Fit
This works on a specific kind of company. Maybe yours.
A successor is built from a company's own operating record, so the company has to have one, and the work inside it has to be worth engineering. Here is what we look for, and what we turn away.
Strong fit
Six markers, and most strong fits have all six.
Industry matters much less than these structural facts. Distribution, services, logistics, manufacturing with a real front office, specialty trades at scale: the surface varies, the markers do not.
OWNER-DEPENDENT
Consequential decisions still route to the founder: pricing exceptions, credit and commitment calls, scope changes, escalations. A 90-day absence would visibly change how the company performs.
B2B, WITH REAL STAKES
Revenue comes primarily from other businesses, where decisions carry relationship history, negotiated terms, and a real downside for being wrong.
JUDGMENT PERFORMED INSIDE
A substantial share of the company's judgment-heavy work happens inside the company, by its own people, rather than being purchased from outside.
A RECONSTRUCTABLE RECORD
The work leaves digital evidence: email and messages, CRM or quoting systems, ERP or finance records, tickets, files. Enough history exists to reconstruct how the business decides.
OBSERVABLE OUTCOMES
Decisions can be connected to what happened afterward: won or lost, paid or written off, resolved or escalated, within months rather than decades.
A REAL OBJECTIVE
The owner actually wants something: a sale or transfer, a retirement, recovered time, or a company that no longer depends on them. Autonomy built for its own sake serves no one.
The load-bearing phrase
"Judgment-heavy" has a precise meaning here.
It does not mean difficult or impressive. Work is judgment-heavy when a rule or a lookup does not settle the case: someone must interpret company-specific context, incomplete facts, competing objectives, relationship history, authority, risk, and the cost of being wrong, then decide whether to act, wait, refuse, or escalate. Where the work happens, inside or outside the company, is a separate question from whether it is judgment-heavy, and the fit screen asks about both separately.
The full definition, with the test we apply, is in the judgment essay.
The honest no
Where we will tell you not to do this.
The fit screen is conservative on purpose. A "not yet" from us costs you ten minutes. A wrong "yes" would cost both of us far more, so these get turned away.
- The judgment that matters is mostly purchased from outside the company, so there is little internal judgment to recover.
- The work leaves almost no digital trail, so there is nothing from which to reconstruct how the business decides.
- Outcomes take so long, or attribute so poorly, that no one can tell whether a decision worked.
- The owner enjoys operating and has no objective beyond curiosity. The engagement is demanding, and curiosity does not carry it.
Company size is a signal, not a wall. The screen asks about normalized EBITDA because the economics of the engagement have to make sense for you, not because a smaller company is beneath the work. Between the strong markers and the honest no sits a wide middle; the screen routes it to a human review instead of guessing. When something disqualifying is confirmed, the screen says so plainly and still gives you a human path: a direct email conversation.
Next
Ten minutes settles most of it.
The private fit screen walks these markers against your actual company. It scores locally in your browser, saves only for this tab, and sends nothing unless you choose to send it.