Henry Street Advisors
Hands-on, not advisory. Contributor, not intermediary.
On a Tuesday in March, a CFO sat down at the end of a long quarterly close and asked whether her four-person AR team should exist in 18 months. The honest answer was probably not in the same shape. The harder answer was what to do about it starting Wednesday. That conversation now happens in every operating function in the company.
AI did not change the work entirely; it changed the cost stack underneath the work. Some workflows now cost about 30% of what they did before. Some are obsolete and have not retired yet. Some still need humans at the center, and the lines between the three are not yet drawn. The result lands on the P&L either as margin, if the company harvests the compressed costs, or as growth, if the company reinvests the freed capacity into the business.
Henry Street Advisors does both halves of the response. The operating diagnostic that names which workflows to redesign, retire, or hold. And the AI tools that make the redesigned workflows actually run. The firm is built around Ben McEachen, an operating leader with 28 years of in-the-trenches experience and direct hands on the AI tooling layer. Ben designs the redesign and ships it.
The diagnostic and redesign work the firm gets hired to do inside a mid-market company. Sometimes pure diagnostic. Sometimes direct rebuild. Sometimes phased across several quarters. The work changes how the company runs, and the firm stays connected long enough to confirm the change held.
Discrete builds (agents, pipelines, internal tools) designed and shipped to solve a specific operating bottleneck the client has named. Built on the same stack Henry Street ships its own work on. Sometimes standalone. Sometimes bolted onto an operating engagement.
Occasional. Different governance, different IP structure, different cadence. Surfaces when a specific opportunity warrants it. Not a default offering.
Framework
Every redesign needs a workflow that does not move. The Operational Anchor is the single workflow you protect while you redesign the others around it. Choose it wrong and the redesign destabilizes the business. Choose it right and the redesign has somewhere to stand.
Henry Street names the Anchor at the start of every engagement. Sometimes it is the cash collection cycle. Sometimes it is the fulfillment promise. Sometimes it is a single client relationship that funds the next quarter. The Anchor is not the most important workflow; it is the one you cannot afford to redesign at the same time as everything else.
28 years of operating experience across tech, SaaS, healthcare, e-commerce, media, advertising, and marketing. Two years of continuous operating-and-build work in flight.
Active engagements: a Phoenix-metro freight company redesigning around a new Carrier TMS, a construction-management agent built for $20M+ construction practices from the developer or owner perspective, a wealth-management hand-off engagement, an industrial supply-chain leakage discovery.
Applied AI builds shipped in the same window: a prospect-and-client communication agent, a legal-document anonymizer, a pay-application review system, a legal knowledge base, an evidence curation workspace.
Henry Street writes from inside the work. Field notes from engagements, frameworks that come out of the diagnostic, what AI is actually changing inside operating models. Author byline: Ben McEachen, Henry Street Advisors.
Read all notes →About the firm
Henry Street Advisors is an operations firm built around hands-on operating redesign and applied AI builds. Founder-led by Ben McEachen. The Henry Street name comes from Saline, Michigan, where Ben's childhood home sat on Henry Street. The operating thinking started young: a paper route with handwritten customer cards, and a candy-selling operation in elementary school that resulted in a talk with Principal Vandercook.
Read more about the firm →Engagements usually start with a 30-minute scoping conversation. It is free, it is direct, and the firm only takes the engagement if the work fits. If the operating situation has competing stakeholders, contradictory objectives, and a shape that does not fit a slide deck, that is exactly where Henry Street gets hired.
Start the conversation →