I work with really good business owners at an inflection point. While the situations vary, what doesn't is the quiet fear underneath. That gut sense that something has to change, and you don't know what or how. My work is two things at once... Honest conversations most owners aren't having with anyone and the strategies that come out of those conversations that we implement together. All of it, in service of one thing: a business built to serve the life you'd almost stopped letting yourself want.
Not as a consultant called in after the fire. As the person standing in it, wondering what came next and whether anything would.
I've built businesses and watched them nearly collapse. I've had the 3am conversations with myself that nobody else knows about. I know what it feels like to keep fighting, not because you believe it will work, but because the people depending on you don't have the option of you stopping.
I've also been on the other side of it. Nearly four decades of it. I've run a freight and logistics company through years I'm still not sure how we survived. Two books came out of trying to make sense of what I learned the hard way so I could try to spare other people from learning it the same way. I've worked across every industry you could imagine (and some I could never have imagined). And somewhere in all of it, the realization that the business and your life aren't two things you balance. They're one thing. And pretending otherwise is where most of the pain originates.
I work the way I work because I needed someone to work this way with me, and I never found one. Someone honest without being brutal. Someone with so much real experience of how business works that they don't need a framework. Someone who understands the deeply human side of owning a company.
That's what I try to be for every client ready to do the work.
If you want to read more of my thinking, my books, or learn about my work with Forums and leadership teams... that's all here: Writing & Conversations →