An operating group that designs, builds, and runs the businesses small communities need — and that no chamber, EDC, or strategic plan is going to deliver.
Every small community has the same problem. The institutions that were supposed to build the next generation of local businesses — chambers, economic-development corporations, the strategic-plan-of-the-month — can't do it. They were built to administer, not to operate.
So we operate. We build the ventures, run them, and reinvest the profit in the next one. The market decides what stays.
We start the businesses our hometowns are missing — back-office support, sales for agencies, tech advisory for Main Street — and run them long enough to know if they should keep going.
Each venture has to make money on its own terms, serve a real customer in a real place, and be the kind of business someone could own and run after we step back. We're not raising a fund. We're not writing checks. We're building operating companies, one at a time, in the open.
Some of what we build will grow. Some will die. The deal we make with ourselves: we don't keep things alive past their welcome, and we don't take credit for the ones that survive on subsidies.
We borrow the best. Most of the problems facing our hometowns have already been solved somewhere else — in Lisbon, Medellín, Tainan, Tbilisi, places that figured out how to build resilient local economies without waiting for permission.
We answer to the market. If the people we're serving keep showing up and paying, we keep going. If they don't, we kill it. The chamber, the EDC, and the strategic plan don't get a vote.
We define enough. Profit funds the next venture, not lifestyle creep. The point isn't to extract value from a community — it's to compound it.
Each one was designed to solve a problem we'd run into ourselves — first as founders, then as the people other founders called when their admin pile got too tall, when their sales engine stalled, or when their tech stack started charging them for tools they didn't use.
AI-fluent admin, ops, and HR support for founders who need things to actually get done.
Sales-as-a-service for growing agencies. Exited founders closing for the next generation.
The right tools for your business. Set up by people who know what they're doing. No fee.
We're looking for the people who've already done the work. The EA who built her own roster of founder clients. The agency exit who can close deals in her sleep. The IT generalist every restaurant in town calls when the POS goes down.
If a Groundwork venture overlaps with what you're already doing, we'd rather buy your time and your judgment than build from scratch. We split the upside, you keep your name on the work, and we handle the parts you don't want to.
Same offer for operators in adjacent verticals we haven't named yet. If you've built something that fits the three rules above, the conversation is short.
One sentence about who you are and what you're working on is enough. We'll write back.
hello@groundwork.co