Frequently Asked Questions: Profit Recovery Consulting

By Abraham Chera | Profit Recovery Consultant | SyBoost

These are the questions I get most often before an engagement starts — answered directly, without marketing language. If you're evaluating whether this makes sense for your business, this is the right place to start.

Most business consultants deliver frameworks, strategies, and recommendations. We do one thing: find money that's already in your business and put it back on your bottom line. Every engagement is scoped and priced around dollars recovered, not advice delivered. If you want strategic direction, we're not the right fit. If you want a specific, measurable improvement to your bottom line, we are.

The retainer covers the full 30-day engagement — all four audit workstreams, implementation support, and the final recovery report with a 12-month impact projection. It is applied as a credit toward your total performance fee. If we identify $300,000 in recoverable waste, our fee is $30,000 (10% of Year 1 savings). You pay $25,000 net after the retainer credit. The retainer is the only upfront cost.

In the work I've done with $1M–20M companies, I have not completed a 30-day audit and found zero recoverable waste. The structure of the business at this stage makes it structurally near-impossible: growth produces waste, and most companies at this revenue level have been growing faster than their operational infrastructure for at least 18 months. That said, if you feel the engagement didn't deliver commensurate value, we refund the retainer. That guarantee has been invoked once in seven years.

We need four things: read-only access to your accounting software, your payroll system or a payroll summary by role, your advertising platforms, and a list of all software subscriptions with costs. We don't need access to personal bank accounts, shareholder information, or anything beyond your business operations. Everything we need is already in your standard business systems.

Minimally. In Week 1, we need 2–3 hours from an operations lead or EA to orient us to the business. In Week 2, we may request short context calls with 2–3 department leads. In Weeks 3–4, implementation decisions are made with you or your designated point of contact. Your team continues normal operations throughout the engagement.

Fast wins — tool cancellations, ad campaign shutoffs, billing corrections — typically appear within two weeks of the final report. Contract-based savings from vendor renegotiations and lease adjustments materialize at the next renewal, usually within 60–90 days. The full annualized savings figure is typically realized within six months of implementation completion.

The engagements I've conducted span e-commerce, professional services, SaaS, healthcare operations, real estate, wholesale distribution, and retail. The specific sources of waste differ by industry — a retailer's shrinkage problem looks nothing like a SaaS company's infrastructure cost problem — but the diagnostic framework is universal. If you're doing $1M–20M in revenue and you've grown faster than your operational infrastructure, there is waste to find. For industry-specific context, see Profit Recovery: The Complete Guide for $1M–20M Businesses.

--- Abraham Chera is the founder of SyBoost, a profit recovery consultancy serving businesses between $1M and $20M in revenue.