Take care of the people.
The numbers follow.Operations and leadership consulting for owner-led companies in Houston, Texas.
Mettle & Oak runs the part of your business that needs running. Turnarounds, growth and expansion, sales leadership, compensation, P&L systems, and exit readiness. Fractional COO and general manager engagements, built by operators who came up through the work and have carried a P&L at every level.
Owners reach out at four different moments.
Margin slipping, good people leaving, fixes that will not hold.
It's a miserable way to run a company, and it's fixable. We steady it first so you can breathe, then find what's actually causing it and rebuild that part properly so it stays fixed after we're gone.
Revenue flat, every decision routed through you, no room to push.
Nothing is broken, which is what makes it hard to explain to anyone. The company runs well because you are personally holding it together. Getting past that means real people in real seats and a structure that runs without your hands on every piece.
A second location or a new market, run on systems built for one site.
Growth breaks the things that were working, and it breaks them quietly at first. We build the operating capacity ahead of the expansion instead of after it starts costing you, so the new site opens into a system instead of into a mess.
Cleaning up the operation so a future sale is a choice, not a scramble.
Clean books, documented process, and a business that runs without you. All of it is operations work, and all of it is worth having whether you sell or not. We are not brokers, and we do not sell your company.
Manufacturing · Machining and fabrication ·
Turbomachinery and rotating equipment · Industrial distribution ·
Heavy equipment · Fire and safety · Repair and overhaul · Field service ·
Water treatment · Bar and restaurant · Real estate ·
Print and publishing · Audio and voice · Audience building
Where we have operated to date. The trade changes. The problems underneath do not.
Every owner-led company reaches this point.
It needs more operating attention than the owner has left to give. That's the good problem, and it's still a problem. Nothing is technically on fire. It just doesn't run without you.
Everything routes through you
Decisions stack up on your desk because nobody else has been given the authority, or the information, to make them. You have become the system, and the system doesn't scale.
The numbers arrive late and nobody trusts them
You get last month's results halfway through this month, from a report no one owns. So the team runs on instinct and you find out about problems after they cost money.
Your best people are doing your worst jobs
The person who should be running a department is expediting orders and fixing other people's mistakes. Nobody is being developed, so nobody is ready to take anything off you.
You grew past your systems
What worked at six million doesn't work at eighteen. The processes that got you here were built for a smaller company, and rebuilding them mid-flight is not a side project.
We don't hand you a deck. We take the work.
Most consultants specialize in one function. We came up running whole companies and never had that option, which turns out to be the advantage. Your margin problem is often a scheduling problem. Your sales problem is often an operations problem, because nobody pushes hard on a promise they are not confident the company will keep. Your turnover problem is usually a manager problem. Fix the symptom and the cause finds somewhere else to surface.
Retainer, project, or hourly advisory, scoped to what's actually wrong and not to a package. Some last months, with us in the business week to week. Others are one problem, taken off your desk and finished.
Fractional COO & General Manager
Day-to-day operating leadership at a fraction of what a full-time executive costs. Cadence, decisions, escalations, and the hard conversations. Carried, not advised on.
Read more StabilizeOperational turnaround
Stop the bleeding, find the real constraint, then rebuild the way work moves through the building so it holds after we're gone.
Read more ExpandExpansion & new locations
A second site, a new market, or a bigger crew, added without breaking what already works. The systems go in before the growth arrives, not after it hurts.
Read more RevenueSales organization build-out
Structure, territory, compensation, pipeline discipline, and hiring. Built and led at the VP of Sales level, not diagrammed from the outside.
Read more NumbersKPI & budget systems
The short list of numbers that actually run the business, owned by name, on a reporting rhythm people will keep. Budgets built from the floor up.
Read more PayCompensation & benefits
Pay and benefit structures that hold your best people without wrecking the margin, and that reward the behavior you actually want.
Read more DevelopP&L ownership & manager training
Teaching your managers to read, own, and move their own numbers instead of waiting on yours. It's usually the thing nobody ever taught them, and it's the difference between a supervisor and a leader you can hand something to.
Read moreWe start with the people doing the work, not the org chart. That's usually where the real answer is already sitting.
Exit readiness
Most owners we work with have no intention of selling, and none of the work above assumes you will. But if a sale is on your horizon, the same operations that make a company good to run are what make it valuable to buy: owner dependency removed, numbers clean and defensible, leadership that survives a transition.
Start a year or two out and it shows up in the offer. Start during diligence and it shows up as a discount. And if you never sell, none of it is wasted. A business that runs without you is a better business to own. We are not brokers, and we do not sell your company for you.
Every struggling company we have walked into had people in it who already knew what was wrong. Nobody had asked them.
We came up through the work.
Every seat on this list has been held by somebody here, and most of us started on the tools before we ran anything.
Most people who do this work came out of consulting and learned operations from the outside in. We came at it the other way. Swept the floor, ran the machine, carried the schedule, made the payroll call, and answered for the number all of it rolled up to. When we tell your team we understand their job, they can tell inside of four minutes whether that's true.
The setting changes from one client to the next. A shop floor, a dining room, a services firm, a fleet of trucks. What's broken underneath is usually the same short list. Nobody is clear on what they own. The numbers show up late and nobody trusts them. Good people are pointed at the wrong work. And the owner is carrying far more of the company in their own head than they should have to, which is normally the price of having built something worth keeping.
“You can't fix a company from a conference room. You also can't fix one by cutting the people who know where everything is. Put good people in the right seats, build the system around them, and give them what they need to do the job. The numbers follow. I've watched that hold up too many times to call it a theory.”
PrincipalMettle & Oak
What that looks like in practice.
Every one of these was a team result, built with the people already in the building.
Two businesses under one roof running on different clocks, and a sales team that had stopped pushing.
Read the full caseEvery dollar of the business ran through the owner's head, which is exactly what a buyer discounts.
Read the full caseThe constraint was never demand. It was that a repair meant the customer went down.
Read the full caseThe owner's number was low because from the outside the business looked like it ran on him.
Read the full caseWe make businesses marketable and diligence ready, which is the same work that makes them good to own.
Three reasons we would turn the work down.
- The conclusion is already written. We will build you a report, and a good one. What we won't do is work backward from an answer you have already landed on. If the numbers point somewhere else, that's what the report will say, and you can do whatever you want with it from there. Paying us to agree with you is a waste of your money.
- The first move you want is a headcount cut. Sometimes it ends up being necessary. It's almost never the right place to start, and if it's the only lever you're interested in pulling, we'll waste each other's time.
- You want us to work around you instead of with you. We can carry a great deal of this. But you can't install a new way of operating in a company whose owner isn't in the room for it.
Whoever sits across from you in the first meeting is who walks into your building. Work doesn't get sold by one set of hands here and delivered by another, and we take a limited number of engagements at a time so it stays that way.
Behind that are operators we came up alongside and worked for, carrying decades of their own across plant floors, service fleets, and the seats that answer for a number. They come in by name and by need. You'll always know who is on your engagement and why.
Your accountant, your attorney, and your broker each own their piece. We work alongside all three and we'll tell you plainly when a question belongs to one of them, because the fastest way to cost you money is to answer one that isn't ours.
Start with whatever is closest to your situation.
Seven engagements
Turnaround, growth, sales, people and pay, the numbers, and exit readiness.
See what we do Selected workFour companies in detail
What was actually wrong, what we did about it, and what moved.
Read the work Who we areBuilt from operators
Every seat on the list has been held by somebody here.
Meet the bench ContactStart a conversation
A call, no charge and no deck. Bring whatever is bothering you most.
Get in touch