FAQ Every question, answered straight.

CMA is an execute-first operating partner for founders and owners in Dallas, TX. We build investor-grade business plans and pitch decks, raise funding readiness, run strategy and feasibility work, provide fractional COO and operations leadership, implement process automation, and build business websites — embedded inside the client business, accountable for outcomes.

Most consulting ends with recommendations. CMA engagements include the implementation: we embed in the business, help lead the work, build the systems, and stay until the change holds. Strategy and execution are one engagement, not two invoices.

Primarily entrepreneurs and small to mid-market companies — from solo founders raising their first capital to established operators scaling past the founder-led stage. Engagements are scoped and priced to that reality: fixed scopes, fixed prices, fast starts.

No. The firm is headquartered at 1910 Pacific Avenue in downtown Dallas and works on site across Texas and nationwide, with remote engagements wherever the work allows. It has also delivered engagements in 13 countries across North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Japan and the Philippines. International clients are served remotely on a scheduled working-session cadence, under the same fixed-price standard.

With a 30-minute intro call: your situation, your goals, and a straight read on whether and how CMA can help. You leave with a clear scope and a fixed price — no obligation, no pressure, no surprise fees.

Fixed and published wherever possible: business plans from $2,500, market research from $1,250, go-to-market from $3,500, and fractional COO from $6,000 per month. Smaller budgets have an entry lane too, including an owner working session at $450 and an essential plan at $1,250 for raises under $250K. Project finance and other custom work are scoped fixed-price on the intro call.

CMA business plans use fixed pricing with no hidden fees. Plans are priced to the capital you are raising: $2,500 for a $250K to $2M raise, $5,000 for $2M to $25M, and from $12,500 for project finance. Raising under $250K? An essential plan is $1,250. You will know the exact price before we start, in writing.

Typically about 2 weeks once we have your inputs, and as little as 5 business days when your deadline requires it. Plans with complex financial models, multi-entity structures, or investor-grade market sizing typically run longer — we confirm the timeline on your intro call before any commitment.

Yes — SBA lending is one of our six plan types. We build plans formatted for SBA 7(a) and 504 review, including debt service coverage modeling, use-of-funds documentation, and the management credentials narrative underwriters expect to see, so your plan can pass review on first submission.

No. Every plan is custom-written from scratch and overseen by Dallas Coleman (MBA, JD, FMVA). The financial models are built for your actual business — not plug-and-play spreadsheets. Templates are why lenders reject plans; custom work is why ours get read.

A business plan is the full written document lenders and serious investors use for diligence; a pitch deck is the visual presentation that gets you the meeting. If you are raising from investors, you usually need both — and they must tell the same story with the same numbers. CMA builds them together so they do.

Yes. Through our partnership with National Business Capital, clients get access to a marketplace of 75+ lenders for term loans, lines of credit, and cash-flow financing. We prepare the materials and position your application; the partnership gives you the routes to capital. National Business Capital is a referral partner, not a lender, and CMA may receive a referral fee.

A good consultant finds what is holding your business back — strategy, operations, finances, or market position — and builds the plan to fix it. At CMA that includes the execution: we implement alongside your team, on site when it counts, rather than leaving you with a slide deck and an invoice.

Yes — that is the core of the practice. CMA specializes in solopreneurs, micro-businesses, and small to mid-market companies, typically under 50 employees. These businesses face fundamentally different challenges than enterprises, and the firm is built around that reality: fast engagement, fixed scopes, and advice calibrated to your resources.

A feasibility study answers "will this actually work?" before you commit capital — covering market demand, financial projections, regulatory risk, and operational viability, ending in a clear go / no-go recommendation. Commission one before launching a business, adding a location or product line, or making a major capital investment.

Market validation and TAM/SAM/SOM sizing, ideal customer profiling, positioning and pricing strategy, channel and sales motion design, and a 90-day launch playbook with owners and KPIs. Engagements are scoped to your stage — from first-product startups to regional expansion.

Most strategy work is fixed-scope and fixed-price, agreed before we start. Ongoing advisory and project management can run monthly depending on what serves you better. The intro call is where we scope it — no obligation, no surprise fees.

No. CMA is based in Dallas and works on site across Texas and the U.S., plus remote engagements nationwide. On-site presence is a core part of how we work when the engagement benefits from it — strategy lands better when your consultant has stood in your operation.

A fractional COO gives you senior operations leadership on a part-time basis — the strategic oversight of a full-time COO without the $200K+ salary. CMA embeds directly into your business: leading operations, building accountability, managing vendor relationships, and supporting your decisions as the owner.

A consultant hands you recommendations; a fractional COO owns outcomes. We run the operating cadence, hold the team accountable, and do the work — process redesign, dashboard builds, SOP creation — rather than describing it. It is an operating role, not an advisory one.

A fractional COO retainer is $6,000-$12,000 per month, sized to the work, with a 3-month minimum. Either way it is a fraction of a full-time executive hire, with no recruiting risk and no long-term payroll commitment. The exact retainer is fixed on your intro call.

Yes — on-site presence is central to how CMA does operations work. You cannot fix a workflow you have never watched. We travel to client locations, sit in on operations, and implement in real time, supplemented by remote support between visits.

If you are the bottleneck for every decision, spending your week firefighting instead of growing the business, you need operational structure — whatever the title. Most CMA operations clients are businesses under 50 employees. The earlier the structure goes in, the cheaper it is to build.

Concretely: documented processes your team actually follows, dashboards showing real-time business health, fewer owner hours consumed by day-to-day operations, and an organization that can scale without breaking. We define the target metrics with you in the first month and report against them.

Senior marketing leadership on a part-time basis. Someone owns the positioning, the demand plan, and the number marketing is accountable for, without a full-time executive salary. CMA takes the seat: we set the strategy, direct the people already doing the work, and report against pipeline.

No, and that is usually the point. Most owners do not have a doing problem, they have a direction problem: someone is posting, running ads, or sending emails with no strategy above it. We direct the people and vendors you already have rather than replacing them. If someone genuinely is not working out, we will tell you plainly.

An agency executes a channel and reports on that channel. A fractional CMO sits above all of it and owns the outcome: what you sell, to whom, at what price, through which channels, and whether the pipeline actually moved. We are accountable for the number, not for impressions.

The Fractional CMO engagement is $3,000 per month with 24 hours included. It has a 3-month minimum, then continues monthly with 30 days notice. Production and staffing are separately scoped and priced. The scope and terms are confirmed in writing before work begins.

The 24 hours include meetings, preparation, marketing planning, campaign direction, team or vendor coordination, reporting and agreed implementation work. The engagement scope sets priorities within that capacity. Additional work requires an agreed scope and fee before it begins.

No. Go-to-market is optional. Start directly with the Fractional CMO seat when your strategy is ready, or choose a separate go-to-market engagement when you need the launch foundation first. Production, staffing, advertising spend and software are scoped separately.

We audit what is running now, fix the positioning, and pick the one or two channels worth real investment. You get a demand plan with owners and dates, reporting joined to pipeline instead of vanity metrics, and the existing team or agency working to a strategy rather than to a calendar.

Go-to-market builds the launch plan for a specific product or market and ends. The fractional CMO seat is ongoing ownership of marketing as a function. Many owners start with go-to-market and keep us in the seat afterwards; either is a fine place to begin.

Three published steps. A $500 Workflow Map takes one workflow, watches it end to end and writes down what it costs in hours and errors — credited in full against the audit if you go further. A $2,500 Operations Audit maps the whole operation and returns a roadmap ranked by return. Builds are then scoped as fixed-price projects, from $2,500, against that roadmap. Scope and price are fixed in writing before any build starts.

The $500 Workflow Map. One workflow, watched as it actually runs rather than as it is described, written up with the hours, the handoffs and the failure points marked. If the honest answer is that a feature you already pay for solves the problem, that is what the map will say — and it costs you $500 to find out instead of the price of a build.

Automate when the tools are right and the handoffs are wrong; replace when there are too many tools for any amount of glue to hold together. Automation on your existing stack starts at the audit above. A replacement is the Operations Platform, from $5,000 to build, which you then own outright. The stack cost calculator gives you the arithmetic for your own numbers, and we will tell you which side you are on before anyone quotes a build.

A structured consulting engagement that takes your business from AI-curious to AI-operational: we audit your workflows, design and build automations, dashboards, and AI assistants for your specific operations, then train your team to use them safely. It is a transformation program — not a ChatGPT workshop or a one-off tool setup.

Yes — that is exactly who it is for. Everything we build is designed for non-technical teams, and training is part of every engagement. We also implement human-in-the-loop safeguards so your people stay in control of every consequential output.

More than most owners expect: reporting, client onboarding, invoicing, proposal generation, data entry between systems, appointment follow-ups, and internal status updates are common wins. The audit phase identifies which of your workflows have the best return — we automate by ROI, not by novelty.

No — and we design against it. The goal is to make your existing team more capable by removing repetitive manual work, not to make people redundant. Clients typically redeploy the recovered hours into revenue-producing and customer-facing work.

Governance is built in from day one: usage policies, data privacy guardrails, tool vetting, and human-review checkpoints for sensitive outputs. You get a written AI policy your business can stand behind — increasingly something customers, partners, and insurers ask about.

A custom-built site on your own domain, mobile-optimized with click-to-call, launched in days rather than months. Choose Build & Maintain (setup plus monthly support covering hosting, SSL, and content updates) or Build Only (one-time payment, you own everything outright).

Most CMA-built sites launch in 2–5 business days once we have your content and brand assets. Redesigns and larger builds run longer — we scope the timeline on your intro call and hold to it.

Two ways to work together: Build & Maintain ($697 initial build plus $199 per month for hosting, SSL, security and agreed content updates) or Build Only ($697 one-time - source files delivered, you own everything outright). Landing pages, redesigns, and conversion work are scoped fixed-price on the intro call.

Often, yes. A redesign engagement starts with an audit of what your current site does well and where it loses customers. If the bones are good we rework structure, copy, and conversion paths; if they are not, we tell you plainly and quote the rebuild.

We are an operating partner that builds. Your website gets the same treatment as a client engagement: positioning first, clear calls to action, measurement, and accountability for whether it actually produces inquiries — not just whether it looks nice. And because we run operations and AI practices, your site connects to how the rest of your business works.

Yes. Build & Maintain includes domain setup, DNS, hosting, SSL, and security, plus phone support when something needs fixing. Build Only includes a 30-day handoff window where we help you stand everything up under your own accounts.

Making more of your existing visitors become customers: clearer offers, stronger calls to action, faster pages, better landing pages for your ads, and measurement so decisions rest on data. It is usually the cheapest growth available to a small business — you already paid for the traffic.

Every build ships with the fundamentals done right: clean structure, fast load times, local SEO basics, and your Google Business Profile linked and optimized. Ongoing SEO campaigns can be scoped as part of monthly support.