Systems built from the ground up.
A growing law firm.
The owner wanted a second office, a second staff attorney, and eventually a statewide practice, but he had no room to build toward any of it while the caseload and the business both ran through him. He brought me in to install the system: six weeks building the core tools with his leadership team, then three months running the weekly leadership meeting alongside them while the follow-through actually got done. Along the way I built the machinery the growth needed: a hiring playbook for the second attorney, a three-year compensation plan, and the KPI systems behind both. By the time my engagement ended the firm was on pace to grow revenue nearly 50 percent year over year.
I started Groundwork to bring twenty years of experience in organizational and system design to the people who need it most: overburdened business owners stretched past their capacity to cast a clear vision and build the plan that gets them there.
I’m Joe Naroditsky. My parents were small business owners. Some of my earliest memories are of opening the deli with them at five in the morning when I was eight, hauling in the bundles of newspapers. Playing in the workshop behind their kitchen cabinet business. Unloading cases of Nikes for the shoe store. I watched them start, end, and start again more times than I can count.
I still wonder what they could have built, and what a lot of owners like them could have built, with a method and someone alongside them to put it to work.
Now I’ve got three young kids and twenty-plus years of my own starts behind me: a community organizing and civic engagement program, co-founder of an interfaith renewable energy nonprofit, employee #2 at a solar construction startup, and helped build a multi-million-dollar purchasing co-op. Building them taught me the thing most owners never get taught: how to start, grow, and sustain.
That’s what Groundwork installs. How to set a future the company can actually be aimed at. How to run meetings that finish real work. How to measure the few numbers that tell you whether the business is healthy. And how to drive focus and values all the way down through the company, which is what makes the rest of it hold.
Owners are usually the reason the business exists — great at the thing it does. The mechanics of metrics, meetings, and getting people into the right roles are usually not their strength. That’s not a flaw; it’s a division of labor. I’m the other half of it.
Groundwork, installed.
If your company has outgrown how it’s run, let’s talk. Fifteen minutes, no pitch — you tell me what’s happening, I’ll tell you honestly whether this is a fit.