Praetor applies a systems engineering discipline to owner-operated businesses — surfacing operational risks before they become visible failures.
Traditional consultants optimize functions in isolation. Finance. Operations. Sales. Each gets assessed on its own terms — and the gaps between them go unexamined.
Praetor looks at the handoffs. The assumptions baked into processes that no one has tested. The structural misalignments that produce friction, rework, and hidden cost at every boundary.
This is the systems engineering discipline applied to business operations — a methodology developed in environments where interface failures carry catastrophic consequences.
A structured assessment of your operational system — delivered as a clear, actionable picture of where your business is exposed. Flat-fee engagement. Two to six weeks, depending on scope.
Ongoing engagement for owners who need a trusted operational partner without the overhead of a full-time hire. Targeted, structured, and designed to make itself unnecessary.
Scoped projects for specific operational challenges — process breakdowns, pre-transaction readiness, organizational redesign. Defined scope, defined outcome.
The problems that damage businesses most rarely begin as obvious failures. They emerge quietly through misalignment, workarounds, and structural friction that compounds over time.
Praetor evaluates the operational signals underneath that friction:
Not a list of recommendations. A clear picture of where the constraint lives, why it exists, and what resolving it is actually worth.
Mark McCants founded Praetor Firm to bring a discipline that is standard practice in defense and complex systems — systems engineering — to owner-operated businesses that have never had access to it.
The discipline was developed in environments where misalignment between components carries mission-critical consequences. That rigor translates directly to organizations where operational drag, misaligned incentives, and untested assumptions compound quietly until they become operational constraints.
Praetor works with owner-operators and leadership teams who want clarity on where their business is structurally exposed — and a partner invested in their ability to operate without us.
No pitch. A direct conversation about what you're dealing with and whether a systems lens is the right tool for it.