Growth Strategy · Commercial Excellence · Value Creation

Senior commercial strategy talent that plugs into your team for the work that moves top line and EBITDA.

Watson & Company works with middle-market private equity funds, their portfolio companies, and the advisory firms that serve them, on commercial due diligence, growth strategy, commercial excellence, and FP&A. Not a firm with a bench. One experienced principal who joins your workstream and carries it.

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Chicago, remote-ready Founded 2023 10+ years in PE-focused consulting

How engagements work

Built to embed, not to bolt on.

Watson & Company does not sell packaged projects. Mark joins an existing team as a senior contributor on a defined workstream, for weeks or months, and works inside your tools, your data room, and your operating cadence.

Inside fund value-creation teams

Deal and operating partners get an extra senior hand on diligence, 100-day planning, and portfolio commercial reviews, without adding a full engagement team and its overhead.

Inside portfolio companies

CEOs, CROs, and CFOs get a strategist who builds the market model, the revenue plan, or the sales-org design alongside their people, so the capability stays after the work ends.

Inside advisory firms

Boutique strategy and value-creation firms get a principal-level contractor who can lead a case workstream on day one, with the PE-fluency and client presence the role demands.

Services

Four disciplines. The same questions every deal team is already asking.

Commercial Due Diligence

Buy-side and sell-side. An independent read on whether the commercial story in the deck survives contact with customers, competitors, and the numbers.

Does the market want what this company sells, at the price and volume the model needs?
Where will the growth in the plan come from, and what has to be built or bought to get it?
Which assumptions, if wrong, break the returns?

Customer and channel interviewsCompetitive positioningMarket and pricing analysisManagement and capability assessmentRed-flag and upside memo

Growth Strategy

Turning a value-creation thesis into a ranked list of markets, segments, and moves, with the economics behind each one.

How big is the real opportunity, and which slices of it are worth pursuing first?
What are the winners in this space doing differently, and what would it take to catch them?
Where does the next dollar go: product, marketing, sales, or acquisitions?

Market sizing and segmentationGrowth-lever prioritizationAdjacency and bolt-on screeningPricing and packagingBoard-ready growth plan

Commercial Excellence

Making the sales and marketing engine capable of the plan: structure, coverage, process, and the metrics that show whether it is working.

Is the commercial team built for the targets, or for the company it used to be?
Where does pipeline leak, and which fixes move bookings this year rather than next?
Do leadership and the board see the same revenue picture, early enough to act on it?

Sales organization and coverage designGo-to-market playbooksPipeline and funnel diagnosticsKPI frameworks and dashboardsRevenue forecasting and planning

FP&A and Financial Analysis

Finance support with an operator's instincts: the analysis behind the commercial plan, and the reporting that keeps it honest.

Which customers, products, and units actually earn their keep?
Does the monthly reporting produce decisions, or just statements?

Profitability analysisBusiness-unit and product-line reviewsManagement reporting designBudget and scenario modelsAcquisition screening support

About

Mark Watson

Founder & Principal

Mark Watson is the founder and principal of Watson & Company, a Chicago-based consultancy that embeds senior strategy and commercial talent into private equity value-creation teams, portfolio companies, and boutique advisory firms.

He brings more than ten years in consulting, most recently as a Principal with a growth and commercial advisory firm serving middle-market private equity funds and their portfolio companies, and earlier with L.E.K. Consulting and Beckway Group, where he led case teams and workstreams on commercial due diligence, growth strategy, go-to-market execution, and commercial organization design across industrials, business services, and tech-enabled sectors.

Before consulting, he spent four years at Whirlpool Corporation in corporate strategy and business development, including its Global Finance Leadership Development Program, which grounds his commercial work in how operating companies actually run their numbers.

He founded Watson & Company in 2023.

LinkedIn mark@watsandco.com