You Know Something in Your Business Is Broken. You Just Can't See It Yet.
The CEO Operating Diagnostic gives you a decision-grade picture of how your company actually runs — where the margin is leaking, where decisions stall, and what to fix first. Delivered in 3 weeks. Built for action, not a shelf.
Book a 15-Minute Fit Call
No pitch. No proposal. A direct conversation about what you're dealing with and whether this is the right tool.
This Is What It Feels Like When Your Company Outgrows Its Operating System
You built something real. Revenue is growing. The team is working hard. But you can feel it — something underneath isn't keeping up.
Every decision still runs through you. Your team waits instead of acts. You're the bottleneck you never intended to become. You hired good people, but they can't move without your approval on things that shouldn't require it.
You have revenue but not visibility. The P&L tells you what happened 45 days ago. You need to know what's happening now — which products are actually profitable, which clients are actually worth keeping, and where cash is quietly draining.
Your team is busy but not aligned. Everyone is working. But on what? Meetings produce updates, not decisions. Projects run late and nobody can explain why. The gap between what you decided and what actually got executed keeps widening.
You're spending on growth but can't measure it. Marketing, sales, hiring, new systems — money flows out, but you don't have the dashboard to know what's producing returns and what's waste.
You started this company to build something. Now you spend 80% of your time managing fires. You're too deep in operations to be strategic, and too strategic to be doing operations. You're stuck in the middle, and the business feels it.
These aren't signs of a bad company. They're signs of a company that has outgrown its operating system. The question isn't whether to fix it — it's whether you can afford to keep guessing at what's actually wrong.
What the CEO Operating Diagnostic Actually Examines
Over three weeks, I conduct a structured assessment across six dimensions of your operating reality. This isn't a survey, a questionnaire, or a strategy deck. It's a forensic examination of how your company actually runs — by someone who has run a 4,500-person company across four countries and knows what to look for.
Decision Architecture
How decisions get made, who makes them, and where they stall. I identify every recurring decision that still requires you — and which ones shouldn't.
Financial Visibility
How fast you get data, how accurate it is, and whether it's driving decisions. I find the 3–5 financial blind spots costing you the most.
Operating Cadence
The rhythm of your business — meetings, reporting cycles, planning horizons. Most founder-led companies either have no cadence or the wrong one. I design the one you actually need.
Team & Accountability
Who owns what, whether accountability is real or performative, and where your org chart says one thing but reality says another.
Execution Velocity
How fast initiatives move from decision to done. I find the 2–3 systemic friction points that slow everything down.
Scalability Readiness
Whether your current model can handle 2× revenue without 2× headcount and 2× chaos.
Three Deliverables. Zero Fluff.
Operating Reality Report
A 15–20 page assessment of your operating reality across all six dimensions. Not theory. Not frameworks. A clear-eyed account of what's working, what's failing, and what it's costing you — written for you, not a board deck.
Priority Action Map
A 90-day execution roadmap organized by impact and effort. Each initiative includes what it solves, what it costs, who owns it, and when it should be done. Designed so your team can start executing the week you receive it.
CEO Decision Brief
A 2-page summary of the three highest-leverage decisions you need to make in the next 90 days — with context, options, trade-offs, and a direct recommendation. If you read nothing else, this tells you what to do first.
What This Typically Uncovers
In my experience operating a $1.3 billion industrial group, the gaps this diagnostic identifies typically represent 5–15% of annual revenue in recoverable margin, misdirected spend, or unrealized capacity.
The diagnostic doesn't just show you what's broken. It shows you where the money is — and gives you a 90-day plan to go get it.
Three Weeks. Start to Finish.
Week 1 — Discovery
90-minute CEO deep dive. Interviews with 3–5 key leaders. Financial and operational document review.
Week 2 — Analysis
Map decision flows, quantify operational drag, identify highest-impact improvements with estimated ROI.
Week 3 — Delivery
Receive all three deliverables. 90-minute working session to walk through findings and decisions. Plus a 30-day follow-up call to review early progress.
Is This Right for You?
This diagnostic is built for:
- Founder-CEOs running $5M–$30M companies who are stuck in daily operations and know the business needs a better operating system
- CEOs of PE-backed portfolio companies who need to demonstrate operational improvement to their board within 90 days
- Family business leaders navigating growth, succession, or professionalization — where the personal and the operational are deeply intertwined
- Any CEO who suspects the company's operating model is the ceiling on its growth but can't pinpoint exactly where or why
This is probably not the right fit if:
- Your company is pre-revenue or below $3M — the diagnostic is designed for businesses with existing operational complexity
- You're looking for a strategy consultant to write a plan your team won't execute — this is an operating assessment, not a strategy project
- You need someone to run operations full-time starting next week — the diagnostic comes first, and ongoing engagement is a separate conversation
Who Conducts the Diagnostic
I'm Ghosson Al Khaled. I spent 17 years inside a $1.3 billion publicly traded industrial conglomerate — ACICO Group — rising from operations to Deputy CEO. I managed 4,500 employees across four countries through growth, financial crisis, restructuring, and leadership succession.
I didn't learn operations from a textbook or a consulting framework. I learned it by running a factory floor, managing cross-border P&Ls, installing operating systems that 4,500 people had to use every day, and sitting in the boardroom explaining the numbers.
When I conduct a diagnostic, I'm not looking at your business from the outside. I'm looking at it the way I looked at my own — with the same rigor, the same urgency, and the same intolerance for problems that hide behind complexity.
Questions You Might Have
Management consultants typically work with large teams over 3–6 months and deliver strategy recommendations. I work alone, operate in 3 weeks, and deliver an action plan — not a recommendation. I've been the person who has to execute the plan, so I only recommend things that actually work inside a real company with real constraints.
You might be right. But in 17 years of operating companies, I've found that what the CEO thinks is the problem and what the data shows is the problem are rarely the same thing. The diagnostic either confirms your instinct (and you move faster) or reveals something you missed (and you avoid a costly mistake). Either way, you win.
Most operational assessments I've seen are either too high-level (strategy decks with no operational depth) or too narrow (process audits that miss the bigger picture). This diagnostic covers six dimensions simultaneously because operational problems are interconnected. A decision bottleneck creates a financial visibility gap creates an execution velocity problem. You need someone who can see the full system.
I'll interview 3–5 of your key leaders for 45 minutes each in Week 1. I handle scheduling directly. Most CEOs find that the team welcomes the process — it signals that leadership is serious about fixing things.
The deliverables are designed to stand alone. Your team can execute the 90-day plan without me. If the findings show you need a senior operating partner to drive execution — someone to install the cadence, run the initiatives, and hold the team accountable — I offer a monthly retainer engagement. But that's a separate conversation, and there's zero obligation.
The operational gaps this diagnostic uncovers typically represent 5–15% of annual revenue. For most companies I work with, the first initiative on the Priority Action Map more than pays for the entire engagement. You'll know within the first week of execution whether the ROI is real.
The First Step Is a Conversation.
Book a 15-minute fit call. I'll ask you three questions about what's happening in your business. You'll know within 10 minutes whether the diagnostic is the right tool for your situation. No pitch, no pressure, no 47-slide deck.
Book a 15-Minute Fit CallOr email me directly: [email protected]