The Cogent Discovery
Is this you?
We built the Discovery for privately held companies with real weight behind them.
Where most of our clients sit
$1M-$100M
In annual revenue. Big enough that a point of margin is real money.
6-250
Employees. Enough people that you can't see everything yourself anymore.
PRIVATE
Privately owned. You answer to yourself, not to a board or a parent company.
Smaller? The floor is around six employees and a million in revenue. Under that, a Discovery usually can't pay for itself yet, and we'd rather tell you that than take the work. If you're close to the line, call us and we'll tell you straight.
Bigger? We've run this well north of $100 million. Nothing about the process changes. There's just more of your business to get through, so it takes more days.
One of these usually sounds familiar
01
The business works. You built it, it's good, and good is no longer enough. You want to know what the best companies in your industry are actually doing differently, what it would take to get there, and whether it's worth it.
02
You're working in the business more than you want to be, and hardly any of that time goes to real strategy. Somewhere along the way the company started running you, and now every decision waits on you. It should be able to run without you in the room.
03
Revenue's up and profit isn't. Everybody's busy and the margin is thin. You've been chasing the same problems for years without ever getting to what's causing them, because nobody has put the whole business in front of you at once.
04
Selling to a third party, passing it to your kids, or building something that outlasts you. However it goes, most of what you'll walk away with is decided long before anybody makes an offer.
Not sure where you land? Let's talk.
Book your DiscoveryPhase 1
What exists today
We start with everything that never makes it into a spreadsheet. The history. The decisions that made sense at the time and never got revisited. The client you cannot afford to lose and the one you cannot afford to keep. The problems that have followed you for a decade.
This is a deep dive into what is actually in place, what is getting done, what is not getting done, and who is really carrying it.
Problem costing starts here. As each problem surfaces we begin putting a number against it. What gets priced in this room is tested against your operations later in the week and proved against your financials after that.
A problem without a cost attached is just a complaint.
The process is invasive on purpose, because the nuance is the business. Every company we walk into is unique, and the reason always surfaces in this room.
Phase 1 ends when we understand your world the way you live it and what you want out of your business and your life in the future.
Phase 2
What the people closest to the business say
Phase 1 gave us your view of the business. Phase 2 goes and gets everyone else's.
You and your analyst build the interview list together. Your leadership team, your managers, the long-tenured people who know where everything is buried, and anyone whose judgment carries weight regardless of what their title says. Nobody is added or left off without you knowing. Then we sit down one-on-one, one conversation at a time, with no audience and no one from ownership in the room.
The questions are built for the position rather than read off a single list. What we ask a foreman is not what we ask your controller, because they are looking at different parts of the same company.
Where their answers line up, and where they contradict each other, is the finding.
These conversations are on the record. Your key players tell us what they are willing to put their name to, and most of them tell us more than anyone expects, because it is the first time someone has asked them directly and written the answer down.
Phase 2 ends with your business described by the people who run it, not only by the person who owns it.
Phase 3
How the work actually gets done
Phase 3 is where we find out what the work actually costs you.
A financial statement tells you what a job cost after the fact. It never tells you where that cost came from. Your analyst walks the process with the people who run it, asking questions built for your industry rather than working down a generic checklist. Every step gets examined, and every step gets costed from the work itself:
The exercise reaches well past the production floor. We also examine:
Once each part of the process carries a number, the conversation changes.
Steps that felt like the cost of doing business turn out to be the most expensive thing you do.
Work you assumed was profitable turns out to be carried by something else. The money you have been leaving on the table stops being a suspicion and becomes a line item.
We also sit in on your critical recurring meetings. The production meeting, the sales meeting, the Monday morning huddle, whatever the business genuinely runs on. An hour of watching a meeting happen tells us what an org chart never will: who talks and who does not, who decides, what gets escalated, and what gets raised every single week without ever getting resolved. Most owners have never seen their own meetings from the outside.
The meeting itself takes an hour or two of your day. Behind it sits more than ten hours of your analyst's own work, going through all of it line by line before any of it comes back to you.
This is also the room where supervisors and field crews say the most. They have watched the waste happen for years, and nobody ever put a price on it.
Phase 4
What the organization experiences
Phase 2 asked your key players to speak on the record. Phase 4 asks everyone, and asks them anonymously.
Every employee gets the survey, from your leadership team down to the newest hire on the floor. No names, no filter, and no manager reading over a shoulder. People will write things in an anonymous survey they would never say across a desk, and those are usually the things worth knowing.
We ask about culture, communication, leadership, and whether people have what they need to do the job well.
One person's frustration is an opinion. The same frustration from nineteen people is a system.
We are not collecting complaints; we are looking for patterns, and the patterns are what we bring back to you. Those patterns are worth more than any single answer. They tell you:
Phase 5
What the financials reveal
Ownership tells us one story. The numbers tell another. Both are true, and the distance between them is usually where the money sits.
We work through four or more years of financials and rebuild your key indicators from the ground up, then measure you against yourself instead of a national average that describes nobody:
This is where problem costing stops being an estimate.
Every problem we have priced since Phase 1 gets held against your own figures, not a benchmark and not a guess. Most of what we find is wasted time, and the work is turning that time back into dollars you can point at on a statement.
What we are hunting: where performance quietly slipped, where margin leaks, where capacity goes unsold, and where profit is hiding in plain sight.
Phase 6
Where you go next
Everything converges in the findings meeting. Your reality, your key players, your operations, your people, and your numbers in one picture, delivered to every equity owner at the same time so nobody hears it secondhand.
This is an actionable plan you can start tomorrow.
What you get in this phase
And the documents to work from
Discovery is invasive by design. We go into the books, the org chart, the floor, and the conversations your leadership team has when you are not in the room. We ask uncomfortable questions, and we ask them of everyone, not only ownership. That is the only way to reach what is true instead of what everyone has agreed to say out loud.
If you want validation, do not book a Discovery. If you want the truth about your business, you will have it in two to three days.
The Cogent Profit Platform®
Every business is unique. Every business also runs on the same four pillars. We evaluate each pillar as it exists in your business, not against a template, to find the opportunity and close the leaks without sacrificing your clients or your people.
Business Development
Fill the pipeline. Win the right work at the right price.
Organizational Engineering
Build the right team. Lead with clarity.
Control Systems and KPIs
Measure what matters. Decide with evidence.
Process Management
Do the work right, every time.
Strong in all four. Unstoppable together.
When the pillars carry load together, the business stops running through you on every decision, your people know what winning looks like, and the value you built outlasts you.
A Discovery does not find profit by cutting your people or squeezing your clients. It finds profit where you are already losing it: work priced below what it actually costs, capacity you pay for and never sell, decisions nobody owns, and cash trapped in the wrong part of the cycle.
Say the word profit to a room of business owners and half of them flinch. Profit sounds like something taken: off the client, out of the payroll, away from the quality the company built its name on.
It is the opposite. Profit is the only thing a business produces that it can give away. Everything the company does for the people who depend on it gets paid for out of that number, and nothing else.
Follow the money
Profit is not the last line on a statement. It is the first link in a chain that ends a long way from the office, in houses that belong to people who have never seen your P&L.
01 The source
02 First it strengthens the business
Payroll clears without you watching the account. Suppliers get paid on time. You stop financing the business out of your own patience.
Money to reinvest rather than borrow. Money to bid the bigger job, add the crew, open the second location.
A profitable company sells for a multiple of what it earns. An unprofitable one sells for the value of its equipment.
A slow quarter becomes an inconvenience instead of an emergency. Nobody gets laid off to make a month work.
03 Then it reaches the people
Time away that you actually take. A wage that reflects the risk you carry, not whatever is left over. A business you can hand to your kids or sell to a stranger, rather than one you have to keep showing up to because it stops without you.
The raise you have been promising arrives. Jobs hold through a downturn. People build careers instead of putting in years, and their families never find out the company was having a hard year.
Every box above is somebody's security, and all of it is paid for out of the same place. A company with no profit has nothing to give anyone.
They are direct, they are experienced, and their job is to tell you the truth about your business and then help you do something with it.
Your Discovery is led by a senior business analyst who has owned, run, or turned around companies the size of yours. Not career advisers. Operators who have signed the front of a paycheck and know what it costs to make payroll in a bad month.
Senior Business Analyst
Kris Hart brings a broad range of skills and over 20 years of experience to help small and midsize businesses thrive. He holds Bachelor's degrees in Business, Clinical Psychology, and Occupational Safety and Health, as well as an MBA.
Before joining Cogent, Kris oversaw Pole-to-Pole and Global flights in Private, Military, Medical and Charter operations, proving his ability to successfully coordinate complex, high-stakes initiatives. He is also a seasoned public speaker, sharing his insights on business growth and leadership with audiences nationwide.
Having sold multiple businesses during COVID, Kris finds it particularly rewarding to empower fellow entrepreneurs, especially those leading small American enterprises. He approaches every client relationship with unwavering dedication and optimism, leveraging his unique expertise to guide companies toward sustainable growth and lasting success.
Senior Business Analyst
Kevin Cummins is a technology and operations leader with extensive experience spanning Fortune 500 companies, startups, and small to midsize businesses. He spent over 15 years in large-scale organizations with P&L responsibility exceeding $750 million before transitioning to the SMB space.
Kevin has built and scaled sales, consulting, services, and client experience teams across North America. As COO of a startup, he helped grow the business to over $17 million in recurring revenue, and later served as CEO of Batterii, leading it from concept to an enterprise platform used by more than 35 Fortune 1000 companies.
Kevin holds a Bachelor of Science from Miami University and master's degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University. He enjoys partnering with business owners to drive sustainable growth and long-term success.
Senior Business Analyst
Dave Drylie brings a uniquely diverse business background shaped by ownership and leadership across consulting, manufacturing, contracting, franchising, and franchisor organizations. He has over 16 years of consulting experience and has delivered training for dozens of trade associations, primarily in manufacturing and construction.
Dave has also taught business and franchising courses at the university level. His work with thousands of business owners has given him deep insight into the common challenges organizations face, and the practical strategies needed to overcome them.
He values real-world experience as much as formal education and leverages both to help business owners navigate growth, complexity, and change.
Senior Business Analyst
Chris Polvado is a seasoned business executive with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations improve operations, drive revenue growth, and scale sustainably. A servant leader at heart, Chris focuses on clear communication, strategic vision, and team development.
His expertise includes operations management, strategic planning, succession and wealth-building strategies, marketing and lead generation, budgeting and forecasting, and relationship management. Chris is passionate about helping business owners align their operations with their purpose and long-term goals.
He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Tarleton State University and is dedicated to positively impacting organizations and the people behind them.
Senior Business Analyst
Arlon Albert brings over 25 years of experience as both a business owner and financial leader, working across manufacturing, construction, and distribution industries. He also spent a decade in senior financial management roles with Fortune 500 companies including Hertz and Waste Management.
Arlon has helped more than 1,900 small businesses identify management gaps, improve cash flow and profitability, strengthen organizational structure, and reduce tax exposure. His background spans financial management, business startups, sales and marketing systems, and leadership development.
He holds an MBA from Suffolk University with a focus on small business marketing and finance, a BS in Accounting from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and is a non-practicing CPA.
Senior Business Analyst
Monte Jump is a people-first leader with over 20 years of executive experience serving as President, COO, and CMO in both large and small organizations. He has a proven track record of driving revenue growth while improving operational efficiency, and he understands firsthand the realities of business ownership as a former restaurant owner himself.
Most recently, Monte served as President of a Burger King franchise operating 43 locations, where he significantly increased profitability through operational and growth initiatives. His career includes senior leadership roles with brands such as Golden Corral, Crowne Plaza Hotels, Schlotzsky's, Backyard Burgers, and TGI Fridays, where he led major turnarounds, marketing transformations, and performance improvements.
Monte holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tennessee and an MBA from Southern Methodist University with concentrations in marketing and finance.
Senior Business Analyst
Wade Rogers is a seasoned business mentor with more than 34 years of leadership experience, dedicated to helping business owners regain clarity and control of their organizations. After a successful corporate career, Wade founded his own consulting firm to focus on serving small and midsize businesses.
His expertise spans operations, sales, finance, and analytics, with experience across manufacturing, medical, food, industrial, and construction industries. Known for his relationship-driven approach, Wade works as an extension of his clients' leadership teams to drive meaningful results.
Outside of work, Wade enjoys the outdoors, fitness, boating, and cheering on Notre Dame and the Dallas Cowboys. He values time with his wife, children, and grandchildren.
Senior Business Analyst
Nick Stewart brings a rare blend of legal, operational, and human resources expertise to his work with business owners. He holds degrees in Business Administration, Human Resource Management, Law (JD), and an MBA, along with a Professional in Human Resources (PHR) certification.
Nick has held leadership roles in inventory management, insurance, and construction, with experience at organizations including RGIS, State Farm, and EY. He has successfully led multiple operational turnarounds through efficiency improvements, hiring and training enhancements, and leadership development.
He leverages his full-cycle leadership experience to help clients strategically align the Four Pillars of the Profit Platform and plan effectively for long-term success.
Senior Business Analyst
Andrew Acer has been part of the Cogent story since 2016, working his way through multiple leadership roles to Director of Portfolio Development and now Senior Analyst. He now brings that experience directly to clients as a Senior Business Analyst.
Andrew rewrote Cogent's business development manual, built AI-driven training across the sales team, and helped close more than seven million dollars in new business. In 2025 he was named a Triad Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree.
His specialties are people and process. Andrew moved into the analyst role to put his passion for improving small businesses to work directly with the owners who run them.
It identifies what is working and what needs attention before any long term change begins.
From there, most clients continue through the Cogent Journey. Some take the plan and run it themselves. Others bring us in for the execution. Either way, Discovery gives you the three things every owner is short on: clarity, control, and confidence in the path forward.
Let's talk
During the Discovery, a full financial review was conducted that opened our eyes to several areas where we were leaving margin on the table.
The clarity, strategic insights, and process improvements that Cogent delivered have proven to be invaluable.
We can now truly see where our greatest profit centers are and concentrate more on those sales opportunities.