Operations, technology, web development, financial systems, and organizational change. The case studies below document the full scope of each engagement: what was asked for, what was researched, and what got built.
A fifth-generation family-owned garden center, operating for over 160 years and recognized as a NC Century Farm, faced a critical inflection point: aging systems, manual processes, no digital presence worth speaking of, and a leadership structure that had not evolved alongside the business.
A sustained, multi-workstream engagement covering seven distinct areas of the business. The work ranged from hands-on technical builds to strategic organizational design to market research and written deliverables, all coordinated without the business missing a beat during peak season.
Each workstream started with direct research and a real diagnosis of what was going on, not a generic framework applied from the outside. Recommendations came out of the client's specific constraints: staff size, seasonal model, budget, and the human side of a family business mid-transition.
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"Working with Max has been a major win for Cline's Nursery. His work has been focused on making our website more consumer-connected and easier to use, and the results are real and quantifiable. Our website feels alive."
"Even though Maxten has only been working with us a short while, he has done so much good, giving life to our stale website with graphics, reviews, and easy navigation of live inventory for both retail and wholesale customers. Highly recommended."
An early-stage startup needed an independent look at their consumer mobile app before a broader launch. They wanted honest feedback on what was broken or confusing, not validation. I spent 10+ hours working through the product as a first-time user and documented everything that failed, confused, or contradicted what the app was promising.
A structured written audit covering all major app features, with issues organized by severity and paired with concrete remediation notes for their engineering team. A separate first-user walkthrough narrative surfaced the gap between what the app promises and what someone actually encounters on day one. A pre-meeting brief organized the debrief call around decisions rather than rereading findings.
Follow-on engagement in progress. Client testimonial to be added.
Additional client engagements in progress. More case studies coming soon.
Short pieces on consulting, small business operations, and the problems that keep showing up.
Businesses come to consultants with a symptom. "We need a new website." "Our inventory is a mess." "We need a better CRM." The actual issue is almost always upstream: unclear ownership, a process nobody questioned, or a decision that was never made. Good diagnosis takes longer than the client expects and saves months of fixing the wrong thing.
The instinct when something is broken is to buy a platform. But most operational problems facing a 10-person business can be solved with Google Sheets, a properly structured form, and one person who owns the process. The expensive system usually gets implemented halfway and then ignored. Start with what your team will actually use.
Consulting work that lives in a presentation deck is consulting work that doesn't get used. The measure of a good engagement isn't the quality of the findings. It's whether the business can run the thing after you leave. Every system I build gets documented. Every process gets an owner. The goal is to make myself redundant as fast as possible.
