Operating Partners
An operating practice, not an advisory firm.
We take on a small amount of outside work for owners and buyers: diligence, preparation for a sale, growth, and hands-on operating. The test is simple — we only do work we would do if we owned the business.
I am Teddy Wickland. I own University Van Lines, a moving, storage, and logistics company founded in 1975. Trucks, crews, payroll, seasonality. That is the vantage point all of this comes from, and it is why the work is specific rather than general.
The Practice
Four kinds of work.
Diligence advisory. We look at a business the way an operator does, not the way a spreadsheet does. Where the revenue actually comes from, what breaks when the owner leaves, which costs are real and which are deferred, and what the first twelve months would genuinely require of you.
Preparation for a sale. Most owners get one shot at this and start too late. We work on what a buyer pays for: clean numbers, demand that does not depend on one person, systems that survive the handoff, and a story that holds up under questioning.
Growth. Demand generation, intake, pricing, and follow-up. Usually the constraint is not traffic — it is what happens to a lead in the first ten minutes, and how much of the selling is still stuck on the owner.
Hands-on operating. When it is useful, we go inside and run it: sit in the business, own a number, and build the thing rather than describe it. That is the part most advisors will not do, and it is the part that changes results.
AI & Automation
The demand engine, installed in your business.
The most repeatable piece of this work is the system we built inside our own company: modern advertising, instant lead response, and AI doing the owner work — the writing, the follow-up, the review requests, the reporting. It runs at University Van Lines every day, and we install the same six components in other owner-run businesses.
How It Starts
We map the business first. Two weeks, $1,500.
We will not quote a build before looking at your business, and you should not accept one from anybody who does.
So it starts with the map. We go through your intake the way a customer does, find where leads leak and where your hours go, and hand you a written build order: the three things to fix first, in sequence, with real costs and real timelines.
Flat fee, paid up front. Read it, tell us it was not worth it, and we refund it. We would rather return $1,500 than argue about it.
Fit
This works for some businesses and wastes money for others.
A fit
- Owner-operated, roughly $1M to $15M in revenue
- Service businesses: trades, home services, moving, logistics, field service — and beyond
- Already getting leads; the problem is what happens next
- Willing to change how the business runs, not just add a tool
Not a fit
- Pre-revenue, or hunting a first customer
- Looking for a vendor to hand it to and never think about again
- Businesses where the real constraint is capital, not operations
- Anyone who wants AI on the website and nothing else to change
Start
Tell us about the business.
A few fields. Teddy reads every one himself, and you will hear back from a person, not a sequence.
No mailing list. No sequence. One reply from a person.