A 90-minute diagnostic that gives you a clear 90-day roadmap to move you from running your business to actually leading it.
That’s intentionally small. It’s early access pricing. More on that below.
The business is busy. People are working. Things are happening. And yet, progress feels oddly fragile. Growth didn’t remove complexity. It concentrated it.
Execution happens, but not in a way you’d bet on without watching it closely. The business still works because you’re involved. Decisions depend on your judgment. Coordination lives in your head more than the system.
If you step away for a few days, nothing explodes. Two weeks might be a different story. But nothing really compounds either.
This isn’t a motivation issue or a people problem, and it’s not something more growth is going to magically resolve.
It’s a design problem.
Running a business looks like this.
Leading looks different.
The gap between those two states isn’t talent or effort. It’s not solved by throwing more people at the problem. It comes down to whether the business is actually designed to generate momentum without relying on your constant involvement.
Once that’s visible, the problem becomes very specific.
Most founders try to solve this at the surface.
They look for better execution, clearer communication, or structural fixes that promise to reduce how much they have to be involved in the “day to day”. Sometimes that helps in the short term, but really it just moves the pressure around.
The underlying issue stays the same because the business is still structured to require the founder’s constant intervention for momentum to happen.
Until that changes, growth doesn’t create relief. It just increases how much attention the business needs to keep moving.
I’m Heath Close. I design operating foundations for growing businesses.
I’ve spent years watching businesses grow, observing and experiencing what actually happens when complexity shows up. Most organizations respond by pushing harder instead of changing how the business is built.
The ones that scale without burning out the founder have a clear operating foundation. The others grow by stacking workarounds until the founder quietly becomes the infrastructure the business pretends it doesn’t rely on. I’ve seen the same pattern repeat in larger organizations.
Growth does not fix foundational problems.
It makes them more expensive.
When a business lacks a shared operating center, teams do good work and still fail to move the business forward together, because the organization does not function as a coherent whole.
Marketing executes. Sales sells. Operations tries to keep everything running. The real leverage lives between departments, and those seams stay unowned. Progress depends on constant alignment, clarification, and follow-up, because the system itself is not doing that work.
So the one in charge steps in.
Sometimes that turns into control, because it feels like the only way to keep things from collapsing. The cost quietly shows up everywhere else. Autonomy erodes. People stop taking initiative. Innovation slows. Retention suffers. Direction blurs. Eventually everyone is focused on the fear of “doing it wrong” rather than taking initiative and moving the business forward.
That is what running a business looks like once complexity outpaces structure.
Leading a business requires something else.
A foundation that sets direction, aligns decisions to it, and allows the business to move toward a shared north star without constant correction. In that environment, the founder’s involvement shapes direction and priorities instead of patching gaps and holding momentum together.
My work is about establishing that foundation early, so clarity, coordination, and momentum do not depend on constant intervention, vigilance, or personal presence.
That is the lens behind my offer, the Impact Intensive.
This is not a strategy session where we talk about your vision and nod along.
It looks at how the business actually operates right now.
How transformation is defined.
How work flows.
How decisions get made.
Where coordination still depends on you personally.
And what would need to change for that to stop being true.
The output is a 90-day roadmap.
Not aspirational. Structural.
It shows what must change, and in what order, so the business can carry its own weight, rather than functioning only when you’re actively propping it up.
Your anchor. The shared definition of what the business is actually trying to deliver.
We look at whether different parts of the organization are oriented around the same outcome, or optimizing for different things entirely.
When this is off, teams work hard and still pull in different directions. Decisions feel situational. Momentum stalls because there is no true north guiding trade-offs.
We identify what the business is actually oriented around today and where that orientation breaks down.
Where transformation becomes lived experience.
We examine how someone moves from first contact to real outcome, and whether that path is intentionally designed or held together by your ongoing coordination.
When this breaks down, handoffs depend on you. Context has to be re-explained. People lose orientation, and progress slows in places that should be automatic.
We surface where the journey no longer carries clarity or quality on its own.
Where the designed experience either holds or degrades.
We look at how work is delivered day to day, whether there is a consistent operating rhythm, and where delivery still requires the founder's direct coordination to happen reliably.
When delivery is unstable, the same bottlenecks reappear no matter how many times they are "fixed." The system adapts around the problem instead of resolving it.
We assess whether delivery is structurally sound or quietly dependent on you.
How the business knows what to do next.
We examine how decisions are currently made, what signals are actually guiding them, and where judgment is being substituted for structure.
When signals are unclear, leaders stay deeply involved because they have to be. Decisions feel heavy. Progress depends on attention instead of orientation.
We clarify what the business needs to be able to see.
This is not about doing less. It is about doing what actually matters.
We look at where your involvement is currently required, where it is compensating for missing structure, and where it would be most valuable if the system were doing its job.
When this is unclear, founders stay stuck in operating mode even as the business grows.
We identify what would need to change structurally for your role to shift.
Your attention is already overdrawn. I get it.
The 90 minutes isn’t adding to your load. It’s the moment you stop compensating for a business that wasn’t designed to function without you.
Right now, you’re spending time every week translating between departments, making decisions that should be systematic, and holding context that should live in the business itself. That’s the actual time cost.
The diagnostic doesn’t take 90 minutes from your calendar. It gives you back your weeks.
Here’s what’s actually expensive:
You. Not your salary. Your attention.
You’re the most expensive person in your business. Not because of what you earn, but because of what your time is worth when it’s spent leading instead of compensating for structural gaps.
If your effective rate is $200/hour, every hour spent in running mode instead of leading mode is $200 of misallocated attention. Every moment doing operations is time not spent in front of paying clients, closing deals, or designing what comes next.
The longer the business stays dependent on your judgment to function, the more expensive that dependency becomes. Not just in hours. In the strategic moves you can’t make because you’re still holding everything together.
The Impact Intensive isn’t a cost. It’s the moment you stop paying that tax.
Fair question.
The diagnostic isn’t trying to understand every detail of your business. It’s designed to surface structural patterns that govern how the business actually operates.
Those patterns become visible quickly. Not because the session is rushed, but because they show up consistently across the five disciplines.
How transformation is defined.
How work flows.
How decisions get made.
Where coordination depends on you personally.
These aren’t hidden. They’re just not usually examined as a system.
Those 90 minutes are focused. You’ve already surfaced the key signals in the pre-session work. The session itself connects those signals into a coherent view of what’s creating drag and what needs to change.
What takes time isn’t the diagnosis. It’s building the roadmap that comes after, which is why you receive that within seven days, not during the call.
The session is forensic, not exploratory. The goal isn’t breadth. It’s precision, and ninety minutes is enough for that.
Hiring changes who does the work.
It does not change how the business works.
When the operating foundation isn’t clear, new hires inherit ambiguity. Decisions still funnel back to you. Coordination still depends on your involvement. The business gets bigger, but not clearer.
The Impact Intensive exists upstream of hiring.
It clarifies what the business needs to know how to do on its own so that when you do hire, you’re not adding capacity to confusion.
That way, growth creates leverage instead of more surface area to manage.
This is early access pricing.
I’m offering it to the first 3–5 clients as the Impact Intensive is rolled out as a standalone diagnostic. In exchange, I’m looking for honest feedback on the experience and the roadmap itself, and a testimonial once we’ve completed the engagement.
As the Impact Intensive becomes established, the price will increase.
If you’re seeing it at $497, early access is still available.
The session itself doesn’t fix the business.
It reveals what’s already been shaping it.
You’ll leave knowing where coherence breaks down, why momentum still depends on your involvement, and what needs to change next for the business to move forward without it.
What happens after that is up to you.
Some founders take the roadmap and run with it.
Others want my support putting it into motion.
Either way, you’re no longer guessing. You’re working from a clear view of the system instead of compensating for it.
If that’s the kind of clarity you’ve been looking for, the Impact Intensive is designed to give you exactly that.
You’ll receive a short set of focused questions ahead of time. They’re designed to surface how the business actually runs day to day, including recurring work and where your involvement is still required.
How long this takes depends on the complexity of your business. The goal isn’t speed. It’s accuracy.
It’s a structured, visual roadmap that makes priorities, sequencing, and dependencies clear at a glance.
The exact format is chosen based on what will make the system easiest to understand and work from. Some founders need something highly visual. Others prefer something more linear.
Either way, you won’t be handed a dense document and told to figure it out. We’ll walk through it together so you leave knowing exactly how to use it.
Complexity is exactly what the diagnostic is built for.
The session isn’t about understanding every detail of your business. It looks for structural patterns that show up consistently across how work flows, how decisions are made, and where coordination depends on you.
No. The diagnostic examines the operating foundation of the business, not headcount.
Solo founders benefit just as much from clarity around transformation, delivery, decision making, and where their attention should be focused as the business grows.
You’ll have a clear view of what needs to change and why.
Some founders implement it on their own. Others want support putting it into motion. That decision can be made once you can see the system clearly.
Because this is a hands-on, bespoke service and not a digital download, it isn’t sold through a standard cart.
To get started, you’ll submit a short request form.
I’ll review to confirm it’s a fit. If so, you’ll receive a service agreement outlining scope, timeline, and deliverables. Once signed, you’ll get an invoice payable via PayPal.
After payment, you’ll receive the pre-session materials and we’ll schedule your diagnostic.
