We work beside founders from first traction to a business worth selling.
Founder-led firms ready to grow, but still dependent on the founder to make the business work.
We install the four systems every business runs on, connect them, and optimize them — done with you, or done for you. Advice is part of it. Building the thing is the rest.
Startup to $10M+ · Since 2015 · Operator-led
Where the equation came from.
The Total Business Heuristic wasn't designed. It was assembled over fifteen years, one discipline at a time, each step going deeper into how businesses work — from what you can see on the surface to the operations that make a company valuable.
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Marketing agency
Demand. How attention becomes conversations — the most visible part of a business, and the easiest thing to sell. Which is why most people stop there.
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Conversion rate optimization
What happens to those conversations. Same traffic, more clients. This is where the arithmetic first became obvious: a small lift, applied at the right point, moves everything downstream of it.
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Revenue optimization
What a client is worth and what it costs to serve them. The number every gain upstream gets multiplied by — and the one almost nobody touches first.
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Growth operations, inside VC portfolio companies
Where the output goes. Companies with real demand and real conversion, still slow — because delivery was eating everything the first three had built. The deepest layer, and the one furthest from anything visible from outside.
Each of the four is valuable on its own. Multiplied together, they're a different business.
Four variables, one equation.
Put together, four separate disciplines stopped being specialties and became four variables in a single expression — three multiplying above the line, operations as drag below it. That is the Total Business Heuristic, and it is what we use working directly with founders and their leadership teams.
It is a heuristic, not an algorithm — a way of seeing where the leverage sits, and an order to work it in: economics first, then sales, then lead generation. See how it works →
Who you work with.
Ian Crafford
Ian founded Vector to do the work he kept getting pulled into: sitting inside founder-led firms, moving between strategy, operations, revenue, and technology without losing the thread.
Fifteen years across 50+ companies as embedded operator, angel investor, and fractional COO. Three clients on the Inc 5000 fastest-growing list.
Specialist depth, where the work calls for it.
Behind the lead operator sits a bench of Vector Certified Advisors™ — operators who have built and run real businesses, not career consultants. Each one works a position in the equation.
Interested in joining as a Vector Certified Advisor™? We're welcoming operators who have built and run real businesses. Get in touch →
Bring your numbers and we'll fill in the equation.
Thirty minutes on where your four systems stand, or ninety in the workshop with a room of founders doing the same.
30 minutes · With Ian · No cost