Introducing ProQ: The Smart Way to Scale Your Business
The Challenges of Business Ownership
Business ownership is one of the most powerful vehicles for dream enablement, but if managed poorly, the shackles that imprison owners can be heavy and hard to bear. Feelings of failure, overwhelming stress, worry, and financial strain can take over. When every single person in the organization depends on you, who do you depend on?
You’re expected to have the answer, to know what to do, to make the best decision, but you’re lost in the weeds of day-to-day operations. Whether it’s sales, service delivery, client relationships, vendors, or products, the list is endless.
You are doing your best day after day to move the business forward, but you lack the firm certainty that this is the best next move to make, much less the foresight to see what steps you should be taking today to ensure you’re in the right position six months from now.
It feels like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. You’re responsible for the livelihood of so many, not to mention your own.
The whole thing can feel overwhelming, suffocating, and crushing.
But it doesn’t have to be that way!
Your business doesn’t need to be one of the heartbreaking statistics—failing within five years or staying stuck at one million, two million, or even substantially less indefinitely.
What is ProQ?
ProQ is twofold. First, it’s a scoring modality that gives you a black-and-white number—literally a score—that tells you exactly how capable your business is of scaling as it exists today. Second, it’s an operational methodology, what we call a flexible framework, that allows you to correct, improve, and accelerate the various components of your business necessary for growth.
Using a matrix of six core components broken down into half a dozen to a dozen sub-sections, the ProQ Score assigns a value to each critical component, sums them up, and generates your custom score.
Just as you can get an IQ score to measure intelligence or an EQ score to assess emotional intelligence, you can now get a ProQ score to determine how intelligently you’ve designed your business.
The Philosophy Behind ProQ
Spelled out in long form, ProQ stands for Progressive Intelligence.
Breaking the name down was deeply intentional. First, “progressive”—because progress takes time. Incremental gains over time move the needle far more effectively and with a more enduring impact than sporadic bursts of effort with unpredictable outcomes. Next, “intelligence”—because the adage “what got you here won’t get you there” is profoundly true. Intellectual and emotional growth are necessary. You have to know more to do more—operationally, managerially, strategically, and practically.
In business, your capacity to scale requires that you, as the owner, expand your personal capacity to lead, envision, strategize, and deploy the necessary tactics to break into the next tier of success. It requires that each core function within your business—what we call the Big Four: Sales & Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Culture & Training—be strong and stable enough to support your organization’s growth predictably, repeatably, and sustainably.
Finally, your organizational structure needs to be designed for replication. Getting one person in a role who executes well is important, but as you grow, you must be able to duplicate and replicate that success consistently. Each role must have a defined fit, form, and function designed to enhance the business and move it toward key objectives, supported by policies and procedures to ensure consistent and excellent outcomes.
Why ProQ?
Tailored for Small Businesses
My business partner and co-founder, Thomas MacDonald, and I are immensely practical people.
Why would you want a score that tells you how scalable your business is—how quickly it can grow and how prepared you are for explosive growth—without the resources, insights, or structure to fix the component parts holding you back?
A Practical, Real-World Solution
ProQ is also a framework designed to meet each business exactly where it is, providing a plan, milestones, micro-steps, and navigational guidance to take you from where you are today to a future bigger than your dreams.
The ProQ System didn’t just appear overnight. It’s the result of decades of study, real-time observation, and diligent refinement of what works and what doesn’t in real businesses. We have sat with, observed, interviewed, coached, consulted, trained, and mentored some of the best small businesses on the planet. We have carefully crafted a total business solution that builds upon existing strengths and enhances or creates what is weak, limited, or absent so small businesses can truly grow.
ProQ: Your Path to Sustainable Growth
So small business owners can not only see where they’re going but also have confidence in the steps they need to take to get there.
Now, don’t tune out because of the phrase “small business.” If your business has exceeded the enviable seven-figure mark in annual (or even monthly) sales, you don’t have something tiny—but you’re not a Fortune 500 company either.
We’ve watched small business owners struggle to apply over-engineered operating systems—designed for large enterprises but ill-suited for small businesses—instead of actually growing their businesses.
And that’s not right.
Small businesses form the backbone of the global economy, and they deserve better.
You deserve better.
You deserve a solution tailored to your specific, day-to-day operational realities.
Everybody wants a silver bullet. Everybody wants to believe that growing a business can be simple, easy, and effortless.
Everyone is searching for a single solution to a complex, multifaceted problem.
Years ago, I would have told you that such a solution doesn’t exist. That it’s a pipe dream. That small businesses have too many moving parts for a one-size-fits-all fix.
Building a business isn’t easy. The odds of massive success are low.
But for the bold, bright, ambitious individuals who embark on the adventure of a lifetime through business ownership, there is now a solution.
A solution designed to meet small business owners where they are and help them grow into all they know they could become—and even more!
And it’s called ProQ.
A score, a framework, a carefully curated and crafted solution that addresses the hard, complex, multifaceted components of your business.
Not just as parts, but as a whole—and within each part.
The question isn’t if your business can grow—the question is how, and ProQ has the answer.