We don't really like business. But we know it.
So we've created methods to help ourselves and others spend more time on creating and the things that matter to them.
And simple systems for radically focusing a business and its founder or head honcho.
What you get with Right Lane
Nicki is an artist. But her first job was for a furniture company doing ads for the newspaper. She generally hated it, but learned a lot. Then she worked for big bad companies (you know, the ones people badly want to work for until they get there, and then they don't). And then one day, she just started doing things for herself and people who were trying to do things for themselves, and she never looked back.
She'll help you find the art and artistry in what you do, and you'll have great materials and will look like whatever bucks-level suits you. And she'll probably make you laugh a lot.
Strategy
Keith was feeling a little burnt-out from being a chef, and his feet were starting to feel like crumbled pieces of classroom chalk. Schools had chairs. Chairs take pressure off feet. So, he enrolled in the closest MBA program to keep his life humming along, and his feet off of hard surfaces. It ended up being awesome, and he realized he was good at math and ideas and stuff. It wasn't until he spent an entire semester talking about strategy that he finally saw it as a word that held real meaning for businesspeople and founders, and so he learned a little chess, read a lot, and started to love strategy. Maybe the spy movies and shows like The Blacklist and Homeland had more to do with it than grad school. Alas, Keith knows strategy.
Systems
We don't think AI is going to kill us all. In fact, we think (do your own research) that the AI people are good computer people with crappy business skills. So, we play with these emerging technologies and are amazed by how many repetitive tasks and research-related work can be assisted by technology (you can't scare us away). In fact, we've even developed a thing called eclAIr that's made up of a virtual list of all of the activities and functions that never quite required full-time managers, but we and our clients ended up hiring anyway. SaaS has mostly been commoditized too, and almost anyone with a keyboard and a screen and a connection can turn ideas into working things within hours. Sure, maybe you'll need big expensive enterprise software someday. But honestly: probably not and maybe never. We're cheaper and more fun.
Imagine all the stuff you have haunting you and piling up (what you did at the bar on Saturday, we cannot remedy). We can lower the business noise, and make life better for you, for good.
Finance
You should have paid more attention to your teacher in undergrad accounting, or taken undergrad accounting, or learned how to find an accountant that understood your business, or never snowed yourself into thinking that Quickbooks was easy and you'll be fine. You're not fine, and neither are your books.
And there are courses called Finance for Non-Finance Professionals that you can take and we recommend to everybody, and they never do, because they just end up asking if we can do it for them and with them, and we say yes, and it looks like Deloitte and other big firms are gonna be replaced by AI and crayon-scratchers like us.
Deals
You probably just got a call from someone from either a big company, or a big guy, or finance bro, or someone who has a rich guy name who has relationships to “family offices,” and you think to yourself, “doesn't everyone have a family office, like a place with a desk, or at least a folding table or somewhere in the corner of your bedroom where you can work?”
And they tell you that your business is worth a lot without ever meeting you in person or spending so much as coffee-time with you. They're fishing for intelligence, friend. They are trying to learn about your business cheaply on your dime, and because we're people and we need to feel wanted and that what we do has meaning and we're gonna get out from all this credit card debt and maybe not lose our house, we get sucked into the fantasy machine that makes us daydream about mountain chalets and private planes and which legendary artist is gonna play at our milestone birthday.
You know when deals really get done? When you're doing your best work and making plenty of cash, and you're not thinking of selling because you're loving the flow you've found for yourself and the people you love.
Hang up the phone and delete the email.
Maybe you'd like to work with us
So, if you've made it this far, you're either sharing this with someone and asking “are those people expletive-ingly crazy” or “should I call them?”
The answer to the first question is no, and the second one is also probably no.
Because it's not productive to work on things that might be better off either just the way they are or running their course. That's true of most things in life.
However, there are those moments in life where you just click with someone, and for whatever reason you want them to win so badly, so deeply that you become a team, or a company, or partners, or the best of friends, or all of the above.
And you want this thing you've created to take on its own energy, beyond what it is today, to become a part of the good things in the world, the things that give people hope, a smile, a beautiful memory, an assist, a hug, or enough money to finally lay back, chill, and let the first sketch of that thing you created live on in the small local museum created because you started something that kept living and feeding people.
Where we play
Artists and Musicians
Fashion and Lifestyle
Entertainment and Venues
Gaming
Food and Beverage (Makers preferred)
Hospitality/Foodservice
Consumer Goods
Retail
Wellness/Fitness
Businesses by Craftspeople or Technical Experts
Start-Ups (Industry Agnostic)
Tech that Shakes Stuff Up
Who you'll work with
Sausage, Egg, and Cheese. Salt. Pepper. Ketchup. Coffee just cream.
Bacon, Egg, and Cheese. Salt & Pepper. Coffee: Cream and sugar.
Bacon, Egg and Cheese on a Bagel.
Sausage, Egg and Cheese, Salt. Pepper. Ketchup. Iced Coffee.
We're not “fractional”;1 we're whole humans.2 You just don't need us full-time. Promise.
1 Calling someone “a fractional” turns a perfectly good adjective into a noun, kinda like Simon Sinek's “the why,” which is stupid. It doesn't need to be a thing. Grammarians call this a functional shift.
2 A semicolon joins two complete sentences that are closely related, where a comma alone would make a comma splice. In American usage, it goes outside the closing quotation mark. (The Chicago Manual of Style)
