01
Client value is incomplete
Revenue alone cannot tell you whether an account deserves more investment—or a difficult conversation.
Operating clarity for recurring-service businesses
Know where growth turns into operational drag.
Northbound connects client value, delivery effort, and complexity—so you know where to grow, reprice, standardize, or walk away.
Client portfolio
Linking revenue to delivery reality
Last 12 months
ClientRevenueDeliveryComplexityNext move
Atlas Co.$420KExpand
Cedar & Main$280KReprice
Harbor Lane$240KExpand
Pinecrest$190KStandardize
Portfolio revenue trend
Key opportunities
Expand3 clients
Reprice2 clients
Standardize2 clients
The operating gap
Revenue tells you what grew. Operations tells you whether it was worth it.
Recurring revenue can look healthy while scope creep, delivery complexity, and uneven staffing quietly consume the margin underneath it.
02
Complexity hides in the work
Custom requests, exceptions, communication, and senior attention rarely appear in the contract value.
03
Growth strains the wrong places
Hiring often treats the symptom. Better operating data reveals whether to add capacity, simplify delivery, or reprice.
Client Economics Review
A focused diagnostic for the decisions hiding inside your client base.
We turn the information you already have—contracts, revenue, delivery activity, and management judgment—into a clear operating view and a practical 90-day plan.
Gather what exists
Share the exports, client lists, contracts, and operating notes you already use. Perfect data is not required.
Connect value to effort
We normalize the information and compare client revenue, delivery load, complexity, concentration, and growth.
Make the tradeoffs visible
You receive a prioritized view of where to expand, reprice, standardize, rescope, or reconsider the relationship.
Leave with a 90-day plan
We translate the analysis into a short operating agenda your leadership team can actually execute.
What you receive
Useful answers, not another dashboard to maintain.
The goal is a better decision—not a prettier collection of metrics.
✓
Portfolio economicsRevenue concentration, growth, contraction, and estimated client contribution.
✓
Complexity-adjusted client viewA practical comparison of contract value against the real operating burden of delivery.
✓
Scope and capacity risksWhere custom work, bottlenecks, or senior dependencies are limiting scale.
✓
Client action matrixClear recommendations to expand, reprice, standardize, rescope, or exit.
✓
90-day operating planA focused sequence of actions, owners, and decisions for leadership.
Designed for recurring services
Built for businesses where every client creates a different operating reality.
Northbound is most useful once growth has outpaced the spreadsheets, informal rules, and founder intuition that got the business started.
Agencies and creative servicesRetainer businesses balancing scope, staffing, and client demands.
Consulting and fractional teamsExpert-led firms trying to scale without making every engagement custom.
Managed and recurring servicesBusinesses with recurring contracts, uneven delivery effort, and growing complexity.
JW
About Northbound
Built from inside the complexity of scaling professional services.
Northbound was founded by Jake Wedig, CPA, an operator and accounting leader who has built teams, service models, and operating systems supporting more than 1,000 startups and small businesses.
The perspective is practical: define the promise, understand the work, expose the exceptions, and make it easier for good people to deliver consistently.
CPAOperations leadershipService designPricing & capacityStartup experience
Start with one operating question
Which clients are helping you scale—and which are making scale harder?
Book an introductory review to talk through your client model, where visibility breaks down, and whether a Client Economics Review would be useful.
Book an operations review
A focused introductory conversation. No software implementation and no perfect dataset required.
Start a conversation