Operating plans, for small businesses
Most small business plans die in a drawer. Keystone is different — a working operating plan that stays current because it's connected to the data already running through your business.
Currently in design partner conversations. Not yet generally available.
The problem
If you wrote a business plan when you started, it's probably out of date now. If you never wrote one, you're running the company on gut, the bank balance, and what you remember from the last conversation with your accountant.
Neither one is your fault. Plan-writing software made a plan a single document, frozen in time. FP&A platforms built tools for finance teams you don't have. The middle is empty.
Meanwhile, every month you're making real decisions. Hire or not. Raise prices or hold. Expand or wait. Replace the truck or not. You make these calls with whatever information is in your head — and you live with the consequences.
There's a better way to do this. It's been technically possible for about eighteen months.
The bigger problem
About half of U.S. businesses close within five years. Only about one in three make it past ten. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics.
It's rarely for lack of effort. Owners work relentlessly. They lose because the decisions that compound — pricing, hiring, cash, when to expand — get made without a current picture of the business.
A plan is only worth what gets executed against it. The day-to-day swallows the plan; the plan stops matching the business actually being run; and by the time the numbers are clear, the decision is already behind you.
The real gap isn't between owners who plan and owners who don't. It's between the plan and the execution.
How it works
Set up takes about thirty minutes. After that, you check in once a month. We do the rest.
A guided 30-minute onboarding. You answer a few questions about your business; Keystone drafts an operating plan you can edit and refine.
OAuth into your accounting (QuickBooks, Xero), your CRM, and your payment processor. No exports, no spreadsheets.
On the third business day of each month, Keystone pulls fresh data and reconciles it against the plan you set.
Performance benchmarked against businesses like yours: same industry, similar revenue band, same region.
A short, plain-language report arrives in your inbox. Five minutes to read. Two or three things to focus on.
What you actually see
This is a representative example for a $1.4M residential plumbing business. Numbers are illustrative; the format and voice are real.
Hi Greg,
Revenue came in at $142,300 — six percent above plan and your strongest month in two years. You added fourteen new customers, three above target. The one flag this month is gross margin: you slipped 1.8 points below plan, driven almost entirely by materials markup on commercial jobs. Cash is healthy at $186K. Fifteen minutes with the quoting template before the next commercial bid recovers most of it.
Your month at a glance
vs plan / vs last monthREVENUE
$142,300
+6.2% vs plan ($134k)
+3.1% vs February
GROSS MARGIN
23.4%
−1.8 pp vs plan (25.2%)
−2.4 pp vs February
CASH ON HAND
$186,200
Healthy
4.2 mo of fixed costs
TOP CUSTOMER %
31%
Concentration risk
target < 20%
You closed the plan gap in December and have been pulling ahead since. March is your strongest beat to date.
You can cover fixed costs for 4.2 months at current burn. We'd start flagging below 3 months. AR is creeping; worth a collections pass.
CASH POSITION
Source: Chase business checking + savings, synced this morning.
AR AGING · $94,300 OUTSTANDING
DSO 38 days · your target is 30 · industry median 33
47 plumbing businesses, $1M–$2M revenue, Pacific NW + Mountain West. Updated nightly.
You're 3.8 points below the peer median this month. Closing that gap would have meant ~$5,400 more in pocket on March's revenue alone.
Two things worth knowing about the people paying you.
Hendricks Office Building = 31% of March revenue
CONCENTRATION RISKYour largest customer accounted for nearly a third of your revenue this month — and 22% over the trailing 90 days. Healthy distribution puts no single customer above 20%. Worth thinking about how to grow the next tier of accounts before this one renegotiates.
Source: QuickBooks customer revenue rollup, last 90 days
Riverside Commercial went quiet six months ago
AT RISKRiverside spent between $4–6K with you every month from June 2024 through August 2025 — eighteen consecutive months. They haven't booked anything since. They didn't say goodbye; they just stopped. A courtesy call from you would tell you whether they moved, switched, or are about to come back.
Source: CRM activity log + invoice history, cross-referenced
Sourced and prioritized. Each one estimated to recover real dollars.
Fix the commercial quoting template
Due April 15Materials markup on your last three commercial invoices averaged 24%, down from your standard 32%. The Hendricks Office job alone was 19%. A fifteen-minute template review before your next commercial bid should restore the markup discipline.
Bill the Hendricks Office change order
Due April 10The Hendricks Office job overran the labor estimate by 18% — about $4,200 of scope creep that you absorbed instead of billing. The scope change is documented in the project notes. A change order is reasonable and recoverable if you send it this month.
Call Riverside Commercial
Due April 30Eighteen months of steady business, then silence. You don't know why. A five-minute courtesy call from you — not a sales call — tells you whether they're recoverable. If they're gone, you learn what happened so the next customer doesn't follow them.
What's working · don't change this
Of the 47 new customers you signed in Q4, 38 have booked a second job — that's 81% repeat rate against a 64% peer benchmark. The gap is large enough that it's not noise.
Whatever you and your dispatch team are doing on first jobs — the call confirmation cadence, the on-time arrivals, the follow-up call you started in October — keep doing it. This is the moat in your business right now.
Source: invoice history, customer-level rollup, vs. peer cohort
Based on your scheduled jobs and the current pipeline. We'll show you reality against this in next month's report.
PIPELINE VALUE
$164,000
47 scheduled jobs
PLAN FOR APRIL
$138,000
tracking +19%
BIGGEST JOB
$28,400
Northwood Apts · starts 4/8
WATCH FOR
Industry materials costs are up 4% month-over-month. If your quoting template isn't fixed, April margin will compress further on commercial jobs already in the pipeline. Also: Q1 estimated tax payment is due April 15.
The voice, the structure, and the data sourcing convention are real. The numbers and the business are illustrative. Every customer's actual report is generated from their connected systems.
What you actually get
A working plan, monthly intelligence, and peer benchmarks at $179 a month only makes sense if it pays for itself many times over. Here's how the math actually works — and what changes for an owner who uses it.
Each of these is a specific operational change that happens when you stop running on monthly bank balance and start running on a current plan plus benchmark data.
01
Catch margin slippage in three weeks, not three months.
Most owners learn that their gross margin dropped when they review the quarterly P&L with their accountant — six to twelve weeks after it happened. By then the bad quoting template has shipped thirty more bids. With Keystone, the same drift shows up in your next monthly report, with the specific invoices that caused it. You fix it before the next bid cycle, not the next quarter.
On a $1.4M business, recovering two points of gross margin = roughly $28,000 a year.
02
Stop wondering whether your numbers are normal.
Your 23% gross margin — is that fine or terrible? Your DSO of 38 days — typical or worrying? Your customer concentration at 31% — risky or whatever? Without peer data, you're guessing. Keystone tells you exactly where you sit against businesses your size in your industry in your region, every month. Statistical context, not gut.
The single most-asked question in customer discovery: "how am I doing compared to others like me?" Most owners never get a credible answer.
03
Spot customer risk before it bites.
One customer quietly becomes 30% of your revenue. A loyal account who used to spend monthly hasn't booked in six months. Your receivables ladder is creeping. These are the silent killers in service businesses — the things that don't hurt until they hurt a lot. Keystone surfaces them on the third of the month, every month, while there's still time to act.
Losing a $35K annual customer because you didn't notice they went quiet is the kind of mistake that pays for Keystone for 16 years.
04
Stop leaking revenue you've already earned.
The unbilled change order. The slipped markup. The pricing on jobs that's twelve percent below what peers charge. The accounts hitting sixty days because nobody chased them. Most small service businesses leak four to eight percent of net income through quiet, recoverable issues that nobody is watching for. The report tells you where, with sources, every month.
The Hendricks Office change order in the sample report — $4,200 — was one month's example. Across a year, the recovery typically lands in five figures.
05
Make the big calls on current data, not gut.
The biggest decisions in an owner's year — hire or wait, raise prices or hold, expand or stay, take the loan or self-fund — are typically made on the bank balance plus instinct. Keystone gives you the plan-versus-reality picture and the peer context to make these calls with actual information underneath them.
One mispriced hire or one mistimed expansion costs more than ten years of subscription. Better information is cheaper than the next bad decision.
Illustrative first-year benefit case for a $1.4M-revenue service business. Your numbers will vary based on your specific operational gaps — but the categories of recovery are consistent.
First-year benefit case
$1.4M service business · illustrative
Margin recovery via quoting discipline
Two points of gross margin recovered on $1.4M revenue
+$28,000
Recovered change orders
Three caught change orders per year at ~$4,000 average
+$12,000
Re-engaged dormant customers
Half the value of one $30K+ relationship caught early
+$15,000
Peer-informed pricing lift
One percent price lift applied on roughly ten percent of jobs
+$10,000
DSO improvement
Eight days of receivables compression at $1.4M run rate
+$30,000
Subtotal — recovered value
Annualized, after first six months of habit formation
$95,000
Cost of Keystone (Operator tier)
$179/month × 12 months
−$2,148
Estimated net first-year benefit
Roughly 43x return on subscription cost · cash recovery, not soft savings
~$93,000
Important caveats. This is an illustrative case for a service business with operational gaps typical of the segment. Actual recovery depends on the business, the gaps that exist, and the owner acting on what the report surfaces. Steady-state benefit is typically lower than year-one (the catch-up effect is real). Keystone surfaces opportunities; the owner captures the value.
Most owners who use a tool like this say the biggest benefits aren't the dollar ones — they're the strategic shifts that change how they show up to work.
Confidence under pressure.
When your spouse asks how the business is doing, your accountant pushes back on a strategic call, or your lender wants a quarterly update — you show up with current numbers and peer context. Not vibes, not last quarter's P&L. The conversations get shorter and the answers get sharper.
Sleep at night.
The discipline of monthly intelligence means you stop wondering what you might be missing. Either there's a flag this month or there isn't — and you know either way. The cognitive load of running blind is heavier than most owners realize until it's gone.
Better banking conversations.
Lenders give better terms to businesses with clean, trended data and peer benchmarks. Walking into a refinance or a line-of-credit conversation with twelve months of Action Reports plus peer comps changes the dynamic. Your CFO substitute showed up before you did.
Easier business sale, when it's time.
Most service businesses sell for three to five times EBITDA — but the buyers who pay the top of that range want clean financial history, operating context, and peer benchmarks. A business with a 24-month archive of monthly reports sells higher and faster than one without.
More CEO time. Less firefighting time.
The owners who use a tool like this consistently say the biggest change is what they spend their week on. The report does the watching, so they stop. Time gets redirected from "checking on things" to actually working on the business.
A growing institutional memory.
Every Action Report stays in your archive. Two years in, you have a documented record of every decision flagged, every action taken, every outcome. When a new manager comes on or you bring in a consultant, the context is already written down.
The simplest way to know: try it on your business.
Concept stage today. Design partner conversations open. Free first year for partners.
Who it's for
Keystone is built for owner-operators of service businesses with steady, recurring revenue — the kind where money moves through the business every week — doing between $500K and $3M a year, with at least a handful of employees. The sweet spot is $1M to $2M.
You probably use QuickBooks or Xero, you probably have a CRM, and you probably take payments through Stripe or Square. You make every important decision personally — and you feel the weight of each one.
See pricing →Industries we serve at launch
DON'T SEE YOURS?
We're adding two new industries per quarter. The peer benchmark data needs minimum cohort size before we publish for an industry — so we're deliberate about expansion. Tell us what we should add.
What Keystone isn't
We'd rather tell you what this isn't before you sign up than have you find out after. Five things Keystone does not do:
We don't pretend the software is replacing a fractional CFO. It surfaces what's happening; you make the call. That's the deal.
Monthly cadence. On purpose. You don't have the bandwidth for another live dashboard, and you'd ignore it if we built one.
No drag-and-drop charts. No widget library. We tell you what matters; we don't ask you to figure it out.
We read from QuickBooks. We don't categorize transactions, file taxes, or fix your books. Keep your bookkeeper.
We surface operating insights. We don't tell you how to invest, what to buy, or how to structure your taxes. Different professionals.
Below $500K revenue, the math doesn't work for you yet. Above $5M, you probably need a real CFO. We sit deliberately in between.
Pricing
The tier is determined by integration depth, not feature gating. Every plan includes the full Action Report and peer benchmarks.
STARTER
For service businesses doing $500K to $1M. Single location, single owner.
OPERATOR
For service businesses doing $1M to $3M. The sweet spot. About 55% of customers choose this tier.
ADVANCED
For service businesses above $3M, multi-location, or growth-stage. More depth, more granularity.
All plans: 14-day free trial · cancel any time · no setup fee · annual billing saves 15%
A note from the founder
I'm a problem solver. For more than a decade I've been pulled into complicated projects across very different industries — semiconductor and engineering operations, multidisciplinary design firms, large-scale commercial development, and public housing — to do one thing: move a plan off the page and into reality.
That work has put me in the room with the people who carry the risk — CEOs, leadership teams, founders, and business owners — and asked me to coordinate everyone a project depends on. The through-line, in every industry, has been the same: the distance between having a plan and actually executing it, and the discipline it takes to hold to that plan while everything around it changes.
I've watched capable people with a sound plan lose the thread — not because the plan was wrong, but because nothing kept it in front of them as conditions shifted. And I've watched owners run on instinct alone, with no working map at all. These are sharp, hardworking people — plumbers, dentists, designers, restaurateurs, fitness studio owners — making the biggest decisions of their business lives with no current plan to weigh them against.
The technology to fix this got built in the last 36 months. Nobody has put it in front of the people who need it. That's the company I'm building.
Keystone is in design partner conversations now. If you run a service business in one of our launch industries and you'd like a free year in exchange for honest feedback during the build, I want to talk.
Questions
Yes. We use OAuth for every integration — your credentials never touch our servers. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. We're working toward SOC 2 Type II certification, with Type I in flight during the build. You can disconnect any integration in one click.
We aggregate anonymized data across customers in the same industry, revenue band, and region. We never publish a benchmark for a cohort smaller than 12 businesses, and individual customer data is never identifiable. You can opt out of contributing to benchmarks without losing access to them.
We add new industries deliberately — we need enough cohort data for the peer benchmarks to be statistically meaningful. If your industry isn't live yet, you can still use the plan and integration features, but benchmarks come later. Tell us about your industry and we'll prioritize it accordingly.
At launch: QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks, Wave (accounting); HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Jobber (CRM); Stripe, Square, QuickBooks Payments, PayPal (payments). More coming in v2: Google Ads, Meta Ads, Mailchimp.
Yes. The Operator and Advanced tiers include the ability to share read-only access with an outside advisor. We're also building a dedicated channel program for accounting firms — get in touch if you want to be an early partner.
Design partner program is open now. General availability is targeted for late 2026. If you want a free year in exchange for honest feedback during the build, reach out directly.
Get in touch
Keystone is in design partner conversations. If you run a service business and you want a free year in exchange for honest feedback during the build — or just want to learn more — fill this out. Corey replies personally within 48 hours.
Your email client should have opened with the inquiry ready to send. If it didn't, email corey@freeholdbrokerage.com directly.
Investor access
Keystone is raising a pre-seed round. The summary below is for prospective investors evaluating the opportunity. Enter your access code to read it.
Access code required
That code didn't match. Check it and try again.
Don't have a code? Request access and I'll send one along with the materials.
Informational only. This summary is provided to prospective investors for evaluation. It is not an offer to sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security. Any investment is made solely through the formal SAFE subscription documents, provided to qualified investors, which supersede anything on this page. Figures are concept-stage projections and assumptions, not results.
The problem
1.4 million U.S. service businesses doing $500K to $3M run on instinct, the bank balance, and last quarter's gut feel. Most have no current operating plan; the ones who wrote one abandoned it. The decisions that compound — pricing, hiring, cash, when to expand — get made without a clear picture of the business.
The cost is brutal and well documented: about half of U.S. businesses close within five years, and only about one in three survive past ten. It's rarely for lack of effort. It's the gap between the plan and the execution.
The tools meant to help don't. Plan-writing software produces a document frozen at day one. FP&A platforms are built for finance teams these owners will never hire. The middle — a plan that stays current and says what to do next — is empty.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics.
The solution
Keystone is a living operating plan — the business plan that watches itself. It connects to the data already running through the business (accounting, CRM, payments) and turns it into a monthly Action Report in plain language: plan-versus-actual variance, peer benchmarks against businesses the same size in the same industry and region, and a short list of what to do next.
Not a document, and not a dashboard. It's the working map an owner-operator never had, delivered on a monthly cadence they actually keep — priced at $99 to $299 a month, below an AI-CFO and above a one-time plan writer.
The round
Stage
Pre-seed
Raising
$500K–$750K
Instrument
SAFE
Valuation cap
$5M
Discount
15%
Typical check
$25K–$250K
Open to angels and small pre-seed funds. Capital funds the MVP build, the first three to five design partners, and completion of the 60-day validation sprint.
Why now
Pulling clean data across the systems an SMB already uses and turning it into plain-language guidance only became practical in the last 36 months. The capability now exists; nobody has put it in front of these owners yet.
The shape is venture-grade: recurring revenue, a peer-benchmark dataset that compounds with every customer, and a clear line to strategic acquirers who want SMB distribution and the data network — Intuit, HubSpot, Xero, Salesforce.
The market
TAM
~$58B
U.S. SMB software spend, all categories.
SAM
~$4.2B
Service SMBs, $500K–$3M — about 1.4M businesses.
SOM · 5-yr
~$73M
ARR target — ~2% beachhead, ~35,000 customers at $175 ARPU.
Why it compounds (the moat)
Habit formation
The monthly cadence builds real stickiness. Switching costs compound month over month as the plan becomes the owner's operating rhythm.
Proprietary peer benchmarks
Every customer who connects data deepens the benchmark set. A late competitor can't backfill years of accumulated, opted-in cohort data.
Unit economics · Y2–Y3 targets
$175/mo
Blended ARPU
85%+
Gross margin
~$1,100
CAC
<6 mo
CAC payback
>3x
LTV / CAC
>100%
Net revenue retention
Trajectory & exit
5-year base case
~$22M ARR
Maturity valuation
$110M–$325M
Most likely exit is a strategic acquisition in the $175M–$550M range at $12–25M ARR (years 4–6). Secondary paths: a PE roll-up, an IPO at scale, or running profitably at $15M+ ARR as optionality rather than the default.
What this round unlocks
Clearing these de-risks the seed round ($2.5M–$3M, months 18–24).
The honest case against
Validation risk — high
Five core assumptions are unvalidated. The 60-day sprint tests them before any scaling spend; capital is staged behind that gate.
Incumbent response
Intuit could bolt a version onto QuickBooks. Mitigated by a multi-system data moat and speed to the first 1,000 customers.
Solo-founder execution
A technical co-founder or VP Engineering is planned by Year 2, with an advisor bench from Year 1.
Concept stage, high variance
This is pre-revenue. The honest probability distribution includes a ~25% chance of total loss. This is an early, high-risk, high-variance bet — sized accordingly.
How to subscribe
The data room includes the strategic business plan, the financial model, the pitch decks, and the SAFE. Any commitment is made through the formal subscription documents — not this page.
Request investor materialsReplies within 48 hours · corey@freeholdbrokerage.com · Portland, OR
Confidentiality & Disclosures
Confidential and proprietary. All materials presented on this site — including but not limited to the brand identity, product specifications, financial projections, peer benchmark methodology, sample Action Report, integration architecture, pricing strategy, market positioning, and related content — are confidential and proprietary to Keystone (working name) and its founder. They are made available solely for the limited purpose of evaluating Keystone as a potential customer, investor, advisor, partner, or employee. Any unauthorized reproduction, redistribution, public disclosure, derivative use, or commercial exploitation of any content on this site is strictly prohibited and may result in legal action.
Sample data is fictional. The sample Action Report and any references to "Hendricks Plumbing & Mechanical," "Riverside Commercial," "Hendricks Office Building," "Northwood Apartments," and related business names, owners, customers, transactions, peer cohorts, and financial figures are illustrative examples developed for demonstration purposes only. They do not represent any actual business, customer, or transaction. Any resemblance to real entities — living, dissolved, or operating — is coincidental and unintentional.
Forward-looking statements. This site contains forward-looking statements about market opportunity, product capabilities, financial projections, growth trajectory, competitive position, and strategic direction. These statements are based on current assumptions, internal analysis, and information believed to be reliable at the time of publication. They are inherently subject to risks, uncertainties, and changes — including but not limited to customer validation outcomes, market conditions, capital availability, competitive response, regulatory changes, and execution risk. Actual results may differ materially from any projections or expectations expressed on this site. No representation is made that any of these projections will be achieved.
Not a securities offering or solicitation. The information on this site is provided for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security, interest, or financial instrument in Keystone or any related entity. Any future investment opportunity, if and when offered, will be conducted exclusively through formal subscription documentation provided to qualified investors and will supersede any information presented here. Nothing on this site should be construed as financial, investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice.
Intellectual property. The "Keystone" name (currently a working name pending trademark filing), the wordmark, the Ink + Bone + Brick visual identity system, the typographic system, the monthly Action Report format, the peer benchmark methodology, the integration architecture, the brand voice and editorial conventions, and all related trade dress are the intellectual property of the founder. All rights are reserved. Third-party trademarks referenced on this site (including QuickBooks, Xero, Jobber, Stripe, Square, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, FreshBooks, Wave, Mailchimp, Codat, and Merge.dev) are the property of their respective owners and are referenced solely for descriptive purposes.
Use of this site. By accessing this site, you acknowledge that the information presented is confidential and agree not to share, copy, distribute, or use the materials except for the limited evaluation purposes stated above. You further agree that this site does not create any contractual, fiduciary, advisory, or other legal relationship between you and Keystone or its founder. Keystone reserves the right to revise, update, or remove any content at any time without notice. Continued access to the site constitutes acceptance of these terms.
© 2026 Keystone (working name). All rights reserved.
Last updated: June 2026 · Concept-stage / pre-launch · Portland, OR