How Decisive Finance works.
The Decision Loop, the Six Trap Diagnostic, three tiers with banded pricing, the Financial Rhythms cadence, and what stays out of scope. No black box.
The Decision Loop.
An operating company is a chain of decisions made in a context, generating commitments that outlast the context that justified them. The Decisive Finance method is one closed loop: every material decision moves through six nodes, and our intervention sits at nodes 5 and 6, operated recurrently through the Financial Rhythms cadence rings (weekly, monthly, quarterly).
A hire, a product launch, a vendor sign, a pricing set, a channel spend commit. Made once, in a context.
The recurring P&L line or revenue-side commitment that decision created. Now living in the business.
The context that justified the decision changes. The decision stays. Compounding spend deploys against a context that no longer exists.
One of six cognitive biases keeps the decision running. Sunk cost. Status quo. Mental accounting. Anchoring. Loss aversion. Certainty illusion.
The Six Trap Diagnostic surfaces the gap. Decision Register. Recoverable Value Report. Six Trap Scorecard.
A Three-Path Model, a Pricing Architecture Revisit, or a Growth Experiment Register produces a new decision tested in market.
Other finance functions live in nodes 1 to 4 and never close the loop. Reporting describes; forecasting projects; budgeting allocates. None of those activities defend the next call. We diagnose at node 5 and defend forward at node 6, in a recurring rhythm, until the company is the loop.
The Six Trap Diagnostic™
A 90-minute structured interview plus a standardized data pull, executed in Week 1. The traps are not failures of the owner. They are structural cognitive patterns no owner alone, however capable, can counteract while operating the business they built. The protocol exists to surface them so the next-call conversation can happen on math rather than on instinct.
The money already spent feels like it is voting. It is not. The next dollar is the only one that matters.
Doing nothing feels neutral. It is never neutral. Every week of unchanged spend is an active call.
The right total can hide the wrong allocation. A clean aggregate can mask a customer-funded cost sitting in the wrong bucket.
The first number set becomes the number the conversation orbits. The price you launched with is rarely the price today's market will hold.
The pain of admitting a commitment is not paying off is roughly twice the pleasure of recovering the cash. Most operating companies run under that coefficient for years without naming it.
Polished reporting can feel like evidence when it is actually theater. Defending numbers with a story that quietly stopped being true is the most expensive habit a company carries.
Find. Install. Run.
Each tier carries a distinct promise. Find names what your money is actually doing in 14 days. Install puts the rhythm in market across 90 days. Run keeps the rhythm operating on retainer. Pricing is banded by revenue: $5M to $8M / $8M to $25M / $25M to $50M. Below $5M in revenue, refer out; the guarantee math does not hold.
The Decision Diagnostic
Names what your money is actually doing, in 14 days.
A read of every material cost, product line, and customer relationship running in the business today, in dollars, with the context that justified each one, the context that exists now, and an owner-accepted plan for every dollar that has to move. Output: a dollar-ranked map of recoverable cash, recoverable margin, and avoided cost.
The 90-Day Decision Resolution
Installs the rhythm that makes the next call defensible, and proves it in market across 90 days.
A 90-day engagement that installs the decision rhythm and the Financial Rhythms operating system. Material decisions are defended with math, taken live (pricing moves, a product line restructured, a cost cut), and scored against what actually happened. The owner walks out of Day 90 with every major call documented, measured, and repeatable.
The Decision Partnership
Runs the decision rhythm on retainer.
Ongoing operation of the decision rhythm built in the Resolution. Weekly decision cadence on open commitments. Monthly deep dive. Quarterly model rebuild. Pricing and growth experiments running inside a defined envelope. The cadence is Financial Rhythms™.
Named artifacts.
Every deliverable has a name, a definition, an output spec, and an owner. The catalog below is the full deliverables list across all three tiers. If a deliverable is not on this list, it is a change order, not a favor.
Diagnostic, 14 days, 5 artifacts
Decision Register v1
Every recurring cost over $5,000 per month, every active pricing decision, every growth-spend channel, every product-line commitment, traced back to the originating decision. PDF plus live spreadsheet.
Recoverable Value Report
The artifact the Tier 1 guarantee is measured against. Per opportunity: dollar amount annualized, source decision, trap category, effort to recover, recovery plan narrative, evidence, recommended move.
Cash Flow Truth Card
2-page PDF. Base, upside, and downside cash position. Driver decomposition. The three variables most likely to move the number. Trigger points.
Six Trap Scorecard
For each of the six traps: LIVE, LATENT, or NOT PRESENT, across cost, pricing, and growth. With evidence and value at stake. One-page card plus four-page backing detail.
Prioritized Action Register
Top five next calls to defend first, ranked by impact and sequenced by effort. At least one pricing move and one growth-motion move if either is live in the Scorecard.
To see what artifact 02 looks like for a company your size, preview the Recoverable Value Report. Four minutes, three questions.
Resolution, Day 15 to Day 90, 10 artifacts
Contribution Margin Dashboard
Live contribution margin by product line, customer segment, and channel. Cost allocation visible. Auto-refreshes on monthly close.
Product Line P&Ls
Contribution margin by product line with full cost allocation. Plus the cross-subsidy flow diagram nobody had.
Forward Capital Register
Decision Register extended. Every cost above $5,000 per month, every active pricing tier, every growth channel commitment carries an explicit decision status, an owner, and a standing review cadence.
Three-Path Models
Five to ten per engagement. For each trapped decision: Keep, Kill, Restructure modeled on identical metrics, with the trap stack and the recommended move.
Pricing Architecture Revisit
Segment-by-segment pricing audit. Repricing hypotheses. List-to-realized leakage analysis. Discount discipline map. In-market test plan with measurement.
Growth Experiment Register
Three named experiments inside the existing go-to-market envelope. At least two live in market by Day 90. Each with hypothesis, target metric, budget, sample size, go and no-go triggers.
Scenario Forecast
Rolling base, upside, and downside model with sensitivity to three to five key drivers. Trigger points. Weekly actuals-vs-prediction reconciliation structure.
Owner Decision Package
Fully populated summary deck. Current state, decisions defended, experiments running, forward plan, asks. Reusable template delivered separately.
Capital and Structure Model
Financial model for the most likely near-term capital event (debt refinance, product-line exit, ownership change). Three paths with documented implications.
Final Readout and Decision Playbook
90-day capstone plus forward playbook. The owner can run the loop without us.
Partnership, ongoing, 4 recurring artifacts
Monthly Decision Dashboard
Rolling view of all registers, the Scorecard, the Scenario Forecast, open decisions, active experiments. Decision of the Month. Experiment of the Month.
Decision Journal
Log of every major decision at the time it is made. Rationale, confidence, expected outcome. Reviewed quarterly against actuals.
Quarterly Strategic Review
Full model rebuild from current economics. Trap Scorecard refresh. Forecast reset. Pricing architecture revisit. Realized Value certification.
Validated Learning Log
Hypothesis, test, outcome, decision. Every experiment, every repricing, every Three-Path recommendation generates entries.
What the owner gets, day by day.
The schedule is a contract. The owner knows what lands when. We know what we owe. Owner time across the full 90 days runs about 18 to 21 hours, including the Diagnostic.
- Day 0Engagement letter signed. Kickoff agenda, data request list, 14-day calendar.
- Day 3Kickoff complete. Data room set up. Six Trap Interview booked.
- Day 7Decision Register draft ready for owner review.
- Day 14Diagnostic package delivered. Named artifacts. 60-minute readout. Tier 1 guarantee triggered. Resolution decision made.
- Day 21Resolution kickoff. Pricing Architecture Revisit scope confirmed. Growth Experiment Register draft reviewed.
- Day 30Contribution Margin Dashboard live. Monthly refresh cycle installed. Product Line P&Ls in draft.
- Day 45Mid-Resolution milestone. Forward Capital Register delivered. Pricing hypotheses confirmed.
- Day 60Rhythm running. Pricing changes live with measurement. Two growth experiments in market. Three-Path Models on top decisions.
- Day 75Owner Decision Package drafted. Capital and Structure Model if applicable.
- Day 90Final Readout. Artifacts delivered. Decision Playbook handed off. Day 90 rhythm-installed test evaluated.
- Day 150Realization check. 30-minute standing call to score in-market experiments and pricing changes. No additional fee.
Financial Rhythms™.
The cadence that runs the loop after the 90 days end. Three concentric rings. Weekly is decision cadence. Monthly is deep dive. Quarterly is model rebuild. The rings keep running whether we are in the chair or not.
- Weekly. Open-decision review. Active experiment scoring against go and no-go triggers. Forward Capital Register movement. 30 minutes.
- Monthly. Decision Dashboard refresh. Decision of the Month and Experiment of the Month. Validated Learning Log entries. Variance narrative. 90 minutes.
- Quarterly. Strategic Review. Full model rebuild from current economics. Trap Scorecard refresh. Forecast reset. Pricing architecture revisit. Realized Value certification. Four to six hours.
Realized Value, certified quarterly.
The 5% Partnership success fee invoices only against confirmed Realized Value, defined in three categories. Each category has a quantification method written into the engagement letter. Russ does not get to grade his own homework: every category requires an owner signature against the methodology, not an opinion.
- In-market pricing or volume changes with measurement. Repricing live across at least one full cycle. Volume change attributable to a specific experiment. Measured in revenue uplift annualized at the new rate, with the comparison period explicit.
- Capacity reallocation booked to a downstream metric. Engineering, marketing, or sales capacity moved off a low-margin line and onto a higher-margin one. Measured by the contribution margin delta over the next two quarters.
- Capital structure or product-line changes with documented economic delta. Debt restructured. Product line exited. Ownership structure reset. Measured by the discount-rate-adjusted present-value delta to the company.
What we do not do.
Glass box means the boundary is named. Below is the list of common asks that are explicitly out of the 90-day scope. Each can be addressed via a change order with its own scope, price, and acceptance criteria. None of them dilute the base guarantee or extend the 90-day clock.
- Ad-hoc modeling of unrelated transactions (acquisition offers, side investments, secondary sales).
- Bookkeeping cleanup beyond what the artifacts require. If the general ledger cannot produce Artifact 1, we quote cleanup as a separate fixed-fee phase.
- Board-meeting facilitation. The Owner Decision Package is a deliverable; running the meeting is not.
- HR or legal consulting on specific reduction-in-force cases. Three-Path on a headcount decision is in scope; severance math, employment counsel, and manager coaching are out.
- Capital introductions or transaction advisory. The Capital and Structure Model is in scope; making introductions or sitting in negotiations is not.
- Interim controller or FP&A hiring.
- Pricing architecture for net-new products or net-new channels. Net-new design is a change order with its own scope and fee.
- Growth experiments in channels the company is not already operating in.
Read the guarantee, then book 30 minutes.
30 minutes with Russ. No pitch. You leave with at least one named action. Guaranteed 3x your Diagnostic fee in recoverable value, in 14 days. Typical 5x to 10x. We don't audit the past. We make the next call defensible.
Decide from the numbers. Prove it in the cash.