I've Operated at the Scale You're Trying to Reach

Founder & CEO

David Smith

Why I Coach the Way I Coach

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I spent 17 years in banking, 15 at BNY, one of the world's largest financial institutions, and 2 at Ameriprise, and I started where the real operating discipline lives: in operations. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, I was brought in as an internal consultant to fix parts of the bank facing revenue, profitability, or management challenges. That's where I learned to diagnose a business before prescribing a fix, find the actual constraint, not the symptom everyone's already arguing about.

In 2013, I spent most of the year in India implementing OCR and machine learning through robotic process automation, years before most companies had even heard those terms together. From there I moved through roles as Head of Product, VP of Program Management and Business Transformation, and eventually Chief of Staff to the COO, supporting a $2 billion expense budget and 26,000 employees worldwide.

My final banking role was Head of Private Credit, running syndicated loans. In 24 months, we grew that business from $187 million to $305 million in top-line revenue, by fixing the operating system underneath it, not by adding headcount or hoping harder.

After banking, I led a healthcare staffing company through a different kind of test. The business had scaled fast, then the market shifted hard. Pay rates compressed, hospitals tightened hiring, and the people side of the business became harder to hold onto. It needed a professional operator, not another strategy session.

I came in and built what was missing: an operating system, a real meeting cadence, and data-driven decision-making the leadership team could actually run on. I overhauled marketing and the sales organization, renegotiated major technology and lease agreements, and built a new system to make sure the company got paid in full and on time by the facilities it served. I also mentored the leadership team directly, because the exit only worked if the business could run without me in the room. In 2024, that work led to a successful exit.

Two very different businesses. The same underlying truth both times: growth doesn't stall because people aren't working hard enough. It stalls because something specific, a process, a system, a dependency on one person, has hit its ceiling. Find that constraint, fix it, and the business moves again. That discipline, refined across two banks and a healthcare staffing turnaround, is the foundation of the P7 Framework.

I coach from the operator's chair, not the sidelines. Every constraint I help you find is one I've had to find and fix myself, in banking, in a market-pressured turnaround, with real money and real people on the line both times.

Head of Operations

Chris Cranias

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Chris runs the operating side of The SMB Solution and our family of businesses, the systems, the vendors, and the day-to-day machinery that lets the coaching work stay hands-on.

Chris is a seasoned entrepreneur across real estate, residential, commercial, and short-term rentals, with over a decade building and operating a rental portfolio. It's where he learned to run multiple properties and P&Ls at once, without letting any of them slip.

Alongside that, he's built and led a digital marketing practice covering SEO, paid acquisition, and marketing automation, with a focus on start-ups, brand development, and the tech integrations that let a small operation run like a much bigger one.

He also brings hands-on experience in family-owned restaurant operations, where the discipline of running a business with tight margins and no room for excuses first got baked in.

At The SMB Solution, Chris handles the pieces clients never see: platform setup, vendor management, integrations, workflow, and the operational infrastructure the coaching sits on. If it needs to work reliably in the background, it goes through Chris.

Client Success

Tanya Pretorius

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Tanya is the person you'll actually reach when you contact The SMB Solution, the calm, organized voice that keeps every client engagement on track.

She brings years of hands-on experience in client services and operations, and she has spent her career making sure nothing falls through the cracks, scheduling, billing, follow-ups, and the hundred small details that separate a business that feels professional from one that feels chaotic.

If you have a question, need to reschedule, want a copy of an invoice, or aren't sure who to ask, you ask Tanya. She handles scheduling for calls and coaching sessions, billing and invoicing, and every general question that comes in across The SMB Solution and our family of businesses. She keeps the calendar accurate, the paperwork clean, and the communication warm.

Clients tend to notice quickly that Tanya remembers them, their business, what they're working on, what they asked about last time. That kind of attention is easy to underestimate until you've worked with someone who doesn't have it.