Uphoff Advisory, LLC is a strategic advisory practice working with founders, CEOs, leadership teams, and investors in B2B media, marketing services, and technology. The businesses that help other businesses grow.
The practice is built on something most advisory firms cannot offer: direct operating experience at the CEO level, across multiple businesses, through every condition markets produce. Bull markets, financial crises, platform disruptions, and now the most consequential technology shift in a generation.
Uphoff Advisory works with a focused number of clients on an ongoing basis, across two practice areas: Strategic Advisory and Value Creation Planning.
What we do
Strategic Advisory
The most valuable thing an experienced operator can offer isn’t a framework. It’s judgment, earned through decisions made when the stakes were real and the clock was running.
Uphoff Advisory works with founders, CEOs, leadership teams, and investors as a consistent thinking partner: someone who understands the structural economics of your market, has navigated comparable decisions at scale, and can move at the speed the business requires.
Strategic Advisory engagements typically focus on one or more of the following:
– Business Transformation
– Go-to-Market Strategy
– Organizational Design
– Operational Scale
– Agentic AI: applied strategy for B2B media and marketing operations
Current and recent clients include companies in B2B media, business intelligence, marketing technology, procurement intelligence, demand generation, and fintech.
Value Creation and Exit Planning
Building a good business and building a valuable business are related. But not the same.
Value creation is not an exit event. It is the result of decisions made every day, about revenue mix, operational infrastructure, market position, and leadership depth. Most founders and CEOs discover this too late: when the deal is on the table and the leverage has already been determined.
Uphoff Advisory works with founders, investors, and leadership teams who are building toward a meaningful exit: not necessarily selling tomorrow, but making the operational decisions today that determine the value the business commands when it matters. This work is anchored by the Uphoff Value Index™, a proprietary diagnostic framework described below.
About
Tony Uphoff is the Founder and Managing Partner of Uphoff Advisory, LLC, and one of the most experienced operators in B2B media, marketing, and technology. A five-time B2B CEO with 35+ years of direct operating experience, he has led businesses through multiple successful exits: including CMP Media, Business.com, and ThomasNet.com, and through cycles of growth, disruption, and transformation that most executives encounter only once. His career spans some of the most recognized brands in the industry: InformationWeek, where he served as Publisher during its peak as one of the most influential technology media properties in the world, part of CMP Media; The Hollywood Reporter; Business.com; UBM TechWeb, where as CEO he led the organization through the 2008 financial crisis, managing simultaneous disruptions across print, digital, events, and a global workforce; ThomasNet.com, where as President and CEO he led a full-scale platform turnaround anchored in Jobs-to-Be-Done research, culminating in the company’s acquisition by Xometry; and Pipeline360, a PE-backed demand generation platform where he led a carve-out, rebranding, and Demand-as-a-Service repositioning that materially improved EBITDA margins and grew international revenue.
Tony is an award-winning CEO and a recipient of the prestigious McCalister Fellowship for Business Leadership from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, one of the most respected recognitions in media and business leadership. His advisory work is grounded entirely in that operating record. The frameworks he uses with clients are ones he developed and tested running businesses under real conditions. Not imported from a consulting textbook.
He writes and publishes Uphoff on Media, a Substack publication covering agentic AI’s impact on B2B media, marketing, and technology, with a particular focus on the structural and strategic implications for operators, founders, and investors. Tony also hosts the Uphoff On Media podcast available on Apple and Spotify.
UPHOFF VALUE INDEX™
An operator-led diagnostic for value creation and exit readiness.
Valuation is a lagging indicator. By the time the market prices your business, the conditions that determine that number are already baked in. For better or worse.
The Uphoff Value Index™ measures what comes before. It identifies the operational conditions that drive valuation, scores them against market benchmarks, and surfaces the specific gaps that separate a good business from a valuable one.
The UVI system includes a proprietary dataset of comparable exits across B2B media, marketing, and technology: including EBITDA multiples, revenue multiples, and Rule of 40 benchmarks, giving clients a direct line between their operational score and what the market is likely to pay.
The UVI is delivered as a structured advisory engagement, not a standalone software tool. It includes a diagnostic session, a scored results report, a prioritized value creation roadmap, and an optional ongoing engagement structured around quarterly re-scoring and active work on priority gaps.
The diagnostic covers six drivers:
– Revenue Quality: Predictability, recurring mix, and customer concentration
– Market Position: Category ownership, moat, and brand visibility
– Operational Leverage: Process documentation, financial hygiene, and scalability
– Leadership Depth: Founder dependency and organizational strength and resilience
– Exit Readiness: Buyer mapping, value narrative, and relationship cultivation
– Custom Driver: Factors specific to your market or business model
Let’s Work Together
Uphoff Advisory works with a focused number of clients at any given time. Engagements are selective by design, because the work requires genuine attention, not a managed service model.
If you are considering an engagement: Strategic Advisory, a UVI diagnostic, or a board role, the best first step is a direct conversation. Use the form below to introduce yourself.