent the past couple of years focusing on several marketing areas including:

• Search Engine Optimization in the area of AI bots and constant Google updates
• Conversion Rate Optimization through an experimentation framework involving ongoing A/B tests and incremental improvements
• Funnel development – from landing page design through the creation of freebies, quizzes, whitepapers for warming up prospects
• Content strategy – both for blogs and social media, including executive branding
• Marketing automation with HubSpot

Inspect the marketing advisor against a single leading indicator that ties to revenue: qualified pipeline, blended CAC, or attributed bookings. If they report traffic and campaigns instead, hold them to a revenue number or reassign the spend.

3. Financial Advisors

The term “financial advisor” is used for several different initiatives in the accounting and investment fields. Some popular examples include:

• Investment portfolio advisory and guidance
• Bank account consulting (and handling deposits or other internal investments)
• Financial planning, projections, and estimations both short-term and long-term
• A de-facto outsourced function of a part-time CFO

In the context of company consulting, financial consultants (or advisors) review past data and future projections regarding your business model and apply industry-grade patterns for risk management and safe allocation of resources (both investing in internal initiatives and managing all expenses, from rent through salaries to stock distribution). For a CFO reporting to a sponsor, this is the seat that underwrites forecast reliability and covenant headroom.

In the event of existing additional capital (for continuously profitable businesses with healthy net margins), an advisor may build a separate portfolio investment plan that yields healthy ROI from funds that are yet to be distributed elsewhere. This may include anything from the stock exchange through forex or penny auctions to purchasing gold or art or real estate investing.

Additionally, financial advisors often help with personal finances. This covers dividends vs. salaries, what is eligible as a company expense, and different investment paradigms for long-term sustainability.

Inspect whether this advisor produces a forecast that survives quality-of-earnings scrutiny. If the model cannot be reconciled to actuals within a tight variance month over month, you have a visibility problem that will cost you at exit. Fix it before you fund anything else.

4. Operations Advisors

Operations consulting is a branch of management consulting that profiles in solving operational and efficiency problems within the organization. For an operating partner, this is the fastest route to margin expansion that does not depend on top-line growth.

Unlike the “bigger picture” component of the business strategy, operations concern the day-to-day activities in a business. Once the strategy has been established and distributed, operations advisors dive deeper into the execution components of accomplishing tasks, allocating resources, the practical workflows, revising the supply chain from beginning to end.

In a traditional manufacturing or eCommerce business, operations experts are invaluable in establishing the most effective workflows in production, shipping, warehouse management, logistics, and maximizing efficiency throughout the process.

In an agency’s context, operations consultants dive into the most expensive component of running an agency (staff, since salaries form the major expense) and the proper in-team management – anything from reporting through meeting scheduling, feedback reviews, day-to-day assignments for team members, the structure of a team, feedback loops, retention opportunities, and efficiency paradigms for maximizing output or free time between projects.

Our team at Growth Shuttle runs a proprietary framework analyzing the company efficiency ratio, charting the full accountability matrix, differentiating revenue drivers from cost items and assessing areas for improvement and restructuring.

The decision here is a margin decision. Give the operations advisor a target basis-point improvement in gross or contribution margin and a date. If they cannot name the cost items they will move, they are describing activity, and you should not renew on that basis.

5. Management Advisors

Management advisors are the strategic planners behind operations consultants (who are in charge of execution).

Traditional management consultants (and other types of advisors) are MBAs who have spent a decade or more in the corporate space.

I’ve studied 500+ of them and over 80% fell in this category.

Funnily enough, this is mainly dictated by the background of “management consulting”. This isn’t a popular title in the startup ecosystem and most founders haven’t gone through this process in the first place.

Which is why a lot of traditional management advisors dive into a certain specialty for SMBs and startups and rely on the following titles instead:

• Digital consultant
• Growth strategist
• Startup consultant
• An advisor for startups
• Business consultant for startups

Management consultants are expected to help organizations improve their operations performance, head analysis of existing organizational issues, and develop plans for improvement. For an owner, the value is a repeatable playbook the management team can run without the advisor in the room. Buy the transfer of capability, not the dependency.

6. Tax Advisors

Tax advisors leverage their professional expertise on tax legislation to help clients handle their taxes in the most efficient manner, and leverage any tax advantages or exemptions. In a leveraged structure, that efficiency drops straight to cash flow and debt service.

There are several different types of companies one can register locally, a variety of payment methods (wire transfers, credit cards, payment providers, aggregated services), separate options for paying dividends vs. fixed salary, possible shares distributed across the senior team, and other payment structures that could be founded for different divisions (or products) across the company.

Working with a tax advisor early on enables businesses to run smoothly as they can take care of tax forms and CPA services and communicate with tax authorities on behalf of their clients. In particular, these tax experts provide consulting on the two main types of tax advice: corporate or personal.

Corporate clients often refer to large companies or enterprises while individual clients who need advice on their large assets need personal tax advice. Just imagine the complex structure of Google or Facebook, registered simultaneously in various countries, and transferring funds back and forth with different taxes in every area.

When Are Tax Advisors Needed

Here are several areas where tax advisors can facilitate the financial work for an organization:

• Corporate tax
• International and customs duty
• Personal tax (for executives)
• Trusts and estates
• VAT (or corresponding tax laws in different countries or states)

Tax advisors often have the following responsibilities:

• Prepare and optimize tax returns
• Resolve potential tax issues
• Comply with company tax requirements
• Save on taxes owed under lawful regulations
• Advise on financing and legal issues

Tax advisors can work with accountants, lawyers, or other financial advisors and create a formidable team of experts who will help you battle financial woes and even prevent any sort of issue from happening. In the context of a 50+ company, they work closely with both the CEO and the CFO of the business.

Once you identify the initiatives you need help with, look for the right advisor in the corresponding field and get ready to transform your business.

Inspect the tax structure for exposure that a buyer’s diligence will surface. Unresolved positions or aggressive treatments become price chips at exit. Quantify the cash benefit against the risk-avoided value, and keep the advisor who can show both.

7. Legal Advisors

A legal advisor is essentially an in-house lawyer that specializes in providing advice on matters concerning the law applicable for the company (area, country, state, or even city in some cases). For a sponsor, this seat is largely about risk avoided and clean diligence.

Corporations often have a legal team comprised of legal experts while smaller companies have a legal advisor on-call whose primary tasks include the following:

• Draft and negotiate contracts with vendors or clients
• Ensure compliance with local and international corporate laws
• Provide counsel for employee and management conflicts
• Conduct legal analysis and research (especially for newer areas such as CCPA or GDPR)
• Review acquisitions, mergers or negotiations and their legal implications across the organization (including possible non-compete clauses, non-disclosures, or possible monopoly cases)
• Formulate legal responses to settlements of disputes
• Monitor and refine the implementation of the legal clauses and policies within the organization

Legal advisors are particularly helpful in making sure that companies arrive with legally appropriate conflict resolutions whenever there are labor or contract disputes, compensation issues, harassment suits, and other employee and management conflicts.

Small to mid-sized businesses often can’t utilize a lawyer full-time (and it’s too expensive to hire one) which is where legal advisors are extremely helpful.

Additionally, legal advisors work with multiple businesses (often 15-20 at a time) and provide a broader overview thanks to their experience with other clients dealing with similar challenges.

Have the legal advisor produce a contract and compliance register mapped to the same categories a buyer will test. Unassignable customer contracts, missing IP assignments, and open disputes are the items that erode a deal at exit. Close them now, on your timeline, not the buyer’s.

8. IT Advisors

IT advisors are a separate type of professional consultants that profile in one or more of the following areas:

• Infrastructure development
• Hardware systems
• Networking
• Software engineering
• Web development
• Building and/or scaling development teams
• Product development
• Compliance (for banks, governments, and companies working with security agencies)

To put it simply, IT advisors are often former CTOs or VPs of technology who transitioned to consulting, enjoying the variety of working with multiple clients at a time. For a portfolio-company CTO, the useful ones translate technology into EBITDA impact and diligence risk, not architecture diagrams.

Some of them profile in a specific area of work – such as facilitating technical teams’ preselection and recruitment process or facilitating a company to outsource a complex product (by contracting the right agency).

ISPs or SaaS companies that are eager to migrate to a large cloud infrastructure like AWS or build their dedicated server center can also contract the right IT advisor and initiate the planning and transition process accordingly.

Smaller companies often partner up with IT advisors when they don’t want to build an entire technical team in-house. In this case, the IT advisor acts as a part-time CTO or works alongside the CTO on initiatives outside of their core expertise. Use one to pressure-test the tech before you fund the roadmap, and hold the output to a cost, a risk, or a revenue enablement, not a stack preference.

9. Recruitment Advisors

The recruitment process is one of the most impactful areas of scaling a business successfully. For a sponsor, mis-hiring at the leadership level is one of the most expensive ways to miss a plan.

• About 56% of companies in a study reported that a candidate rejected their job offer in 2012
• Of the 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months
• 89% of those who left failed due to a mismatch of values
• 11% failed because they lack the necessary skills
• Hiring the wrong fit often costs 6 figures (let alone missed opportunities and the limited progress due to delays)

Hiring issues may vary but when downplayed, scaling can be a very costly endeavor.

Recruitment advisors provide support and in-house consulting for both internal hiring and liaison with staffing firms (or other outsourcing companies).

Working with a recruitment advisor will grant you access to a broader number of reliable recruitment agencies, thus bridging the gap between companies and applicants. 

Basically, the following are the responsibilities of a recruitment advisor:

• Negotiate job profiles, contracts, and fees
• Headhunt and screen candidates for a job
• Interview prospective employees alongside the team leads
• Organize the selection process in a smooth, easy-to-follow manner
• Advertise job vacancies across internal networks

These recruitment advisors help companies streamline the staffing process, hiring and onboarding staff efficiently. Point them at the two or three roles the value-creation plan actually depends on, and hold them to time-to-fill and first-year retention on those seats. Volume of req’s filled is not the metric that matters to you.

10. Sales Advisors

Sales advisors navigate the sales processes within the organization, building in-house sales teams, streamlining the internal sales processes, improving the funnel development process with the marketing team, refining pricing, and more. For an owner, pricing and sales-motion work is often the fastest run-rate revenue lever on the board.

79% of consumers prefer interacting with salespeople who are trusted advisors. This is why it is crucial to have a trustworthy sales advisor in a company, whether in B2B or B2C.

And if you manage to hire an industry leader who is a known player in the space, this can facilitate your recruitment process, too.

The responsibilities of a sales advisor vary depending on the industry and the products or services offered by the company.

eCommerce businesses may count on a professional sales advisor in various areas:

• Negotiating better vendor terms and delivery orders
• Managing sales promotions, discounts, prices, and return terms 
• Outreach for sales and partnership opportunities (including wholesale and retail)
• Processing sales transactions alongside the team
• Handling customer concerns and complaints for high-tier customers
• Assisting in sales pitches and product presentations

B2B businesses can fully offload the sales process after the first several months and delegate sales meetings, trade show demos, and other strategic relationship deals to their advisor.

Qualities to Look For In A Sales Advisor

Nowadays, 50-90% of the journey of a buyer with a B2B company is complete before the buyer interacts with a sales representative. Although the nature of tasks differs, all sales advisors share a common goal: increase the likelihood of a sale by providing sales advice and creating an appealing environment for decision-makers.

Some of the common traits companies look for when looking for a sales advisor are:

• Proven experience in the industry (preferably with other companies in the field)
• Digital know-how for leading webinars or product demos
• Customer-oriented and results-driven
• In-depth knowledge of products and services advising on
• Great communication and interpersonal skills
• Great organizational skills
• Team-building skills for nurturing an in-house sales team
• Vision and product understanding enabling them to expand monetization opportunities together with executives

Task a sales advisor with a specific run-rate revenue outcome tied to conversion, average deal size, or pricing, and a horizon short enough to matter to the hold. If they cannot commit to a number and a date, keep them out of the plan.

11. Digital Transformation Advisors

The digital universe has been growing rapidly over the past 20 years – with a good number of Fortune 500 companies predominantly offering digital products or services.

This led to the slow transition of traditional businesses to the web in various disciplines:

• Moving in-house systems to the cloud
• Deploying modern CRMs, ERPs, marketing automation solutions
• Modernizing hiring with application tracking systems and innovative processes
• Digitalizing services and solutions previously offered offline
• Building eCommerce solutions where applicable
• Transferring on-site onboarding and training processes to online training platforms
• Coaching and mentorship sessions with different groups of employees on the new technical suites (and other concepts around data privacy or personal security)

Digital transformation advisors excel in these areas and help businesses transition to the modern web with minimal friction. For a sponsor, the danger is a multi-year transformation that consumes capital and never books a return inside the hold.

They often operate alongside marketing teams to allow for a seamless process without interfering with existing operations in the works. Especially in the context of traditional offline marketing, offers are being transferred in their digital equivalent, including the adoption of tracking systems like Google Analytics, advertising solutions from Facebook, Google, Taboola/Outbrain, or even Instagram, marketing automation suites (and more).

As online visibility has become a selection standard for most millennials and Generation Z consumers, digital transformation advisors have been extremely helpful in attracting young talent and in making sure that the company shows progress in adopting the latest tech and industry-grade standards for the web.

Insist that any transformation is staged into increments that each pay back inside the hold period. Fund the first stage, verify the return, then release the next. A big-bang program with a payoff after your exit is someone else’s value creation.

12. PR Advisors

It’s not rampant among small businesses to employ a PR advisor but having one can have a huge positive impact on your branding and marketing efforts.

PR advisors are professionals who take care of your brand image and reputation. Specifically, PR advisors help out with:

• Elevating the status of your business
• Generating goodwill among your target customers
• Managing issues and crisis tainting your company’s image
• Connecting your business with the media for better exposure
• Rebranding your business if decided upon

Although you can develop your own PR strategy, it is hard to beat the connections and the resources of reliable PR advisors. They are called “image shapers” for a reason. When you have a good PR advisor on your side, you can turn a PR nightmare into an opportunity to present your brand better. For an owner, the real value here is risk avoided: a crisis that damages customer retention or the exit story is expensive. Retain PR on a crisis-readiness basis, not as an always-on spend, unless the brand itself is a value driver in the thesis.

13. Startup Advisors

Experts in assisting entrepreneurs and early-stage businesses through the difficulties of founding and expanding a startup are known as startup advisors. These consultants offer guidance on how to create a feasible business strategy, secure funding, create a minimum viable product (MVP), and create effective go-to-market strategies.

Startup advisors will play a critical role in 2024 in fostering innovation and helping new businesses establish a strong foundation for long-term growth. In fact, startups with advisors raise seven times as much money and get 3.5 times better user growth than those without, claims Medium.

Based on a Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report also, startups that collaborate with advisors have a five-fold increased chance of surviving for more than three years.

How can startup advisors help? Well, aside from the objective feedback and an extra pair of eyes to help you look into your business processes, seasoned startup advisors lend credibility to startups, making them more appealing to investors. 

For a startup advisor, however, you need someone with solid experience in the field and of the market and someone who is focused on growth. Competencies in coaching, industry understanding, corporate passion, communication, reputation, and networking are a must.

But how can a startup afford these advisors?

Depending on the amount of guidance given and the stage of the firm, an advisor could get anywhere from 0.25% to 1% of the shares of a startup. It is possible to arrange this kind of pay in a way that guarantees the founders receive fair remuneration for their shares while preserving their ability to swap out advisers without sacrificing ownership. 

One alternative is a vesting timeline of two years with a six-month cliff, meaning that the company will keep the stock if the advisor exits within the first six months of the arrangement not working out.  For a sponsor holding an earlier-stage asset, the equity-for-advice model is the point: align the advisor to enterprise value, and structure vesting so a non-performer is cheap to remove.

14. Investment Advisors

Investment advisors concentrate on investigating investment options and making the most of a company’s financial resources. 

They offer advice on handling internal investments, creating and maintaining investment portfolios, and providing projections for both short- and long-term financial planning. Investment advisors are essential for companies trying to control risk, optimize returns, and allocate resources wisely for expansion and growth in the dynamic financial landscape of 2024.

I have shared my story as an investor in this Investor Profile put together by SeedBlink.

After announcing my supporting role as a Brand Ambassador for SeedBlink, I was thrilled with:

• The overwhelming number of decks coming my way, and
• New investors eager to learn the angel investing ecosystem in Europe

As a serial entrepreneur, business advisor, and former trainer/mentor, I’ve worked with thousands of intrapreneurs and founders on side hustles, solopreneur businesses, lifestyle brands, dropshipping opportunities, and smaller to mid-sized startups. Some grew to 7-figure and even 8-figure ARR companies – and I’m thrilled to have been involved in the process. I am especially proud and honored to have been a trusted advisor for multiple 9-figure brands.

The opportunity to join a broader network of growing businesses, with some skin in the game – is something I cannot recommend enough.

If you want to give investing a shot (especially in the EU area being limited in opportunities), DM, and I’ll share my process and tips accordingly. For a portfolio-company owner, the seat matters mainly for how idle cash is deployed against covenants and reinvestment priorities. Hold it to capital-allocation discipline, not portfolio theatrics.

15. Risk Management Advisors

Advisors in risk management are experts at locating, evaluating, and reducing the risks or hazards that could affect an organization’s day-to-day operations. 

In 2024, risk management consultants will play a critical role in helping organizations create plans to protect themselves from unpredictability in a constantly shifting business environment. These consultants collaborate closely with companies to develop risk-reduction strategies, guarantee adherence to industry standards, and improve resilience all around. 

Risk management experts are essential in helping firms overcome obstacles and prosper in the face of uncertainty, from cybersecurity threats to market swings. About 41% of firms said they had three or more major risk occurrences in the previous year, according to Secureframe.

Businesses can use statistics to find patterns and trends in data that could point to potential hazards in the future. However, having a risk management advisor solely focuses on looking out for potential risks and mitigating them with higher-quality information for making decisions reduces losses and prevents financial downfalls. For a sponsor, this is reduced operating risk and cleaner diligence, both of which protect the multiple. Have the advisor produce a ranked risk register with owners and dates, and treat anything unowned as a live exposure.

What to Inspect Before You Back the Advisory Bench You Inherited

This is the section written for you specifically, the deal partner, operating partner, or portfolio-company CEO who has just taken on a business and a bench of advisors nobody has audited against a value-creation plan. Every seat above is a candidate for the same test, and the test is not what does this person do. The test is what enterprise-value lever they touch, what it costs when the seat is wrong, and the decision that follows.

Start with a one-page map. List each advisor for business currently on retainer, the fee, the lever they claim to move, and the last measurable outcome they produced with an account, a period, and a baseline. Seats that cannot fill in that last column are running on trust, not evidence. That is the single fastest way to separate the company advisors who compound value from the ones that are simply recurring cost.

What good looks like is narrow and consistent. A good advisor commits to a number, a horizon, and a method before the work starts, and reports against it without being asked. They classify their impact honestly: realized dollars already in the P&L, run-rate improvements now annualizing, forecast upside still to be proven, and risk avoided that a buyer would otherwise price against you. When someone lets forecast or enabled value read as though it were already realized, that is the tell, and you discount their reporting accordingly.

What it costs when the seat is wrong is rarely the retainer. It is the value gap that stays open because a seat you thought was covered was not. A strategy advisor producing decks that never reconcile to the plan costs you a quarter of misdirected execution. A financial advisor whose forecast fails quality-of-earnings scrutiny costs you at the negotiating table at exit. A legal or tax exposure left unmapped becomes a price chip in the buyer’s hands. The fee is noise against those numbers.

This is also where private equity advisory firms have to be honest about their own frame. The firms worth retaining speak in the language of EBITDA, cash conversion, forecast reliability, and time to exit. The ones to be wary of report hours, tickets, and activity, and expect you to infer the value. If you cannot trace a line from the engagement to one of revenue growth, margin, cash, faster integration, reduced risk, better visibility, a higher multiple, or a shorter path to exit, you are underwriting activity, and activity is not outcome.

The decision this drives is a portfolio decision made per seat. Keep the advisor whose outcome you can trace and who accepts a number. Restructure the one whose value is real but mis-measured, usually by rewriting the engagement around a metric and a date. Cut the one who cannot connect to a lever, and redeploy the fee into a gap that can. Do this in the first hundred days, revisit it every board cycle, and you turn an inherited cost centre into a bench that funds itself in enterprise value.

Need Advisory Help?

If the endless pool of business advisory services seems overwhelming now, the discipline that cuts through it is the same one you run on every deal: connect the seat to the lever, or drop it. Understanding the full list of business advisory services matters far less than knowing which two or three close the value gaps in front of you. If you want to work through that mapping directly, try out my advisory 1:1 async program to dive deeper into the most critical areas of running a successful business, or schedule a quick exploratory call.

The questions owners and boards ask me most often are the plain ones. What is a business advisor and what do business advisors do differently for a company under a hold clock. What are business advisors actually accountable for once a value-creation plan exists. Those are the right questions, because the answer for a portfolio company is not the same as the answer for an unowned founder-led business. The types of advisory services do not change, but the standard you hold each one to does.

It helps to keep the categories straight. Business advisory and consulting services span strategy, finance, operations, tax, legal, technology, and risk, and the examples of business advisory services above are the ones you are most likely to have inherited. When someone asks me for a short list of business advisory services worth funding under a plan, my answer is always the same: the ones whose output reconciles to a number you would show a buyer.

More than 500 SMEs and startups have benefited from my advisory and assistance with growth strategy, technology guidance, internal process automation, increasing revenue through inbound marketing and technical solutions, resolving operational issues, and honing their high-level business plan. Our portfolio businesses have generated over $1.65 billion in service revenue and $700M in product sales last year alone.

My consulting firm also helps close gaps in their operations and address issues they are unable to fully recognize. Here are my three main objectives:

• Opening up new revenue streams via new offers and service lines
• Automating workflows and improving efficiency
• Building an experimentation framework to stay ahead of the curve with weekly A/B tests

And if you’re in an early stage mode, here’s my lightweight strategic growth circle program.

The bench you inherited will not audit itself. Map it against the plan this quarter, hold every seat to a number and a date, and you will know by the next board cycle which advisors are building the multiple and which are quietly spending it. That decision is yours to make, and it is worth more than any single engagement on the list.

By Mario Peshev, DevriX