Why Most Advisors Won't Tell You This
Most advisors don’t publish what they say no to. The incentive structure of advisory work pushes in the opposite direction—toward appearing broadly available, generically valuable, and applicable to any company that might need what you offer. Saying no publicly feels like leaving money on the table, or worse, like admitting you’re not good enough to help with the companies you’re declining.
The conventional wisdom in professional services is that you cast a wide net and filter privately, preserving the appearance of universal relevance while quietly declining the opportunities that don’t fit.
I’ve come to believe this is exactly backwards, and that publishing a clear filter for what I won’t advise is more valuable to everyone involved—including the companies I decline—than maintaining the comfortable ambiguity most advisors prefer.
The companies that are a genuine fit for what I do deserve to know it clearly, without having to decode positioning language or sit through a conversation that ends in a polite no. The companies that aren’t a fit deserve the same clarity, so they can spend their time finding someone better suited to their situation rather than pursuing a relationship that won’t serve them well.
And I deserve to be honest about the fact that my time is finite, my equity is limited, and the opportunity cost of saying yes to the wrong company is measured not just in hours but in the results I can’t deliver for the right ones.
So this is my public filter. Not as a marketing exercise, but as an honest articulation of what I’ve learned about where I can create real value and where I almost certainly can’t.
The Companies I Won't Advise: Starting With the Hardest One
The hardest category to decline isn’t the obvious misfit—the pre-revenue startup asking for mentorship, or the e-commerce company that needs a different skill set entirely. The hardest category is the company that looks right on the surface but has a foundational characteristic that makes meaningful impact nearly impossible regardless of how good the advice is.
The company I find most difficult to decline—and most important to decline—is the one where the founder or CEO isn’t genuinely ready to change. Not unwilling in an obvious or hostile way, but unwilling in the subtle way that manifests as endless intellectual engagement with ideas that never translates into the hard operational decisions those ideas require.
I’ve sat across from enough founders who can discuss turnaround frameworks with sophistication and genuine curiosity while simultaneously finding reasons—always reasonable, always contextually justified—why each specific recommendation doesn’t quite apply to their situation, why this quarter isn’t the right time, why the team needs a bit more preparation before that change can happen.
This pattern is the single most reliable predictor of a failed advisory relationship I’ve encountered in twenty years of operating and advising companies. It’s not that these founders are dishonest or uncommitted—most of them genuinely believe they’re ready for hard feedback and difficult change.
It’s that the distance between intellectual agreement and operational execution is precisely where turnarounds succeed or fail, and some leaders can’t close that distance regardless of how well they understand what needs to happen.
Advising a company in this situation doesn’t help the company—it gives leadership a way to feel like they’re addressing problems they’re actually avoiding. I’d rather have that conversation honestly in the first thirty minutes than discover it six months into an engagement.
The Stage Boundaries: Why $3M and $50M Are Hard Lines
I’ve tried to be flexible about revenue stage, and I’ve learned through expensive mistakes that flexibility here is actually a disservice to the companies I’m trying to help.
Below $3 million in ARR, the problems a company faces are fundamentally different from the ones I’m built to solve. The challenges of finding product-market fit, building an initial customer base, and surviving long enough to develop a repeatable go-to-market motion require a different kind of operator than the one who excels at taking a proven product and building the organizational discipline to scale it profitably.
When I’ve tried to help pre-PMF companies, I’ve consistently found that my instinct toward structure, accountability, and operational rigor is actively unhelpful at a stage that still requires the scrappiness and flexibility of early exploration. I create more anxiety than value, and the founders end up spending energy managing my frameworks rather than finding their customers.
Above $50 million in ARR, the problem inverts. Companies at this stage have typically built enough organizational structure that the primary constraint on growth isn’t operational discipline—it’s strategic positioning, market expansion, M&A execution, or capital structure optimization. These are domains where my expertise is relevant but not distinctive.
There are advisors who specialize in late-stage growth and enterprise scaling who will serve these companies better than I will, and pretending otherwise because the opportunity looks attractive would be a disservice to the company and a waste of both our time.
The $5 million to $50 million ARR range is where I’ve consistently been able to create the most disproportionate impact—where the product is proven, the market opportunity is clear, and the primary constraint is whether the organization has the operational architecture to capture that opportunity before burning through its runway or losing ground to better-run competitors.
The Geography and Language Filter: Why This Is Non-Negotiable
I work in Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and increasingly the US market. I operate in English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
And I’ve learned that operating effectively in Latin American markets requires more than language fluency—it requires a specific kind of cultural intelligence about how business relationships form, how decisions get made in family-owned enterprises and founder-led companies, how trust is built in contexts where institutional credibility matters less than personal reputation, and how regulatory environments shape competitive dynamics in ways that operators from other markets consistently underestimate.
When companies outside these geographies approach me, my honest answer is that I could probably be useful to them, but not in the distinctive way that justifies the equity I’d need to make the engagement worthwhile for either party.
A US-only SaaS company doesn’t need a LATAM operator—they need someone who has scaled their specific type of business in their specific market context. Saying yes to these companies because the opportunity looks attractive would be optimizing for my short-term deal flow at the expense of their actual outcomes, which is precisely the kind of advisor behavior I find most objectionable.
The Compensation Structure: Why Cash-Only Is a Genuine Dealbreaker
I don’t have a strong philosophical objection to cash compensation—I understand why companies prefer it and why some advisors prefer it. My objection is practical and grounded in what I’ve observed about advisory relationships over many years: when an advisor isn’t exposed to the outcome, the quality of advice degrades in ways that are subtle but consequential.
The cash-compensated advisor has a structural incentive to be helpful in the short term and advisory in the long term—to provide guidance that feels valuable in the moment, generates positive reactions in meetings, and maintains the relationship regardless of whether it’s actually moving the needle on the metrics that determine whether the company succeeds.
I’m not suggesting this is conscious or dishonest—it’s a natural consequence of misaligned incentives that I’ve observed in myself when I’ve taken cash-based engagements and in the advisors I’ve watched from the other side of the table.
Equity-based compensation aligns my interests with the company’s outcomes in a way that changes the quality and character of the advice I give. When I have equity, I’m not trying to be helpful—I’m trying to be right. Those are different things, and the difference shows up in whether I tell founders what they want to hear or what they need to hear when those two things conflict.
The Wrong Vertical: Knowing the Edges of Your Expertise
I am not a generalist operator. I’ve built deep expertise in fintech, healthcare SaaS, and enterprise B2B software across Latin America, and that depth is both my greatest advantage and a genuine boundary on where I can create value.
Consumer software, e-commerce, marketplaces, hardware companies, and most B2C businesses present dynamics that are different enough from my core expertise that my pattern recognition—the thing that makes me genuinely useful in turnaround situations—doesn’t apply reliably.
I’ve learned this the hard way, taking engagements in adjacent verticals because the company seemed interesting or the founder was compelling, and discovering that the intuitions I’d developed across twenty years of operating in my core domains led me to recommendations that were directionally wrong for the specific dynamics of their market.
The discipline required to decline opportunities in adjacent verticals where I might be somewhat helpful—but not distinctively helpful—is the same discipline I advocate for in product roadmaps and organizational decisions: saying no to good opportunities to preserve the capacity to do great work on the right ones.
What I'm Actually Looking For
Publishing this filter isn’t an exercise in exclusivity for its own sake. It’s an honest acknowledgment that advisory relationships where the fit is wrong don’t just underperform—they actively cost both parties something real.
They cost the company the time and equity spent on an advisor whose expertise doesn’t match their problem. They cost the advisor the time and reputation spent on engagements where the impact doesn’t justify the investment. And they cost both parties the opportunity cost of not finding relationships where the fit is genuine and the potential for outsized impact exists.
What I’m looking for is simple enough to state plainly: a B2B SaaS company in Latin America, between $5 million and $50 million in ARR, facing a genuine operational turnaround challenge in fintech or healthcare or adjacent regulated industries, led by founders or boards who have demonstrated—not just claimed—willingness to make hard decisions at the pace a turnaround requires.
A company where the problem is real, the stakes are meaningful, the market opportunity is clear, and the compensation structure aligns my outcomes with theirs through equity that makes winning together worth more than the comfort of playing it safe.
These companies exist. They’re harder to find than the companies that don’t fit, which is part of why publishing this filter matters. The right company reading this should recognize themselves immediately—not in the companies I’m declining, but in the clear space between those exclusions where a genuine fit lives.
The Honest Conclusion: Saying No Is How You Say Yes Well
I’ve declined more opportunities than I’ve accepted, and I’ve come to believe that this ratio is a feature rather than a limitation. Every no I’ve given to a company that didn’t fit has preserved my capacity to give the next right company something that matters: full engagement, genuine accountability, and the specific expertise that makes the difference between advice that sounds good and advice that changes outcomes.
If you’re reading this and you recognize your company in the filter I’ve described—not in the exclusions but in what remains—then we should talk.
And if you’re reading this and you recognize your company in the companies I’ve declined, I’d genuinely encourage you to treat that recognition as useful information rather than a rejection.
Knowing quickly that a relationship won’t serve you well is one of the most valuable things an honest advisor can give you. It’s the thing most advisors are too cautious, too polite, or too commercially motivated to say out loud.
This is me saying it out loud 🙂