You started this company
to do something great.
Then daily operations took over. Now the thing you’re best at, the reason you started the business, is the thing you never have time for. MakeWaves defines how your business runs, eliminates what slows it down, and gives you back the forward momentum that creates real, lasting growth. When your operations are working, your business starts leaving a wake.
Problem You’re Facing
Before Your Operations Are Ready
Automation Is Introduced
Every Engagement. No Exceptions.
Most founders come to us nodding at all four of these.
If any of these feel accurate, you’re in the right place.
“My best people are still waiting on me for basic decisions.”
Because the process lives in your head, not on paper. There’s no written standard, so everything routes through you by default.
“We pay monthly for tools that didn’t fix the problem. Now they own our data.”
Software doesn’t fix a broken process. It speeds it up. And when you stop paying, you lose access to everything you built inside it. The tool owns your data. You just rent it.
“Training someone new means starting from scratch every time.”
If there’s nothing written down, there’s nothing to train against. Every new hire learns from whoever has time to show them, and that person is usually you.
“I know I’m the bottleneck. I just can’t stop long enough to fix it.”
You’re too deep in the daily work to step back and see the system. That’s exactly what an outside perspective is for.
You can’t optimize what you haven’t defined.
Most small businesses don’t have a strategy problem. They have a definition problem. When no one can clearly describe how work moves through the business, inefficiency multiplies and the founder fills every gap personally. We fix the foundation first, so your business can move forward without you holding it together.
Clarify the Process
Map out your manual workflows, surface tribal knowledge, and establish a clear picture of how work actually moves through your business.
Structure the Data
Organize your data so it’s accurate, consistent, and yours. That means structuring it in a way you control, not locked inside a subscription platform, and engineering it so the reporting, analysis, and AI tools you build on top of it actually belong to your business.
Document the Workflow
Build indexed SOPs that define exactly how each role performs each task. A documented process is more than a reference guide. It’s a training framework and a performance standard. When the expectation is written down, it can be taught, measured, and owned by someone other than the founder.
Train and Align
Train your team against the documented standard and establish clear performance accountability. This is the step that transfers ownership. The roles the founder always felt only they could handle finally belong to the people hired to do them.
Improve Visibility
Build automated operational scorecards and reporting dashboards so your leadership team has real-time insight into what's working and what isn't.
Integrate Automation & AI
Only after steps 1–5 are stable do we apply automation or AI, and only where it creates measurable business value. When your data is clean, structured, and owned by you, the ceiling is a company-specific AI built on your operations, not a generic platform with a monthly fee and a cancellation clause.
Where most clients start.
Every engagement begins with a clear picture of where you are. From there, we build what your business actually needs, with no assumptions and no one-size-fits-all solutions.
Operational Assessment
A fixed-fee diagnostic engagement. We map your workflows, surface what’s slowing you down, and deliver a prioritized operational roadmap, so you know exactly what to fix and in what order.
Learn moreOperational & AI Readiness Assessment
Find out if your business is actually ready for AI before spending on it. We evaluate data quality, documentation depth, and workflow consistency, and show you what needs to be in place first.
Learn moreFractional Operations & AI Advisory Retainer
Ongoing monthly advisory for businesses that want a committed operational partner. Metric tracking, accountability meetings, 30-day action plans, and direct access to guidance as your business evolves.
Learn more
Operations experience.
Practical results.
Marc Wetherington is the Founder and Principal Consultant at MakeWaves, with over 20 years of hands-on experience leading operations, redesigning workflows, and building the process infrastructure that lets small businesses grow without breaking down.
He has led teams through chaotic growth, rebuilt operational systems from the ground up, and delivered measurable improvements in efficiency, cost control, and team performance across product-based and service-based businesses alike.
A documented process does more than describe how something is done. It becomes a training tool and a performance standard. When a role is defined on paper, a team member can learn it, own it, and be held accountable to it. That’s what lets the founder finally step back from the functions they’ve always felt only they could handle.
Marc founded MakeWaves on a core conviction: you can’t optimize what you haven’t defined, and a business can’t scale if the founder is the only one who knows how it runs.
Leadership
Methodology
Offerings
Businesses
From the businesses we’ve worked with.
We were growing fast but everything lived in our heads. The SOP library Marc built changed how we onboard people and manage the team. We actually run smoother now than we did at half our size.Business Owner Product-Based Distribution, Southwest US
We thought we needed new software. What we actually needed was to understand our own processes first. Marc was direct about that from the first call. It saved us from making a very expensive mistake.Founder Service-Based Business, Pacific Northwest
I never had real visibility into what was happening in the business. Now I have a scorecard that tells me what I need to know every week. I make faster decisions and I am not chasing data anymore.Principal Growing SMB, 20 Employees