For the last decade, my job was growth. The kind investors expect: 20 to 30 percent year over year, quarter after quarter, at companies backed by venture capital and private equity. I built customer success and sales teams from scratch. Wrote the processes nobody had needed the week before. Played a large role in taking one company from under $500,000 in revenue to $8 million, then through a successful acquisition. I'm proud of that work.
None of the tools that made it possible are exclusive to venture-backed tech, though. Knowing your numbers cold. Understanding exactly why a customer stayed or left. Building a system instead of relying on one person's memory to hold the whole business together. That work just rarely gets offered to anyone outside of it. The ceramics studio down the street is running on the same underlying mechanics as the companies I used to work inside. Nobody ever sat down and did this with them.
That's the gap Warp & Weft is trying to fill.
I'm not promising a small pottery studio a Series B growth curve, that comparison would be a little ... off, honestly. But the rigor transfers. Understanding your numbers and building systems that don't require you to hold every piece of the business in your head is the same work whether the product is SaaS or hand-thrown mugs.
There's a more personal reason too. I grew up making things. Painting ornaments, sculpting clay animals, breaking more than one of my mom's sewing needles trying to make pajama pants when she wasn't home. I never stopped. These days you'll find me at Claybird Studio in Dryden, or shrimping over my iPad drawing in Procreate, or cheering on my best friend who runs Rose Street Textiles in New England. Watching people pour passion into their work, then watching how often the business side is quietly making them miserable, is what actually got me to start this.
I live in a small village in the Finger Lakes. Small enough that my pottery studio is 40 minutes away, on the other side of the lake, because there isn't one closer. What's close, though, is a stretch of small businesses this place genuinely depends on. When they're doing well, the whole village feels it. When they're not, you can feel that too.
I still work at a PE-backed company right now, building this on the side, and I'm not going to pretend that isn't a strange contradiction. I've spent a decade inside rooms with some of the sharpest business operators and systems money can buy, the exact kind of expertise venture capital and private equity pour into their portfolio companies while using that same money to buy up land, housing, and whatever else stands in the way of more growth. That expertise almost never makes it to the businesses actually holding a community together, and I think that's backwards.
I want my village to thrive. I want the village 40 minutes away to thrive, and the one after that. I can't close the wealth gap from a consulting practice in the Finger Lakes, but I can take what I learned in those rooms and hand it to the businesses that were never supposed to have access to it. If enough of them get what they need to actually thrive instead of just survive, that's a village staying a village instead of turning into another town where the local shops got priced out and something else moved in.
If you've ever felt like nobody built these systems with a business your size in mind, that's the gap I'm trying to close.
This blog is called The Maker's Margin: business sense for people who make things. No jargon, no assumption you went to business school. I'll write about pricing, discounting, systems, the unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether a business survives its fifth year. Some of it comes from the ten years I spent doing this at scale. Increasingly, some of it will come from doing this work directly with businesses like yours. I'm just getting started on that front, and I'd rather build this in the open than pretend otherwise.
If you want to see where your own business stands, I built a free 5-minute self-audit, no signup required: warpandweft.studio/audit. And if any of this sounds like the conversation you've been wanting to have about your business, reach out and let's talk.