Services built around your growth priorities.

Most companies don't lack ambition — they lack a plan rigorous enough to survive contact with the market. We build growth-oriented strategic plans grounded in honest assessment: where you actually stand, what the market will actually bear, and what your organization can actually execute. Our experience spans companies from start-up through $2 billion in revenue, and our approach adapts to each stage.

What We Deliver

• Objective market and competitive assessments — including the broader forces shaping your category and where you're best positioned to win.
• A shared growth vision with clear priorities, resource allocation, and milestones that leadership and the board can hold each other to.
• Financial models and pro-formas for strategy, fundraising, and M&A — built to withstand scrutiny.
• Translation of strategy into sales and marketing programs, so the plan actually reaches the market.

Nearly every company we engage with has revenue within reach that it isn't capturing. Sometimes past success has obscured the path forward; sometimes the sales process, pricing, or messaging is simply out of alignment. We identify those gaps quickly — and help close them within current markets and customers, without waiting for a multi-year transformation to pay off.

Where We Focus

• Pricing — finding revenue left on the table and building the rationale to capture it.
• Sales process — evaluating where time and effort are going, and where they should go instead.
• Messaging — moving the organization from product selling to results selling, clearly and consistently.
• Pipeline — marketing programs that generate real opportunities, not just activity.
• Market share targets — grounded in actual sales cycles, win rates, and competitive realities.

Where needed, we can work directly alongside your team — developing materials, coaching staff, and building the internal capability that outlasts our engagement.

Greg Collins has completed and integrated over 70 transactions — from $1M technology acquisitions to $200M acquisitions and $300M divestitures. That track record reflects something beyond volume. One technology company made three acquisitions in the same period: we planned and executed two; they handled the third internally. The two CFA-led deals handily beat their Year 1 EBITDA targets — one by roughly four times plan. The internal deal fell short. Same company, same era, same resources. Different process, different outcome. We identify risks and opportunities early enough to manage them in the deal structure, not after close. Read the full case study →

What We Cover

• A structured business development process — with clear objectives, target criteria, and milestones embedded in your growth plan.
• Confidential identification and prioritization of acquisition or divestiture targets.
• Rigorous analysis of synergies, risks, and value drivers for each candidate.
• Active advisory role through negotiation — protecting your position at the table.
• Coordination of legal, accounting, and banking third parties throughout the process.
• Integration planning and management from due diligence through close and beyond.

Nearly every engagement at Cape Fear Advisors involves a PE-backed company at some point in its lifecycle — before acquisition, during the hold period, or preparing for exit. The practice spans the full range of operating disciplines described on this page: strategic planning, growth acceleration, M&A advisory, post-transaction integration, pricing and sales programming, vendor and procurement management, and corporate strategy. Most of those disciplines already have their chapter in the operating group playbook. One doesn't.

The PE operating playbook has a chapter for every major execution discipline — procurement, IT, headcount, pricing, financial controls. Each was systematized when someone applied independent measurement to a cost line that had previously been managed by the people with the most invested in the status quo. The Portfolio Marketing Audit is the same discipline applied to the one cost line that has never been independently reviewed.

Marketing and media spend is commonly the second or third largest discretionary cost line in consumer-facing portfolio companies. Unlike headcount, real estate, IT, and procurement — which have been through multiple review cycles — media spend has almost never been independently reviewed. The agencies and platforms measuring it are paid to spend it. Every major ad platform reports its own return on ad spend — add those self-reported numbers together and they routinely exceed total company revenue, because they cannot all be right simultaneously. At a 20% operating margin, a platform-reported return of $1.06 on every dollar spent is not a positive outcome — it is a money-losing equation. That arrangement persists not because the spending is immaterial, but because the complexity has made it easy to defer.

Through Cape Fear Advisors, Greg Collins brings both the operating group perspective and the measurement infrastructure to end that deferral. The analytical engine behind every review is C3 Metrics — an AI-powered independent attribution platform with zero channel affiliations, attributing 2.49 billion advertising touchpoints monthly across 20+ channel categories, and no financial interest in the outcome. The data does the talking: no bias toward any channel, no disincentive to surface waste, every motivation to produce findings that are defensible to investors, portfolio company leadership, and acquirers alike. Greg Collins serves as CEO of C3 Metrics alongside his advisory work at Cape Fear Advisors, making this the only engagement of its kind: operating group experience, finance fluency, and proprietary measurement infrastructure — in a single engagement.

Three things converged to make this engagement possible — and to make it unlike anything an advisory firm or marketing consultant can offer separately. Forty years of operating experience in PE-backed software and services businesses established what independent measurement should actually be asking. C3 Metrics spent fifteen years building the infrastructure to answer it — with no commercial relationship to any of the channel categories it audits. And AI-powered analysis, introduced in the last two years, compressed a traditional six-month measurement project into a 90-day deliverable with the same depth. The convergence matters: the operating experience defines the question, the measurement infrastructure provides the answer, and AI makes the timeline realistic for a hold-period engagement.

What the 90-Day Review Delivers

• Baseline efficiency measurement — what each dollar of media spend is producing by channel, independent of platform-reported metrics and agency-prepared summaries.
• Traffic quality audit — programmatic fraud identified and quantified in dollar terms, using four independent detection signals. Six-figure fraud costs in a single campaign month are not unusual in programs that have never been independently audited.
• Saturation analysis — spend thresholds identified above which cost per result escalates without proportional return. The threshold is a calculable number, not an estimate.
• Reallocation roadmap — specific budget recommendations, ranked by expected impact, with supporting data to brief the portfolio company management team and the board.
• Ongoing measurement program — the audit establishes the baseline; the program keeps it current. Independent attribution running continuously through the hold period, always producing verified data, always justified by what it finds. The savings it surfaces exceed its cost at every point in time.

The Return

• Programs with no prior independent measurement typically show 15%+ efficiency improvement in year one. The average return on measurement investment is 6×.
• The value compounds. Measurement deepens year over year — the baseline extends, comparisons sharpen, and reallocation decisions improve. Every other execution discipline in the operating playbook works this way. Marketing measurement is no different.
• Portfolio companies that begin independent measurement during the hold period exit with a documented efficiency trajectory: auditable, defensible, and valuable to acquirers in ways platform-reported metrics are not.