Business transformation & operations consulting · Grand Rapids, MI

Clarity for companies that have outgrown chaos.

For owners of 20 to 500 person companies whose systems have fallen behind their growth. I help you replace the chaos with clarity, so every decision gets made with confidence instead of guesswork.

See the opportunity
  • We look at how you run
  • We tell you the truth about what it costs
  • You decide with confidence

01 / 04

The Opportunity

The growth that built your company has created room to run it better.

Growth tends to outpace the systems that got a company here. That's a sign of success, and it's where the biggest gains are waiting. Most owners I talk to are weighing questions like these, and most of the answers are already in the business.

  • Should I hire another person or invest in technology?
  • Which software should we buy?
  • Do we need a COO?
  • Why does every department operate differently?
  • How do I know if this investment is worth it?

What becomes possible

  • Technology that fits

    Tools chosen to match how your business runs, so every system earns its keep.

  • One way of working

    Every department running the best version of each process.

  • Numbers you can act on

    Reports your leaders trust enough to make big calls without a second spreadsheet.

  • A clear way to decide

    A repeatable way to choose between hiring another person and buying technology.

Self-assessment

See where you stand: the 10 questions every growing business should be able to answer.

Answer these honestly, on your own, in about ten minutes. No one is scoring it and nothing gets sent anywhere.

  1. If your most tenured person left tomorrow, what would leave with them?
  2. Is there a backup you have been told exists that nobody has verified?
  3. Which of your business-critical processes exist only in someone's head?
  4. When you bought your last piece of software, what process was it meant to fix, and did it?
  5. Do the people who run your business trust the reports they get?
  6. How do you decide whether to hire another person or buy technology?
  7. Where are your people still working around the system in a spreadsheet?
  8. Which two departments solve the same problem in two different ways?
  9. What did your last significant investment return, and how do you know?
  10. What decision are you putting off because you don't trust the numbers?

Mark each question as you go.

If three or more of these are hard to answer, that is not a failure. It is what growth does to a company that has been busy succeeding.

Talk it through with Kevin Printable version (PDF)

02 / 04

How I Work

I diagnose before I prescribe.

  1. Step 1

    We look.

    I talk to your leaders and your people to see how the business runs day to day. The org chart is only part of the picture.

  2. Step 2

    We tell you the truth.

    A clear picture of what's working, what's costing you, and what's at risk, with numbers attached.

  3. Step 3

    You decide with confidence.

    A prioritized roadmap you own, with the ROI on each item, and a team capable of executing it.

What you walk away with

  • A written picture of how your business really runs
  • A roadmap with a dollar figure on every item
  • A team that can run it without a consultant

My commitments

Five things you can hold me to.

  1. I diagnose before I prescribe.

    No technology recommendation, no org-chart recommendation, no investment recommendation until I understand how your business runs and have talked to the people doing the work.

  2. I talk to your employees, not just your leadership.

    That's where the truth lives, and it isn't optional. What they tell me is reported in aggregate and never attributed by name, which is exactly why they tell me.

  3. Every recommendation comes with a number attached.

    If I can't estimate what a problem is costing you, or what fixing it is worth, it doesn't belong in the report.

  4. I'll tell you if you don't need me.

    Sometimes the honest answer is that the problem is smaller than you thought, or that someone else is a better fit. You'll hear that from me before you hear a proposal.

  5. I build you toward independence.

    The goal is a team that can run the system without me. That's worse for my recurring revenue and better for your business, and it's the whole point.

03 / 04

Services

Four ways to work together. Every one guaranteed.

Fixed scope, with findings in weeks. I do the digging, and your team only needs to give me access and time. Every engagement carries a guarantee, so the risk sits with me.

Why the Continuity Assessment exists

A backup you were promised is not a backup you have.

I once found an entire revenue reporting operation running on a single server that held ten years of undocumented code. I flagged it. Seven months later that server failed and took every query and every line of code with it. The backup everyone had been counting on was never built. Dozens of reports went dark, hundreds of people lost the data they ran on, and it took about a month to rebuild from nothing.

50+
reports and dashboards down at once
~400
people suddenly unable to do their jobs
10 yrs
of undocumented work to reverse-engineer
~1 mo
to rebuild critical reporting from scratch

Growth made documentation feel less urgent than delivery, until the day it was the only thing that mattered.

The usual path

  1. Diagnostic finds the problems and builds trust
  2. Project solves the highest-priority item
  3. Retainer keeps me at the table for what's next

Included with every engagement

The Annual Continuity Check

A free half-day return visit twelve months after we finish. I review what was implemented, re-run the single-points-of-failure scan, and find what the last year of growth has newly broken. No pitch.

04 / 04

About

I've spent thirteen years inside the chaos. Now I help growing companies find firm ground.

Kevin Ludwig, founder of Firm Ground Co.
Kevin Ludwig · Founder

I've done this work inside a utility, an automation company and a global hospitality company. I've seen what a broken system costs the people inside it, and I've paid some of that cost myself.

Now I do the same work for growing companies, without the enterprise price tag.

$500K+
in technology investments approved by executives
23% to 89%
survey completion, in six months
5 hrs to 30 min
lead research time, after an AI-enabled redesign
$150K
saved each year from one platform decision

Why this company exists

For thirteen years I did the same work inside large organizations. A regional utility. A global automation manufacturer. A global hospitality company.

Different industries, same problem in every one of them: growth outpaced clarity.

Technology got bought before anyone understood the process it was supposed to fix. Every department had its own version of the same process. Leaders made expensive decisions on incomplete information and hoped.

I spent those years learning how to fix that.

How to build a business case that survives executive scrutiny. I've secured approval for more than $500,000 in strategic technology investments, from cloud infrastructure to licensing to a contractor staffing model that didn't previously exist.

How to find the waste nobody's measuring: cutting lead research from five hours to thirty minutes, taking a survey completion rate from 23% to 89%, saving $150,000 a year on a single platform decision.

How to lead people through change they didn't ask for, including the month we recovered from a server failure that destroyed ten years of reporting code. I coordinated five cross-functional teams to restore the business while keeping executives informed with the plain truth.

And how to build things that outlive the person who built them: sixty-plus documented process flows, governance frameworks, source control, and the first analyst-to-manager promotion path in an organization that had never had one.

I also learned what I didn't want to build.

I saw organizations buy software to avoid making a decision, and I saw what a broken system costs the people inside it.

Companies will accept exceptional individual effort as a substitute for good systems, right up until the person providing that effort is gone. What lasts is clear systems and processes that survive any one person leaving.

That's what I spent thirteen years learning to build. It's what this firm exists to build for owners who can't afford to guess.

What I've done

Investment & business cases

  • Secured executive approval for $500K+ in strategic technology investments, including cloud infrastructure, AWS migration, development contractors, source control and BI licensing
  • Established an organization's first contractor staffing model, securing a $48,000 investment that expanded technical delivery capacity

Waste elimination & productivity

  • Cut lead research time from five hours to thirty minutes through AI-enabled process redesign
  • Raised a survey completion rate from 23% to 89% in six months
  • Delivered $150,000 in annual savings through a single platform decision
  • Audited 17,000+ invoices as project lead

Delivery & modernization

  • Migrated 66 reports and tools from legacy infrastructure to AWS, two months ahead of schedule
  • Directed delivery of a forecast tool MVP supporting an estimated 750 users
  • Grew revenue 61% in a utility joint-construction portfolio
  • Authored 60+ process flows and procedures for a single department

Leadership

  • Led a multidisciplinary team of 7 analysts, managers and contractors
  • Supported operations across a multi-thousand-property portfolio
  • Championed the first analyst-to-manager promotion in the organization's history
  • Nominated for Best in Class Assistant Director within four months of joining

Why a generalist

Most consultants pick a lane. Just HR. Just finance. Just IT.

In a company your size that's a mismatch, because your problems don't stay inside one department. A financial consultant won't fix an accountability problem. An HR consultant won't fix a margin problem. The thing slowing you down is usually sitting in the space between two functions, where nobody owns it.

The work I've done covers technology, process, change management and leadership together, because that's how the problems arrive.

Where I am

Firm Ground Co. is based in West Michigan and works with owner-operated companies across the Midwest. They typically have 20 to 500 employees and have reached the point where growth has started to outrun the systems that got them here.

Most of the work happens on site. Some of it happens over a coffee before anyone signs anything.