East Branch AdvisoryEST. 2026
East Branch Advisory

Listen. Synthesize. Act.

East Branch Advisory is a single-operator practice supporting management teams through inflection points — growth, transition, integration, and pre-exit moments where capable hands are needed. The practices below describe where the firm has shown up and where it can be useful.

01 — Who the firm works with

 

Profile
  • StageGrowth-stage through early middle-market. Pre-seed through PE-held businesses in hold periods, mid-integration, or pre-exit.
  • Revenue$10M – $200M.
  • SituationsStepping back from founder-led operating models. Scaling past the systems that got the company here. Integrating acquisitions. Preparing for exit. Stalled execution where the data and the decisions aren't lining up.
  • StrengthParticular fluency with founder-led businesses, where the competitive advantage lives in the founder's head and needs to be articulated and documented; this documentation is critical for creating transferable institutional knowledge that can be shaped into repeatable processes.
  • EngagementDirect work with CEOs, founders, boards, and PE sponsors.
02 — Services

Five practices, structured as 30–90 day engagements with fixed-fee scopes.

  1. i.

    Experience to Institutional Knowledge

    For companies where critical commercial logic — pricing, sales judgment, operating instincts — lives with one or a small handful of people. East Branch Advisory surfaces the experience-based competitive advantage, documents it as transferable institutional knowledge, and builds the processes that make it repeatable across the organization. Particularly valuable in founder-led settings and through transitions of leadership.

  2. ii.

    Pricing & Revenue Optimization

    Diagnoses and fixes unit economics. Audits pricing logic against delivered margin. Identifies friction across the revenue and e-commerce funnel and implements the fixes — pricing structure, packaging, promotions, conversion, and product launches.

  3. iii.

    Commercial Due Diligence

    Operator-grade diligence on revenue quality, customer concentration, pricing durability, and competitive position. Built for sponsors, boards, and management teams who need a substantive read, not a checklist.

  4. iv.

    Cash & Financial Clarity

    Resets FP&A, forecasting, and 13-week cash visibility. Builds a decision-grade operating model that finance, ops, and GTM can actually agree on, and a forecast leadership can trust within thirty days.

  5. v.

    Strategic Planning Process Design

    Stands up a formalized strategic planning process — annual and rolling — that translates strategy into board-ready operating plans, accountability, and the cadence to actually run the business against them.

03 — Working alongside firms

A complement to MBB and extra capacity for value creation resources.

East Branch Advisory engages efficiently when external talent is necessary.

  • a.

    Implementation support

    The work that begins after the strategy is set: 6–18+ month engagements embedded with the client to actually execute the recommendations. This is where most of the firm's time goes. The structure of the practice — one senior operator, direct involvement, no handoffs — is built for it.

  • b.

    Buffer capacity

    Slots in cleanly alongside a firm's existing team to fill gaps, especially with respect to pricing, FP&A, commercial diligence, experience-to-institutional-knowledge work, and strategic planning.

04 — Engagements

 

Anonymized at client request. Details available on request.
Case I  ·  PE-backed specialty contractor  ·  ~$80M revenue

Codifying a founder's pricing logic and pressure-testing it against historical performance.

Situation
The founder priced every bid based on a mental model developed over thirty years. The logic was consistent and effective when he applied it, but it had never been written down. The estimating team priced without access to the framework; the founder reviewed and adjusted before submission. The CPQ system did not reflect his logic and its outputs were not trusted at the levels where it mattered. With the company in a PE hold period and actively acquiring, the founder's role as the de facto pricing authority was a single point of failure.
Approach
East Branch Advisory sat in on live bid reviews and reverse-engineered the founder's decision rules from how he actually adjusted bids. Articulated his method — pricing on visit economics rather than line-item margin — as a written framework. Pressure-tested it against 2,313 closed jobs, identifying $6.7M in losses concentrated in sub-$25K jobs where the underlying assumption broke down. Mapped a repeatable bid review process that embedded the framework into the estimating workflow, and designed a pilot for the segment where pricing was systematically misaligned with delivery economics.
Outcome
A written pricing framework, a two-channel bid intake process, a margin analysis identifying the segments where pricing was off, a pilot program scoped and ready to run, and a recurring fade-gain reporting structure for ongoing monitoring. Pricing discipline no longer depends on the founder being in every bid.
Case II  ·  Growth-stage consumer business

Rebuilding forecast and cash visibility to unstick leadership decisions.

Situation
Unreliable forecasts and unclear cash runway were stalling decisions. Finance, ops, and GTM were each operating against different assumptions, and leadership had lost confidence that the numbers reflected reality.
Approach
Rebuilt FP&A and a 13-week cash flow model. Reconciled assumptions across functions. Delivered a decision-grade operating model that finance, ops, and GTM could actually agree on.
Outcome
Clear runway visibility and a trusted forecast within thirty days. Leadership decisions moved faster and with more conviction.
Case III  ·  Direct-to-consumer brand

Closing the gap between strong demand and underperforming revenue.

Situation
Demand was strong but revenue was underperforming. Pricing structure and funnel friction were obscuring the actual unit economics, and the team didn't have a clear read on which levers were worth pulling.
Approach
Diagnosed conversion and pricing issues across the funnel. Implemented changes to pricing, packaging, and promotions. Supported product launches and revenue experimentation with measurement built in.
Outcome
Measurable revenue lift, clear unit economics, and a repeatable GTM playbook the team could run without external support.
05 — How engagements work

Built to deliver decisions, not deliverables.

06 — Contact

 

mpmschmid@gmail.com to schedule a call.