We’ve sat where
you’re sitting.
Counsel advises mid-market companies through growth, restructuring, and leadership transitions — by operators who’ve done it.
Every company hits
an inflection point.
We don’t organize our work by service line. We organize it by the moment — because that’s how you remember it.
The Pivot Quarter
When the product works but the business model doesn't, and everyone in the room already knows it.
The Founder's Exit
The Culture Reset
When the product works but the business model doesn't.
A Series B SaaS company had hit $8M ARR with strong NPS scores and a product their customers genuinely loved — but the unit economics were quietly unraveling. The founders knew it. The board suspected it. And the sales team was pricing deals based on growth targets that no longer reflected reality. The CEO came to us six weeks before a board meeting she was dreading.
"We had all the data. What we didn't have was a room where we could say what the data actually meant."
We ran a two-week working session with the founding team and finance lead — no slides, no decks, just a whiteboard and the actual numbers. We helped them separate what was structurally broken from what was temporarily painful. Then we rebuilt the narrative: not the spin version, but the honest version that would earn the board's trust rather than their skepticism. We also worked directly with the VP Sales to reset the pricing architecture before the quarter closed.
The board meeting became a strategic conversation instead of a performance review. The company repriced its enterprise tier, reduced CAC by 31% over the following two quarters, and the CEO described it as the first time she'd walked out of a board meeting feeling like she was running the company.
Facing something similar?
Most of our best engagements started with a single honest conversation.
She built it. Now she has to trust someone else with it.
The founder of a regional healthcare services company had received a strategic acquisition offer she wanted to accept — but the incoming leadership team was external, the culture was fragile, and her own role post-close was undefined. Her COO was loyal but overwhelmed. The acquirer was moving fast. And the founder was trying to be rational about something that felt like handing her child to a stranger.
"She didn't need a transition plan. She needed someone to acknowledge that this was genuinely hard before telling her what to do next."
We spent the first three sessions not talking about the transaction at all. We talked about what she'd actually built — the culture, the team, the things that didn't show up in the data room. Then we worked backward from the close date to identify the five decisions that would determine whether the culture survived the first 90 days. We also facilitated a direct conversation between the founder and the incoming CEO that neither of them had been willing to initiate.
The transition closed with a 90-day retention rate of 94% among senior staff — well above industry average for acquisitions of this size. The founder stayed on as a strategic advisor for 18 months and described the handoff as "the first thing I've done in five years that I'm proud of and at peace with at the same time."
Facing something similar?
Most of our best engagements started with a single honest conversation.
Two companies, one org chart, and a hundred people watching.
A mid-size professional services firm had acquired a smaller competitor with a very different operating culture — flat vs. hierarchical, remote-first vs. office-centric, output-focused vs. process-focused. Four months after close, the HR director was fielding weekly resignation conversations, the combined leadership team had stopped having honest meetings, and the new org chart had been revised three times without anyone admitting why.
"The problem wasn't that the cultures were incompatible. The problem was that no one had decided which one they were actually building."
We started with listening sessions — not surveys, actual conversations — with 40 employees across both legacy organizations. We weren't looking for consensus; we were looking for the load-bearing beliefs that each culture had built itself around. Then we ran a two-day offsite with the combined leadership team that had one explicit rule: no one was allowed to describe the other company's way of working as a problem to be solved.
Within six weeks, the leadership team had agreed on five operating principles that were genuinely new — not a blend of the old ones, but a deliberate choice about who they wanted to become. Voluntary attrition dropped by 60% in the following quarter. The HR director said it was the first time in her career she'd seen a post-merger integration actually work.
Built by women who
left corner offices
to build their own table.
Counsel was founded in 2019 by three operators who had, collectively, run through every kind of business inflection point — and noticed that the advice available to mid-market companies rarely came from people who’d actually lived it.
We don’t do retainers for the sake of retainers. We come in when something is genuinely hard, stay until the shift is real, and leave behind a team that doesn’t need us anymore.
The room is already
well-lit.
Most of our engagements start with a 30-minute conversation that costs nothing except honesty. If there’s a fit, you’ll know it in the first five minutes.