Carbacio Group is built around the two of us — by design, not by stage of growth. We don't fly in junior consultants. The partner you meet on the discovery call is the partner on the engagement, every week, for the entire engagement.
Nick built his career the way most executives only claim to: from the sales floor up. Fifteen-plus years in automotive retail operations, moving from sales to General Manager to the executive suite across multiple dealership rooftops, gives him a rare vantage point as a Fractional CEO — he has personally owned the number, run the floor, and made the calls when a month wasn’t going right, not just advised from outside on how someone else should.
Nick’s track record predates Carbacio Group. Prior consulting work under his direction produced a documented $3.36M annualized profit improvement, a 27% reduction in operating expenses, and 80% growth in sales volume for a client. That same discipline — find where money is leaking, fix the process, prove the number — is what he brings into every Carbacio Group relationship, as both Fractional CEO and Fractional COO.
As Fractional COO, Nick is the embedded operator: he owns discovery, diagnostics, and executive relationships across the firm’s engagements, and is currently running weekly discovery and diagnostics as a standing part of an active client’s leadership team — not as an outside advisor checking in occasionally. He also leads Max Q Automotive, Carbacio Group’s sister automotive practice, as Founder & President.
Nick spent years operating at the highest levels of automotive retail — from the sales floor to the general manager seat to the executive suite of multi-store groups. He has seen, firsthand, how good dealerships lose money they don't know they're losing.
Max Q Automotive was built on a straightforward premise: most of the profit a dealer needs already exists in their store. It's being obscured by loose process, misaligned management, and expense structures that never got properly examined.
Nick works personally with every client. Not as a remote advisor — but inside the store, alongside your team, until the changes stick.
Across variable, fixed, and finance.
Specialized in store turnarounds and sustained performance improvement.
Not slide decks. Not remote advisory. Inside the building, on the floor.
No junior consultants flown in for the readout. The partner you meet is the partner running the work.
Jeff is the builder behind Carbacio Group’s technology and AI visibility systems, and the author of the methodology the firm is built on. He developed the Carbacio Stack℠ — the SEO + AEO + GEO framework that makes a business citable and recommended by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, in addition to traditional Google search.
As Fractional CMO, Jeff runs that methodology as a full marketing function for clients, not a one-time audit. For Jessica Ward of The Box Method, he significantly improved her website, built out a full LinkedIn outreach strategy, launched a newsletter, produced multiple one-pagers, and ran AI SEO work that has delivered a 3x increase in website traffic in six weeks. He also runs Carbacio Group’s own outbound systems and AI-driven messaging, along with the LinkedIn growth engine across the firm’s owned channels.
As Fractional CTO, Jeff owns technical infrastructure end to end — from the AI Visibility Scorecard and proprietary calculators clients use to measure their own performance, to the CRM and automation stack that runs the firm’s own client acquisition. He is the embedded Fractional CTO on Carbacio Group’s active client engagement, where he owns a multi-site web portfolio, manages hosting and deployment, and is building out the CRM and automation infrastructure (HighLevel, Zapier) that runs that client’s lead flow. He also built and maintains Carbacio Group’s own site infrastructure — consolidated schema, llms.txt, and a technical foundation built to be readable by both search engines and AI crawlers — as a live proof of the methodology, not just a claim about it.
The numbers and the technical layer. If a Carbacio Group engagement requires a financial model rebuilt, a scorecard designed, a what-if calculator built, a website rebuilt for AI-era discoverability, a domain portfolio audited, or a monitoring infrastructure stood up — that's Jeff's work.
The financial diagnostic. The capacity, pricing, and headcount what-if modeling. The scorecard build. The technical and AI-search audit when in scope. The deliverable documentation. The handover playbook. Anything in the engagement that has to ship in software, not slideware.
Most consulting firms split their partners by industry — restaurants partner, healthcare partner, manufacturing partner. Carbacio Group splits by discipline. Nick on people and operations; Jeff on numbers and technical execution. The two skill stacks are stronger together than either is alone, and on every engagement the client gets both.
Every Carbacio Group engagement is co-led. Nick takes the relationship and operating seat; Jeff takes the technical and financial seat. We're both on every call that matters, and you'll never be handed off to a junior.
Discovery, executive interviews, the operating walk, the talent search, the hard conversation. The work that requires presence in the room.
Financial modeling, scorecard build, technical and AI-search audit, infrastructure work, deliverable documentation. The work that has to ship as software, not slides.
Carbacio Group sits at the top. Max Q Automotive is the dealer-facing practice the partners built first. It proved the operating model and still serves its category, now under the Carbacio Group umbrella.
The horizontal consulting firm. Wyoming LLC. Owned 50/50 by Nick Carbacio and Jeff Hatfield. The entity that contracts every client engagement described on this site. Carbacio Group is the firm the two starter brands grew into — a single roof for horizontal consulting across the verticals the partners serve.
Built first, around the operating reps Nick brings to the automotive dealer category. Max Q proved the model on the dealer side — high-credibility operational diagnostics, scorecards, dealer-specific KPIs, and a door dealer principals actually walked through. It still operates with its own brand identity and its own site, now sitting under Carbacio Group.
Some engagements referenced in our case studies, including the twelve-property service portfolio, were delivered by the partners directly before Carbacio Group LLC was formed. They are shown because the methodology is the same one the firm runs today. All current engagements contract and bill through Carbacio Group.
Max Q Automotive keeps the door its category recognizes, so dealer principals find a brand built for them. Carbacio Group sits above it as the firm that contracts horizontal consulting engagements across every vertical the partners serve. Two brands, two partners, one operating standard.
If your question isn't here, it'll be on the discovery call.
short discovery call. You'll be on the line with both of us. We'll know inside that call whether the fit is right — and we'll tell you either way.