Fixed-fee deliverable · SMB operators & leadership teams
Before you hire, buy a tool, or add support, the Blueprint is a fixed-fee diagnosis of what is really slowing work, with prioritized moves and a sequenced plan you can act on.
Fixed-fee. Focused is $2,500, Expanded from $3,500. We set scope and the exact fee on the Fit Call, no surprises. No payment to talk.
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A repeatable method from two founders with operations-leadership backgrounds at trusted names like Comcast, AWS, and Verizon, paired with vetted operators who have run your kind of problem.
Altvina is not a staffing firm or freelancer marketplace. Operators are engaged only when the Blueprint shows a real gap.
Inside the deliverable
Blueprint first
Execution support is available only where the Blueprint shows a real capability or capacity gap, not as a default retainer or hire.
Diagnose · Design · Deploy
The through-line below; deliverables and scope are spelled out on this page.
A single, fixed-fee artifact and walkthrough that turns operating friction into decisions your leadership team can act on.
Why it matters: most expensive mistakes happen when leaders fund headcount, vendors, or tools before the operating problem is defined. The Blueprint prices clarity first.
Tangible sections you can circulate internally, built for operators, not for a board aesthetics deck.
Evidence-based read on what is constraining throughput, quality, or decisions, separated from noise and politics.
A short list of levers ranked by impact and feasibility, with the cost of deferring each one plain to see.
If/then routes (hire vs redesign vs automate vs targeted support) with the compromises each path carries.
Who decides, who executes, and what has to be true before the next step ships, reducing recurring meeting loops.
A phased plan aligned to your capacity, budget rhythm, and risk tolerance, not a hypothetical five-year vision.
Explicit guidance on where independent experts help, where your team should run, and where spend would be wasted.
The Blueprint is meant to shift how leadership time, meetings, and dollars line up with the actual constraint.
Before
Leadership calendar is coordination, not decisions
After
Time returns to priorities, tradeoffs, and follow-through
Fewer recurring forums that re-open the same questions without owners.
Before
Reporting is debated more than it is used
After
Metrics tie to decisions leaders will actually make
Clarity on what to trust, what to fix, and what to stop measuring.
Shift
“We should hire” is the reflex answer
Outcome: Hire / redesign / automate choices are tested against the bottleneck
Shift
Parallel initiatives compete for the same attention
Outcome: One sequenced path with explicit decision gates
Strong fit when execution is costly or unclear, but the right fix is not obvious yet.
Same rigor, choose the footprint that matches how wide the problem runs.
Fixed-fee, $2,500
One primary bottleneck, a smaller organization, or a contained workflow or team scope.
Fixed-fee, from $3,500
Broader drag across workflows, functions, or multiple decision paths.
Both options include current-state diagnosis, root-cause analysis, a prioritized opportunity map, decision paths with tradeoffs, a sequenced, prioritized roadmap, and a clear read on where support is helpful, optional, or unnecessary. Fixed-fee. Focused is $2,500, Expanded from $3,500, your exact fee is set on the Fit Call, no surprises.
No surprises, no obligation
Prefer to start in writing? Tell us what's slowing you down
Our promise
A fixed fee, set before you pay
We agree the scope and the exact price together on the Fit Call. No hourly creep, no surprise invoice.
The plan is yours to keep
The Blueprint is a deliverable you own and can run with, on your own or with us. There is no obligation to buy anything else.
We'll tell you if you don't need us
If we can't name a constraint worth more than the fee, we'll say so on the call. The Fit Call is free, and there's no payment to talk.
Hiring, retainers, and freelancers can all be right later. Blueprint-first means you fund the fix that maps to the real constraint, instead of paying for headcount, presence, or task coverage before the problem is named.
Execution support is not the default. It is considered only where the Blueprint shows a real capability or capacity gap. Experts are independent operators, not employees or generalist consultants.
When it does make sense, the work is structured, not open-ended: scoped to a specific line in your Blueprint, a written finish line, and nothing to renew. You keep the result.
Shapes vary by situation; none of these are mandatory packages.
For teams that can execute internally but need clarity on what to fix.
For targeted capability gaps tied to a specific problem.
For more complex execution challenges requiring coordinated support.
One common gap the Blueprint surfaces is technology and data. See how scoped IT & data support works.
See the deliverable
Every Blueprint is built for one specific business. This sample follows the same five-part structure your own would, so you can see the method and the level of honesty before you buy.
Pick the business closest to yours
Each is an illustrative composite, not a real client. Same rigor we bring to a real Blueprint.
Operational Efficiency Blueprint
Sample deliverable
Illustrative sample. A composite grounded in patterns we see often, not a real client. Every figure is modeled from the composite's own records, not a measured result from any business.
Executive summary
Meridian came to us a week from signing two hires, a salesperson and an operations manager, about $150,000 a year, to win and run more big contracts. The owner was certain the problem was growth: the pipeline of large recurring accounts felt too thin to keep everyone busy. We asked to see the numbers behind the plan before anyone agreed it was a growth problem.
We rebuilt twelve months of finished work account by account, counting the hours that never make it onto an invoice: crew time, paid drive time between stops, the supervisor's windshield hours, and the after-hours callbacks nobody bills. The story inverted. The three largest, most-protected anchor accounts, the ones used as references and staffed around, run at a combined loss of about $60,500 a year once true hours are counted. The book of small one-off and post-construction jobs everyone treats as filler is what quietly funds them. This is not a thin-pipeline problem. It is a 'we cannot see which work makes money' problem, and Meridian was one signature from spending $150,000 to win more of the work that loses it.
Our recommendation: fix what the book earns before adding people. Re-price or renegotiate the three losing anchors, change how every new account is quoted so it can never silently go underwater again, fix the 58-day collection lag that is masking the bleed in the bank balance, then re-decide the hires from clean numbers. On these figures that recovers most of the leak inside a quarter and keeps the $150,000 in your pocket until the work actually earns it.
This Blueprint cost $2,500. The hire it asks you to pause is sixty times that, every year, pointed at the wrong problem.
What we cannot promise
We cannot promise your biggest anchor renews at a price that works, that conversation is yours and it may go badly; what we can hand you is the floor below which keeping each account costs you money, and the order to walk in.
The brief
A family-run commercial cleaning and building-maintenance company, about 30 people, roughly $4M a year, eight years in business. Revenue has climbed every year but the bank balance has not, and the owner was a week from hiring a salesperson and an operations manager, about $150,000 a year combined, to win and run more big recurring contracts. They came to Altvina to pressure-test that plan before signing the offer letters. We asked one thing first: show us, account by account, which work actually makes money. Nobody had ever counted it that way.
How we looked
The owner was sure the problem was a thin pipeline of big accounts. Before agreeing, we did the one thing the business had never done: we pulled twelve months of completed work and rebuilt what each recurring account truly cost to serve, not what the proposal assumed. That means counting the hours that never reach an invoice, crew labor at the real loaded rate, paid drive time between stops, the supervisor's windshield and re-clean time, and the after-hours callbacks the dispatcher handles as a favor. Then we ranked every account by real profit, coldly, no matter how prized the logo is.
What we found (the part that flips the story)
The three largest, most-protected anchor accounts, the ones on the website, the ones crews were hired around, lose money once true hours are counted. It is not even across them: the medical office park is roughly break-even, but the regional bank branches and the distribution warehouse bleed about $33,900 and $29,700 a year. The small post-construction and one-off jobs everyone calls 'filler' carry a 24 percent margin and were quietly funding the anchors. Meridian does not have a growth problem. It has a 'we cannot see which work makes money' problem, and was about to spend $150,000 to win more anchors exactly like the ones losing it.
Recurring book, real profit by account (trailing 12 months)
Regional bank, 9 branches
Distribution warehouse
Medical office park
Mid-size recurring (11 accts)
One-off & post-construction
Reconstructed from Meridian's own job records and payroll, not industry averages. 'Real cost' includes unbilled drive, supervisor, and callback hours. Rounded to the nearest hundred.
Real margin by account type, trailing 12 months
The two losing anchors sit below the line. The work treated as least important is the most profitable.
Show our work: the worst account, line by line
Take the bank, 9 branches, billed at $17,900 a month. The bid assumed a 2.5-hour clean per branch, five nights. The crew clock and the route sheet say the real average is 3.1 hours once two older branches that always run long are counted. That gap is about 67 unbilled crew hours a month. Add the supervisor's 11 hours a month driving the route to re-check the two problem branches, and the after-hours alarm-reset callbacks, 4 to 6 a month at roughly an hour each, billed to no one. Loaded at Meridian's own labor rate, those unbilled hours run about $2,825 a month. That is why an account that 'looks like' $17,900 of revenue actually costs about $20,725 to serve. You are paying roughly $2,825 a month to keep this logo. We rebuilt every other account the same way, from your hours, not from estimates, which is why we believe the rest of the table.
The collection lag hiding it
58
days
Average time from work done to cash in the bank on the three anchors, against 30-day terms
28
days late
How far past terms the anchors run, so the bleed never shows up as a cash crunch on time
$94k
tied up
Roughly what is sitting in receivables past terms on the anchors at any given moment
Why it stayed hidden
These accounts were bid years ago from a rate sheet, won, and never re-costed, while the work quietly crept: a branch remodel that added square footage, a warehouse that started running a second shift, alarm callbacks that became routine. They are also the accounts the family defends hardest. The owner's brother runs the bank route and is proud of it; the warehouse was the win that 'put us on the map.' And the 58-day collection lag means the loss never arrives as a missed payroll, it arrives as a line of credit that keeps creeping up for reasons nobody can name. Nothing in the system showed the leak, and the people closest to it had reasons not to look.
Why an owner cannot catch this from the inside
This is a position problem, not a competence problem. Seeing it needs three things an owner running the day rarely has at once: the outside eye that knows exactly where margin hides in route-based cleaning work, the distance to call your proudest account unprofitable to your own brother's face, and the hours to rebuild a year of job costs and rank them without flinching. Neither Altvina founder has ever run a cleaning company. What we bring is a vetted operator who ran bidding and margin inside a multi-route janitorial firm, plus the founders' systems lens and the distance to do the counting. That judgment is what the diagnosis buys, not a spreadsheet you could have downloaded.
What we assumed (and would confirm)
We used Meridian's loaded labor rate as given. If the workers' comp class code or the real overtime load on the night crews is heavier than payroll showed, the anchor losses are larger, not smaller. We flag it because the re-pricing conversation should start from a number you have nailed down, and we would lock that down before the first call to the bank.
Section 1 of 5
How we worked
We rebuilt the composite’s real numbers from its own records, ranked the work by true profit, sequenced the fixes, and framed the decision. Diagnose, Design, Deploy. Every figure traces back to the business’s own records, no outside benchmarks or industry averages assumed.
What your Blueprint includes
This is one business’s blind spot. The method is the same. The answer is always different.
A Fit Call is 20 minutes, no payment, no slides: an honest read on where your margin is hiding and a straight recommendation, a Focused Blueprint, an Expanded one, or you do not need us yet. Sometimes that last one is the answer, and we will say so.
See what your numbers would say in 20 minutes.
No payment to talk. If we are not the right move, we will tell you.
This is what the Blueprint does: it finds what your own numbers are hiding, and tells you where not to spend. We would rather talk you out of an expensive hire or tool you do not need than sell you a bigger project.
You have seen what a Blueprint surfaces. Now map yours.
Diagnose names the constraint; Design turns that into a sequenced plan; Deploy adds experts only where the plan shows a real execution gap.
The Fit Call is how we confirm fit, choose Focused or Expanded scope, and align on fees, without prep or obligation.
No payment to talk. We focus on fit and sensible next steps.
Prefer to start in writing? Tell us what's slowing you down