OAG deploys into lower middle market companies post-acquisition, eliminates operational waste, replaces bloated SaaS with infrastructure the company owns, and delivers measurable EBITDA improvement — typically within 90 days.
We build it. You own it. It costs almost nothing to run.
These aren't strategy problems. They're operational debt — inherited processes, unquestioned defaults, and normalized inefficiency compounding quietly under the surface of every portfolio company.
Every critical decision routes through the founder. The business runs on instinct, not infrastructure. You can't exit a business that only works when one person is in the building. The 100-day plan requires extraction. Nobody has built the systems to make that possible.
Month-end close takes two weeks. Data lives in 14 spreadsheets across six people. The CRM doesn't talk to the ERP. The team is running $300K/year in invisible workaround labor — cost that doesn't show on the P&L but destroys margin at scale.
The 100-day plan is written. The LOI closed. Now the portfolio company team is lean, the CEO is overwhelmed, and the sponsor needs EBITDA improvement fast. Plans don't execute themselves. Most PE firms don't have the operational bandwidth to run it. We do.
Every OAG engagement produces specific operational outputs — not recommendations. Built systems, replaced costs, extracted capacity, and documented infrastructure ready for exit.
Most consultants try to improve what exists. We interrogate whether it should exist at all. Built on decades of lean operational leadership and first-principles thinking — not a framework invented in a consulting deck.
Map every process. Question every assumption. Find where time and money actually go — not where people think they go. Most LMM companies have never measured their true operational cost structure.
Kill what doesn't need to exist. Most companies run 30–40% waste they've never measured. Before improving anything, we identify what should not exist — meetings, reports, handoffs, and approval layers that add cost without adding value.
What remains after deletion gets reduced to its minimum viable form. Complex workflows consolidated. Decision paths shortened. Simplification always precedes speed.
Compress cycle times. Parallelize where possible. Remove approval bottlenecks. We prove the optimized flow manually before encoding it — so what gets accelerated is the right process, not a faster version of the wrong one.
Build systems the company owns for under $75/month that replace $15K–$25K/month in SaaS licensing. Automating a broken process locks in failure permanently — we only automate what's been proven and simplified first.
Our average Override Diagnostic identifies $120K–$400K in hidden operational waste within the first 30 days. A full-time operations VP at a $20M company costs $150K–$250K in salary before benefits and equity. You get embedded COO-level execution from day one at a fraction of that cost — with measurable EBITDA impact in 90 days.
For PE sponsors evaluating portfolio-wide operational support, the PE Value Creation engagement is scoped around your hold period and portfolio complexity. Contact us directly.
Obsidian Axis Group was founded by Cedric, an executive operational strategist with decades of leadership across distribution centers, fulfillment networks, and service businesses at enterprise scale.
His career spans executive-level roles managing 200+ person operations, enterprise consulting engagements with Maersk, Amazon/AWS, Levi Strauss, and International Paper, and direct advisory work with growth-stage businesses navigating the operational complexity that comes with scaling through acquisition.
The OIL Framework was not designed in a boardroom. It was built through thousands of hours on warehouse floors, production lines, and inside the operations of companies that needed to move faster without adding cost — the same methodology now deployed inside LMM portfolio companies post-acquisition.
Every engagement is led personally by Cedric. When you hire Obsidian Axis Group, you get the architect — not a junior associate learning on your portfolio company's dime.
The OIL Framework wasn't designed for LMM companies first. It was stress-tested inside DefaultFail — the operator community where every system and framework was proven by real business owners before it became a consulting engagement.
The $75/month infrastructure stack deployed in every Fractional COO engagement was built, tested, and refined across dozens of operator businesses before OAG took it into post-acquisition execution. When we say it works, we have the receipts.
We replace the internal business operations layer of your tech stack. That means the tools running your strategy, workflows, communications, people management, project coordination, and day-to-day operations. We do not touch specialty software that serves your clients directly or handles regulated data. If your portfolio company uses healthcare scanning systems, financial analysis platforms, compliance tools, or any software where the output directly affects the safety or financial wellbeing of a third party, those stay exactly where they are. We are not a development house and we do not build custom software on demand. We analyze what is running internal operations, eliminate what should not exist, simplify what remains, and replace what makes sense with infrastructure you own.
Every person on this team has built, scaled, or fixed something at a level most consultants only read about. When OAG engages, you get decades of combined operational intelligence — not a fresh MBA running a playbook.
30 minutes. No pitch deck. We'll review the portfolio company's operational situation, identify the most expensive defaults, and tell you honestly whether an OAG engagement makes sense. If it doesn't, we'll tell you that too.