Shawn Duncan — Business Coach in Austin, Texas
A business coach in Austin for owners done guessing.
This is you every month: revenue up, profit flat, and a to-do list that never tells you what actually moves the needle. Most coaches hand you a PDF and wish you luck. We diagnose the business first, then fix the real problem.
Based in Austin, Texas. Working with owner-led businesses doing $500K–$3M across Travis, Williamson, Hays and Bastrop counties.
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Verified Google Review“Shawn is great to work with! Very knowledgeable in the business space and has extreme attention to detail.”
Sagun Sedai
·CEO of the Austin Report
September 12, 2026
Business Coach in Austin, Texas
Most of my advisory work happens in and around Austin — shop visits, working sessions, and the kind of deep-dive conversations that don't work over a templated Zoom link.
I work with owner-led businesses based in Austin, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, San Marcos, Pflugerville and Leander. If you're looking for a business coach in Austin who can sit with your numbers, walk your operation, and tell you the truth about what's actually limiting growth, read more about Austin business coaching.
Shawn Duncan
I live and work in Austin, Texas, and Austin clients get the most in-person time — shop visits, ride-alongs and working sessions in the room. See how I work in my home market on the Austin business coaching page.
Fuck the noise. Find the signal.
Signal-to-noise ratio is the only thing that matters in a small business. The signal is the two or three levers that actually move profit, freedom, and growth. The noise is everything else — notifications, opinions, vanity metrics, new tactics, employee drama, and the shiny shit that feels productive but changes nothing.
Every successful owner I know can see through the noise and bet on the signal. They don't chase trends. They don't treat busy as proof of progress. They know that labor, pricing, follow-up, owner dependency, and a handful of customer-acquisition channels are what actually build the company — and everything else is just a distraction wearing a good headline.
That's what we do together. Strip out the noise, identify the handful of real signals in your business, and fix them in the right order.
Twenty years of real business. Not a certification.
Most business coaches spent 30 years in corporate America, got a certificate, and decided they know how to run a small company. They don't. They never had to choose between making payroll and buying groceries. They never bought a business at 2 AM because the numbers worked and the seller was desperate. They never sold one, lost money on one, or operated three at the same time while raising a family.
I have. I've bought, sold, and operated multiple small businesses. I've had the sleepless nights. I've paid employees before I paid myself. I've dealt with bad managers who somehow made every problem sound like it was my fault. I've fired customers, raised prices, and walked into a Monday not knowing if the week would end in the black.
That's the difference. When I tell you what to do, it's not from a workbook. It's from already making the mistake, taking the hit, and figuring out what actually works when the shit hits the fan.
Real advice from someone who's been there.
A 30-year HR manager can't teach you what to do when your best employee walks out with half your book of business. A former VP with a corner office can't teach you how to make payroll on Friday when your biggest customer is 60 days late. I can — because I've been there.
Established owners, $500K–$3M
Profit, ops, owner freedom
Typically six months
Real conversations. Real decisions.
No slide decks. No motivational speeches. We sit down with the numbers, the schedule, the payroll, and the customer list — and we decide what gets fixed first, who owns it, and how we'll know it worked.
- Straight talk about what the numbers actually say
- Decisions made in the room, not "circled back" later
- You leave knowing the next three moves
What's it worth to fix it?
Three levers, using your numbers and editable scenario assumptions. Labor comes off your actual labor cost, price changes can affect job volume, and new work only pays what's left after materials and labor.
Where you are today
Top line for the last 12 months.
Payroll as a share of revenue — about $360,000 a year.
Everything you buy to deliver the work.
What you actually keep — $96,000 a year. Everything else ($444,000) is fixed overhead.
What we'd go fix
Tighten scheduling and productivity. Labor goes 30% → 27% of revenue. Illustrative floor: 15%.
Illustrative assumption: lose 0.25% of jobs for each 1% price increase.
More jobs from follow-up, Google and reviews. Each new job costs you materials and labor.
Illustrative assumptions — edit these
The lowest labor percentage this scenario will model. This is not an industry benchmark.
Set this to zero if you expect no volume loss, or increase it for a more conservative scenario.
Profit today
$96,000
Profit after the fixes
$235,536
+$139,536 a year · $11,628 a month
Illustrative scenario, not a forecast or promise. Results depend on the assumptions you set. In the Growth Assessment we run the numbers from your actual P&L and market.
Not advice. A system.
Every client runs through the same framework. I don't wing it, and I don't dump a 47-page plan on you. I teach you the operating system that turns an established small business into a better-run, better-marketed, more profitable machine — and I show you exactly what to fix next.
Step 1 of 12
Business
What are you actually building? We get the real picture — revenue, structure, how the thing runs day to day — before we touch anything.
The Growth Assessment is where we find your biggest constraint.
Then we run the framework on it — in order — so you're not guessing what to do Monday morning.
You're not broke. You're leaking.
Underpriced jobs. A crew running at 60%. An agency billing you for reports nobody reads. Customers you should have fired two years ago. None of it feels like a crisis — it just quietly flushes six figures a year.
We find the leaks first. Then we fix them in order.
The shit that actually matters
Nobody hands you a "good luck" document. This is the working knowledge owners usually never figure out — the difference between being self-employed and actually running a company.
Is the agency you hired actually screwing you?
Most owners can't read the reports they're paying for. I'll show you the three numbers that tell you whether they're earning the check or cashing it.
Your employees trained you, not the other way around
If standards slip the second you're not looking, you've built a culture that teaches the owner to accept less. Here's how you flip it back.
When to raise prices — and how without losing the book
You're not 'being fair.' You're undercharging because nobody ever showed you the math. There's a right moment and a right way. I'll show you both.
Some customers need to be fired
The chronic complainer paying late at your lowest rate is costing you your best jobs. Knowing who to cut — and how — is a skill. Most owners never learn it.
Self-employed vs. actually running a company
If the business stops when you stop, you don't own a company — you own a job with extra paperwork. Closing that gap is the entire point of the framework.
The stuff that never shows up in a course
No PDF, no webinar, no '10x mindset.' This is the operating knowledge that separates the guy with a truck from the guy with a company. Taught straight.
Let's diagnose the business first.
You don't need another package to choose from. You need to know what's actually holding your business back.
Assess
We look at the business as a whole — money, sales, marketing, operations, people, and where you sit inside all of it.
Identify
We determine what's actually limiting growth right now, not the forty things you could theoretically improve.
Prescribe
I recommend the strategy and the level of advisory support that fits the stage and complexity of your company.
Execute
We work the plan together, in order, and measure progress against the numbers that move the business.
Recommended, not chosen.
After reviewing your business, we'll recommend the level of support that makes the most sense for where you are and where you're trying to go. Advisory engagements typically run six months, with monthly or paid-in-full payment options.
Growth Advisory
For owner-led businesses that already have the fundamentals in place and need coaching to sharpen the operation — margins, pricing, people, and getting the business to run without you in every room.
- Profitability and pricing
- Operations and business systems
- Hiring and team management
- Sales systems and KPIs
- Owner accountability and leadership
- Reducing owner dependency
Scale Advisory
For owner-led businesses that are tangled across multiple areas — marketing, ops, sales, and people — and need deeper coaching across every avenue to clean up the mess and build a company that performs.
- Multi-discipline turnaround
- Marketing and sales alignment
- Operations and capacity rebuild
- Leadership and management teams
- Financial strategy and cash flow
- Executive-level accountability
Both are owner-led. The difference is where you are right now: a solid foundation that needs sharpening, or a business tangled across marketing, ops, sales and people that needs heavier lifting. We figure that out in the Growth Assessment.
Need more than advice?
You hire Shawn to diagnose the business and advise you on what to fix first. If that diagnosis calls for customer-acquisition work, our separate marketing division can implement that part of the strategy.
- SEO
- Local SEO
- Google Ads
- Meta Ads
- Website design & optimization
- Landing pages
- Conversion optimization
- Content strategy
- Lead generation
- Marketing strategy
Marketing is an optional implementation path, not the main product. It is only recommended when the diagnosis supports it, and it is scoped and quoted separately from Shawn Duncan Business Advisory.
When the fix is infrastructure.
You hire Shawn to diagnose and advise first. When that work reveals a bottleneck no habit can fix — like a sales process running on texts, spreadsheets and sticky notes — the separate Systems & Automation division can implement the infrastructure.
- Custom CRM
- Employee & task management
- Lead tracking
- Sales dashboards
- Quoting systems
- Scheduling tools
- Customer portals
- Automated workflows
Systems work is optional implementation, only recommended when the diagnosis calls for it. Projects start at $5,000 and are scoped separately through a paid Systems Discovery & Blueprint.
Last stop
Stop guessing. Get the system.
You've got the business. You've got the customers. What you don't have is the operating system that runs it without you holding it together. That's the whole job — and every client goes through the same framework to get there.
Shawn Duncan — Profitability / Ops / Owner Freedom