Business operations consulting across Hilton Head, Bluffton, and Beaufort
Fixing the operational math behind a company that feels busy and margins that feel thin.
AA19 makes capacity, pricing discipline, and job-level margin visible, then manages against them with the owner. Built for companies growing revenue without growing profit. Findings land in week two, changes get implemented by week four, often with custom dashboards holding the numbers.
The problem for a local owner
Growth hides problems. A company doing 2.4 million in the Lowcountry with eleven employees feels successful right up to the quarter where crews run flat out and net margin lands at four percent. Revenue rose. Profit did not.
The causes sit in operations: jobs priced from memory, crews dispatched by proximity rather than skill, change orders absorbed rather than billed, and a schedule built each morning at 6 a.m. by an owner in a truck.
What gets built
Operations consulting starts with numbers, not opinions. Job costing, crew utilization, drive time, callback rate, and quote win rate get pulled and reconciled against the general ledger.
- A job-level profitability model showing which service lines carry the business and which drain it
- Capacity planning tied to seasonal demand curves specific to Beaufort County
- A pricing structure with defined floors, exception rules, and an approval path
- Dispatch rules covering skill matching, geography, and callback risk
- A change order policy with documentation and billing built in
What the first 30 days look like
Week 1
Baseline numbers
Revenue, job costs, crew hours, and quote-to-close data get pulled and reconciled into one baseline the owner can trust.
Week 2
First working version live
Findings are delivered: where margin leaks, which jobs lose money, and what capacity the crew actually has.
Weeks 3-4
Changes implemented with the owner
Recommendations turn into changes made alongside the owner, with the measures that prove whether the change held.
What it connects to
Recommendations get wired into the software running the day: scheduling in the field service app, costing in QuickBooks, and reporting in a dashboard the owner checks in under two minutes.
Process-level detail continues in business process consulting, and the execution side gets handled through operational systems setup.
Three ways to solve this
Do it yourself
- Upfront effort
- Evenings and weekends spent wiring tools together and testing the numbers work.
- Monthly cost profile
- Owner time, plus a subscription fee for every tool in the stack.
- Who maintains it
- The owner, and changes wait for a free evening.
- What happens when the season gets busy
- The numbers work slips first, since billable work wins the day.
Hire an agency or extra admin
- Upfront effort
- Discovery calls, onboarding documents, and steady direction from someone on staff.
- Monthly cost profile
- $2-5k+ retainers, or a salary plus payroll cost for an added admin.
- Who maintains it
- The agency, on their queue and their timeline.
- What happens when the season gets busy
- Turnaround depends on the retainer tier and the account manager's queue.
AA19 build
- Upfront effort
- A scoped build handled by AA19, with a few hours of owner input during discovery.
- Monthly cost profile
- Scoped build, then light maintenance.
- Who maintains it
- AA19 maintains the build, and the setup is documented so the business owns it.
- What happens when the season gets busy
- The system runs at the same pace, since nothing depends on a free hour.
Proof
[PROOF: short anonymized outcome with one real number - to be supplied]
What changes after
Margin becomes visible before the job runs, not after the invoice clears. Owners gain the ability to decline work confidently, price premium work correctly, and staff against a demand curve.
One common result: revenue holds flat for two quarters and net profit climbs by six to nine points. Less work, more money, fewer 6 a.m. schedule builds.
Questions about business operations consulting
What size company benefits from operations consulting?
Companies between roughly 750,000 and 15 million in annual revenue with field crews and recurring scheduling pressure.
How much historical data is required?
Twelve months of job and invoice history produces reliable analysis. Six months works for a directional read.
Does the engagement include implementation?
Analysis and recommendations come first. Implementation runs as a separate build so the plan can be judged on its own merit.
Will crews resist new dispatch rules?
Adoption improves markedly with crews involved during the diagnostic phase, which the engagement builds in deliberately.
How is success measured?
Gross margin per job, crew utilization, callback rate, and owner hours spent on scheduling. Baselines get recorded at the start.
What does this cost?
Every build is scoped to the business, sized to the systems already in place. A short consultation produces a fixed-price proposal before any work starts, no retainers required to get an answer.
Related services
Services hub
All AA19 services
Closely related
Business Process Consulting
Ready to scope business operations consulting?
A short conversation covers the current setup, the bottleneck, and the first build worth shipping.
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