Operations & Growth Consulting for B2B Companies
Built to hold its shape under pressure.
KilnWorks Partners is a management consultancy for mid-market B2B companies, fixing the operating model, decision rights, and cost structure that founder-era habits leave behind once a company outgrows them. We work embedded inside your team, not from a slide deck.
Practice Areas
Four kinds of problems. Each one gets worse quietly before it gets loud.
01Operating Model & Org DesignFix the decision rights, reporting lines, and meeting rhythm that founder-led habits leave behind.
Most operating problems trace back to decisions that are unclear who actually owns them, not to a lack of talent or effort. We map how decisions actually get made today, not how the org chart claims they get made, and redesign reporting lines, meeting cadence, and escalation paths around the company you are now, not the ten-person team you used to be.
- Decision-rights mapping across the leadership team
- Org structure and reporting-line redesign
- Meeting cadence and escalation-path audit
- 90-day implementation plan with named owners
02Growth StrategyWhere to compete next, and what to stop funding, when every initiative claims to be the priority.
A growth plan that lists eleven priorities is not a strategy, it is a wish list with a deadline. We work with the leadership team to prioritize the two or three growth bets worth real resourcing, kill or shrink the rest, and build the resource-allocation model that keeps the same debate from resurfacing at the next planning cycle.
- Market and segment prioritization
- Resource-allocation model across growth initiatives
- Kill-or-fund criteria for existing programs
- Quarterly review structure to keep the plan honest
03Process & Cost EfficiencyOperational drag and cost structure still sized for a company half your current scale.
We walk the actual workflow, not the documented one, to find where work stalls, gets redone, or requires three approvals that used to require none. The result is a specific, sequenced list of process and cost changes, sized to the savings or speed they actually produce, not a generic efficiency framework applied without context.
- End-to-end workflow mapping and bottleneck analysis
- Cost-structure review against current revenue scale
- Sequenced improvement roadmap with owners and timing
- Follow-up review at 90 days to confirm changes held
04Change & Leadership AlignmentA leadership team that agrees in the room and disagrees again by the next Monday.
Most change programs fail from misalignment at the top, not resistance below it. We run structured working sessions that surface the real disagreement, not the polite version of it, and build the shared decision framework and communication plan that keeps a program from quietly stalling three months after the kickoff meeting everyone nodded along to.
- Structured leadership alignment sessions
- Shared decision framework and escalation protocol
- Change communication plan for the wider organization
- Progress checkpoints through the program lifecycle
How We Engage
Three ways to work together, depending on how sure you are of the problem.
Diagnostic
A focused assessment to pinpoint the real root cause before committing to a larger program. Interviews, workflow review, and a clear written finding, not a 60-slide deck.
Sprint
A concentrated engagement on one well-defined operating problem, from diagnosis through a working solution the team can run without us.
Embedded Program
We work inside your leadership team through implementation, not just recommendation, for a change significant enough to need someone in the room every week.
Who We Work With
Not every company is a fit. Here's how to tell.
The right fit
KilnWorks works well for a B2B company somewhere between $40M and $400M in revenue, past the point where founder instinct alone can run the place, but still small enough that a consultancy the size of a small country doesn't make sense. You have specific pressure: a growth plan that keeps stalling, a leadership team that disagrees more than it admits to, a cost structure nobody has revisited since headcount doubled. And you want someone actually in the room, not a delivery team supervised by a partner you met once during the pitch.
A worse fit
It's a worse fit if you're pre-revenue or still finding product-market fit, since the problems we solve assume an operating model that already exists and needs fixing, not one that hasn't been built yet. It's also a worse fit if what you actually want is a single slide deck to justify a decision you've already made. We'll tell you if that's what's happening, and it usually ends the conversation.
Example: Getting a Post-Merger Leadership Team to Actually Agree
A specialty insurance brokerage's leadership team, freshly merged from two firms, agreed in every meeting and reverted to old habits within a week. Structured alignment sessions surfaced the real disagreement and built a decision framework that held.
Example: Cutting Eleven Growth Initiatives Down to Three
An industrial equipment manufacturer had eleven active growth initiatives competing for the same stretched team, and none of them were fully resourced. Prioritizing three and killing the rest freed up the capacity to actually finish something.
Example: Untangling Decision Rights After Three Years of Headcount Growth
A commercial real estate services firm had tripled headcount in three years without ever revisiting who actually owned which decisions, and simple approvals were taking weeks. Redesigning decision rights and reporting lines cut real approval time dramatically.
Get Started
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A short call to understand the situation and confirm fit.
A scoped proposal, no obligation to continue.