Build a business that becomes a real asset - one you can happily own forever, or easily sell tomorrow.
For owners of established manufacturing, engineering, and complex B2B businesses who want a business that’s worth more, depends less on you, and gives you real options for the future.
Is this you?
By every measure that matters to other people, your business is a success. So why doesn’t it feel like one?
Revenue is solid. The team is capable. The business runs day-to-day. But you’re still the person the difficult calls come back to. Still the one who holds the key relationships. Still the one who has to be in the room when something genuinely important is at stake.
Nobody sets out to build it this way. It just happens, gradually, as the business grows around the person who created it.
And somewhere along the line you’ve started to sense – even if you haven’t said it out loud – that the way this business runs today isn’t the way it needs to be if you want real options. Not options in theory. Options in practice. The ability to step back without things going south. The ability to sell and have a buyer see what you see. The ability to own this business on your own terms, rather than on its terms.
How we help owners
Four ways in, depending on where you are and what you need next.
Most owners start with a conversation or the diagnostic. Some come in through the book. The Guild is for owners ready to do the structural work itself. If you’re planning to exit inside eighteen months, the work is different again
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the guild
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the book
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the diagnostic
Discover the Value Architects’ Guild
The Guild is the structured way owners install CatalystOS™ in their own business — deliberately redesigning how it's built, how the team leads it, and how it competes, so it stops depending on you to hold it all together and starts behaving like a real asset.
The work is done alongside a small group of owners doing the same thing in their own businesses, with Richard, on a quarterly rhythm — so the changes compound rather than stall the moment the working week swallows them again. Most members recover the cost of the programme from improvements identified in the initial deep-dive alone.
The track record behind it
Richard McMullan
Founder, Value Growth Catalyst
Author, The Business Exit Blueprint
Creator, CatalystOS™
Chair & Co-Owner, two manufacturing businesses
35+ years leading and advising complex businesses
A decade in strategy consulting, including FTSE 100 clients
Board-level operation in a £370m+ revenue business
Scaled a UK & Ireland retail business from £1.5m to £20m
135+ owners advised across 30 sectors
Outcomes from the work
CatalystOS™ is the system distilled from doing this work, in different forms, for more than three decades.
One client grew their valuation from £5m to £44m in three years and is now approaching £100m in revenue. Another exited for £11m on completion with no earn-out.
The work isn’t about chasing those numbers. It’s about building businesses that can produce them – or that can be happily owned forever or easily sold tomorrow.