Salt Lake City · Boutique business consulting

Most consultants begin with what’s wrong.

We begin with what’s possible.

We help you and your organization unlock your highest level of performance — and then sustain it. Forty-five years of leading companies from the inside, brought to yours.

Book a conversation

The first one is a discovery meeting, at no charge.

Scroll

45
Years leading and transforming organizations
$80M
Revenue at a manufacturer Rich built from start-up
10×
Donation growth Kathy drove in a single year
$45K
Annual savings found for a current client

What we build

Three things, in this order.

Vision

A compelling picture of where the business is going that your people actually believe — not a statement on a wall, but something they can repeat and act on.

Alignment

Processes, metrics, compensation and leaders all pointed the same direction. This is where growth is won or quietly lost.

III

Legacy

An organization healthy enough to outlast you, and ready for whoever leads it next.

The difference

Advice arrives with a methodology. We arrive with questions.

Most consultants show up with a prepackaged framework and a plan to be gone by the end of the quarter. We’ve spent forty-five years leading organizations from the inside — so we’ve lived the problems you’re describing rather than studied them.

Engagement depth over time

Most consultantsDeck delivered. Engagement ends.

SchalterStill there when the next thing breaks.

Listen Immerse Build Stay

Month 1Month 6Month 12Year 2 and on

Most consultantsSchalter
Arrive with a frameworkArrive with questions
Study the problemHave lived it
Deliver a deckBuild a strategy you believe in
Bill for the quarterPrice against the value added
Leave at quarter endStay while it takes hold

Underneath all of it is a single idea: stewardship. You’ve been entrusted with a business, and with the people in it. Our work is helping you take care of that well enough that it flourishes and outlasts you.

How we show up

Experienced enough to guide you. Humble enough to listen. Invested enough to walk with you.

Rich and Kathy Schalter walking through a tree-lined downtown plaza.

Who we serve

Things founders say to us.

We’re growing and I can’t tell you why.
Revenue is up and no one can name the cause — which means you can’t repeat it, and you can’t protect it.
We grew, and now I can’t manage it.
The systems that got you here are buckling, and every real decision still routes through you.
Why aren’t my managers better leaders?
Usually because nobody ever built them into leaders. That’s buildable, and it’s faster than hiring around the gap.
I can’t get the data I need to run this business.
You need a small number of KPIs that are transparent, shared with your team, and actually tied to the decisions in front of you.
I want this to outlast me.
A family or founder-led business heading into a leadership transition, where nobody’s certain the culture survives the handoff.

Typically businesses of 10 to 200 people and $1M to $200M in revenue. Founder-led and family-owned companies are where we do our best work — though the skills apply to any industry.

How we work

We don’t bring a method. We build one.

A real conversation
An hour on what’s actually happening in your business. No charge, no deck, no obligation. You’ll know by the end whether we understand it.
Immersion
We spend time inside the business — with your leaders, your team, your numbers and your customers — until we understand it close to the way you do.
Findings, then a proposal
What’s driving the business, what’s impeding it, and what we’d do about it. Scope, timeline and price follow, based on the value we believe we can add.
Build and align
Vision, processes, KPIs, compensation, leadership development. Whatever the business needs, in the order it needs it — designed for you, not adapted from a template.
We stay
Alignment isn’t a deliverable. We walk alongside you while it takes hold, and we’re still there when the next thing breaks.

VisionAlignmentLegacy

Outcomes

What’s different a year in.

A vision your people can repeat
And that changes what they actually do on a Tuesday morning.
Clarity about what matters
You know which activities drive the business and which are noise.
Waste named and removed
Including the meetings nobody needed and nobody would defend.
Numbers you can run on
KPIs that are transparent, communicated, and owned by the team.
Managers who lead
Leaders built from the inside rather than hired to patch a gap.
A culture people opt into
Clear, transparent and inclusive enough that people contribute to growth on purpose.

By the numbers

Three results, plotted.

Every figure below is a real outcome from a real engagement. Nothing modelled, nothing projected.

Okemos Education FoundationAnnual donations grew roughly tenfold in a single year.

Custom fire-truck manufacturerBuilt on Rich’s convictions from day one. Production began 2012; revenue passed $80M by 2014.

Utah Italian Cultural AssociationFrom language club to cultural association — zero to 35+ paid members, and 50+ total participants.

Rich & Kathy

The two of us.

It’s a two-person firm on purpose. When you hire Schalter, you get us — not an associate with our name on the invoice.

Rich Schalter

Co-Founder

Rich has spent more than four decades helping organizations grow from where they are to where they aspire to be. His experience spans executive leadership in entrepreneurial ventures, privately held companies and global organizations — a vantage point on what happens to leaders as a business scales.

For the first twenty-five years he was the lead financial person inside family-owned entrepreneurial businesses, and the pattern he kept finding was the same: no vision the team believed in, processes that didn’t match the strategy, numbers nobody could see, and no bench of leaders coming up behind. He came to believe their growth was capped not by the market, but by the absence of those things.

In 2011 he got to test that. Asked to lead the design, development and production of a new line of custom fire-truck cabs and chassis, he built the company on those convictions from day one. Production began in 2012; by 2014 it was past $80 million in revenue, and it built more than 2,500 trucks in seven years.

Kathy Schalter

Co-Founder

Kathy has led in a wide range of settings — nonprofit organizations, volunteer teams, small businesses and an entrepreneurial startup. Those experiences shaped the conviction she brings to every engagement: healthy organizations are built by leaders who inspire, engage and empower the people around them.

Helping those leaders succeed is her greatest passion. She partners with organizations to create clarity, alignment and healthy cultures — the conditions where people flourish, organizations thrive, and impact reaches past the present generation.

Her work with the Okemos Education Foundation is a fair illustration: in a single year, annual donations grew from roughly $30,000 to $300,000 — a tenfold change in what the organization could actually do for its schools.

“What I love most about this work isn’t the financial upside — it’s helping people turn their vision into something real.”

Kathy Schalter, Co-Founder

Selected work

A few things we’ve helped build.

Awaken Church · Salt Lake City

$45,000 saved annually

Brought budget and expenses back in line, and built organizational leadership metrics that streamlined communication and gave the team clarity on who owned what. A new building maintenance and cleaning program saves roughly $45,000 a year. We’re currently overseeing a building remodel and the redesign of several churchwide programs.
Utah Italian Cultural Association

0 to 35+ paid members in nine months

Guided and implemented the shift from a language club to a cultural association — overseeing a new website, developing contracts for contract employees, and launching community forums. Paid memberships went from zero to more than 35 in nine months, with 50+ total participants across memberships, newsletter, events and language enrollment.
Okemos Education Foundation

$30,000 to $300,000 in one year

Kathy helped this nonprofit grow annual donations roughly tenfold in a single year — a tenfold change in what the organization could actually do for its schools.
Songs of Songs · Ongoing

Decisions aligned to a long-term vision

A family-owned apparel company led by two brothers whose mission reaches well beyond clothing. Since spring 2026 we’ve been helping them align daily decisions with their long-term vision — building a decision-making process that moves past instinct alone, so they can name what’s driving a choice, weigh better alternatives, and act deliberately. Their next launch lands at the end of August.

Other engagements include GMRT. References and further detail on any of the above are available on request.

In their words

Hear it from a client.

The brothers behind Songs of Songs, in their own words.

Awaken ChurchUtah Italian Cultural AssociationOkemos Education FoundationSongs of SongsGMRT

Questions

The honest ones.

We don’t have time for this right now.

That’s usually the strongest argument for doing it. Being too consumed by this week’s demands to think about the next five years is precisely the condition we get hired to fix. We work around your operating reality rather than against it — and the first step costs you one conversation.

Our business is unique. Will any of this transfer?

Your business is unique — which is exactly why we don’t bring a methodology. We learn your business first and build something that only fits you. What transfers isn’t a framework; it’s judgment earned across four decades and a lot of very different industries.

Couldn’t we figure this out ourselves?

Sometimes. The obstacle is rarely capability — it’s proximity. It is very hard to see clearly the thing you are standing inside of. We’re outside it, and we’ve been inside a lot of others.

How do we know it will work?

You’ll know after the first conversation whether we understand your business. If we don’t, don’t hire us — the discovery meeting is free for exactly that reason. Beyond that, we’ve done this successfully in family businesses, startups, global companies and nonprofits, and we’d rather show you than tell you.

What does it cost?

Every engagement is designed from scratch, so we price it after we’ve assessed the business — based on the value we believe we can add. You’ll see scope, timeline and price before you commit to anything.

How many clients do you take at once?

A few. That’s the whole point of a boutique practice, and it isn’t going to change. It also means our availability is genuinely limited — worth knowing if the timing matters to you.

Start here

Let’s have a conversation.

No pitch and no deck — a discovery meeting at no charge, so we can both find out whether there’s something here worth building. In person in Salt Lake City, or wherever you are.

Book a conversation Or email us