The Fultz Group
Where Wall Streetmeets Main Street.
Corporate-grade systems, applied at family-business scale.
We are not coaches. We are not consultants. We are operators who turned a mom-and-pop into a small corporate powerhouse, and now we help other family-business owners do the same without losing the soul of the company.
The gap nobody fills
The consultants don’t fit your desk. The coaches don’t survive your Tuesday.
Most family-business owners get pulled in one of two directions when they want to grow.
The corporate consultants
Show up with frameworks built for $500 million companies and slide decks that don’t fit on the desk of an owner who’s also doing the dispatch.
The coaches
Show up with mindset work and three-step cures that don’t survive a Tuesday on the shop floor.
What’s missing is the combination.
Real account management, real cross-functional alignment, real dashboards, real strategic partnerships, but built for a 30-employee fleet repair operation in Tennessee, not a Fortune 100 with an army of analysts.
We fill that gap because we’ve actually had to do both. Wall Street rigor in companies whose teams call us by our first names.
The framework
The Ownerless Business Ladder.
You haven’t finished building your business until it can succeed without you. The Ladder shows where yours stands today, in five levels from owner-dependent to ownerless growth.
You climb it with the R.E.S.T. Method: Record the Rules, Empower the Team, Systematize the Flow, Test the Trust.
- Rung 5Ownerless GrowthThe goal
- Rung 4Systemized Execution
- Rung 3Documented Clarity
- Rung 2Delegated Chaos
- Rung 1Owner-DependentStart
Two halves of one business
Most owners get half of what they need. You get both.
Steve · Vision & Direction
The WHY and the porch conversation.
Forty years of operating. A PhD in counseling psychology. Twenty-five years in pastoral ministry. The one who decides where the company is going, takes the calls that need an owner on the line, and carries the public-facing role.
- Co-author, The Owner Shift and Family Business Facelift
- Grew the family business from $6 million to more than $10 million
- AI for small business: where automation saves an owner time, and where it doesn’t
Melissa · Systems & Execution
The HOW and the dashboard.
Eighteen years at Omnicell and McKesson building cross-functional alignment programs, where her most recent role contributed to more than $1.5 billion in revenue. The one who builds the rails and stands up the dashboards for sales, marketing, service, and finance.
- International best-selling author of The Art of Alignment
- A 2019 Gartner white paper built around the key account program she developed
- “Consultant of the Year” in a Fortune 10 company
Who this is for
You know your craft cold. What you don’t know is how to run the business without being the engine.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when a company gets built to run on one person’s brain. The fix is the slow, specific work of taking your brain out of the business and putting it into a system, while the business is still profitable and you still have energy. That’s the shift.
The body of work
One method. Several front doors.
Whatever stage you’re in, there’s a way to start. Read first. Join the conversation. Do the work at your own pace, or do it with us.
The book · 2026
The Owner Shift
From bottleneck to breakthrough. The four moves we used to get our own businesses out of our heads.
Get it on Amazon →
The book · 2025
Family Business Facelift
How AI and automation are reshaping traditional business, and how a family company puts them to work.
Get it on Amazon →Obsolete By Design
The self-paced courseDigital course
Obsolete By Design
The self-paced course. You haven’t finished building your business until it can succeed without you.
See the course →The Owner Shift newsletter
Owner-to-owner writing for people who want to own the business instead of being owned by it.
Free 02AI for Family Business
For the owner who feels behind on AI. Find the one thing eating your week, and the exact next move to fix it.
Get better at it 03One-on-one engagements
For owners who want vision and operation in the room with them. It always starts with a conversation.
Do it togetherOn the mic
Recent conversations.
Helping Older Business Owners Embrace Technology
Uncovering Hidden Millions: Tech and AI for Family Business Growth
Lesson from This Couple who Transformed Hundreds of Businesses
Building Sustainable Family Businesses with Steve and Melissa Fultz
Steve and Melissa Fultz
$1.5B in Deals: The Power Couple’s Leadership Secrets
The proof
We run the businesses we teach.
We don’t make recommendations from outside. The playbook we teach is the one we ran on ourselves, in companies whose teams call us by our first names.
Start here
Tell us where the business is stuck.
A first conversation is a diagnosis, not a pitch. Sometimes the answer is that we’re not a fit, and we’ll point you to a better resource. Either way you leave knowing more than when you started.
We don’t take clients we can’t help.