The Orchard Group provides on-site consulting for Small and Emerging Businesses.

The Orchard Group offers professional business management for emerging companies that have promise and great potential, if they could only solve the many short-term challenges that come with growth.

If your enterprise started off as a small business, and your hard work paid off until it all became a bit too complicated, that’s where we come in.

Our clients are not Fortune five hundred corporations; they're not even huge companies!

Emerging businesses simply are not the same as multi-national corporations. You work with people - not just departments and locations; you know each customer - not just broad market demographics; and you know your product - not just some management science -after all, that's why you're in the business you're in.

While the principals of the Orchard Group put their time in at places like Peat-Marwick, Sunbeam-Oster, Pella Windows and IBM, this is definitely not the consulting focus of today's Orchard Group. Instead, it's our experience with hundreds of small and emerging companies, including the ones we've owned and run ourselves, that really qualify the Orchard Group to make positive change happen within your business enterprise.

With each client, our job is to work ourselves out of a job.

An essential part of our background is in business education as delivered by university extension services. This means that we are used to helping competent people find new solutions and new understandings for their existing businesses though applied education.

Another way to say this is that, while on-site, we offer the parts of business school you need, tailored directly to your operation and product market, without the fluff, travel, and sideshow of heading back to college for courses that are presented as "general" knowledge. This also means that we have no interest in extending our stay with your company for longer than it takes to get the job done.

We apply ourselves as temporary members of your management team.

After we do a lot of listening, we often apply some sophisticated tools to address profitability problems, but in scale to an emerging company's requirements, and not over its head, because we recognize the differences in operating models.

We believe that it takes a shared understanding of your business operation at your scale and market potential, an understanding of family enterprise and local workforce capabilities, and some knowledge of the road a small business must travel to continue to succeed as it grows. We contrast these understandings to our business expertise, and work to develop unique solutions that we help implement within your organization.

Reasonable fee structure: business suit optional.

Unlike larger companies, your enterprise can't afford to bury consulting fees, and after all, part of our job is to justify every company expense. If you'd feel more comfortable being helped while we wear pricey business suits, this is an available option. Otherwise, Orchard Group consultants show up on the job "casual but neat", and charge short-term fees that are in the range of most small business Certified Public Accounting firms, and longer-term fees that are in keeping with adding a temporary executive within your business market.

We work as contractors, you pay no fringe benefits or payroll taxes, and we strive to help you pay for our services by uncovering lost profit centers and efficiencies within your business that will be producing net income well after the Orchard Group has completed its work.

Naturally, you do have to promise to pay us for the time we spend on your business, but if either party doesn't think the relationship is being helpful, we can agree to dissolve the effort at any time.