Executive leadership partnership
As companies grow, leadership problems rarely arrive with a warning. A decision that once took five minutes now takes three meetings. A founder becomes the final approver for work that should sit elsewhere. A senior team gets larger without becoming more capable of making decisions together.
The business is growing. The leadership model is simply becoming more expensive.
Apply for a 2027 engagementBased in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with leaders wherever they are.
You may recognize it
What growth changes
The habits that make a founder effective at $20 million can create very different results at $200 million.
Speed can become harder. Close involvement can become a bottleneck. Loyalty can become reluctance to make a necessary change. A strong personal point of view can make it harder for other leaders to develop one of their own.
None of these are character flaws. They are often strengths overused. We often apply methods that have worked for us even after the circumstances have changed. The difficult part is knowing which is effective and what is creating silent disruption.
Where the cost shows up
I've spent my career close to these decisions — the executive hire that never works, the leader kept in a role too long, the good people who leave because the organization couldn't resolve a problem at the top.
Consider a senior executive hired for $250,000 who isn't effective in their role three months later, or a $500,000 executive who leaves six months in because "this isn't what they signed up for." The salary is only the beginning of the cost to you. The search, the time spent onboarding, the work that didn't get done, the relationships that have to be rebuilt, and the next person who has to be found usually cost organizations between $35,000 (recruiting costs) to $150,000 in the wake it leaves behind.
Or consider a decision that sits with the CEO for a week because nobody is quite sure who owns it. Multiply that by dozens of decisions, across dozens of people, over a year.
The expense is real even when nobody has named it — this is leadership drag, and it rarely shows up as a line item until it's already expensive.
Why I do this work
I've spent more than a decade coaching leaders — including more than 50 C-suite executives and 700+ senior leaders and managers — and I've also held senior operating roles and been Head of HR in a global fast-growing company responsible for the people decisions that have to keep pace with growth.
That gives me a particular vantage point. Beyond the leader, I look at the system; the relationships around the leader, the team, the structure, the decision rights, and the stage of the business.
Sometimes the problem is the leader. Sometimes it isn't. The useful work is figuring that out before the organization spends more money treating the wrong thing.
The partnership
This is ongoing work for a leader who wants an executive partner who can sit close to the business, decipher where there is leakage, coach individuals and solve problems systematically.
The work then naturally follows what the business and leader needs.
That might mean working through a consequential decision, changing how you delegate, preparing for a leadership transition, addressing an executive-team dynamic, or figuring out why a problem keeps returning after everyone thought it had been solved.
The investment
$65,000 for a one year engagement
This is for you if you know you are already paying for organizational or leadership friction. This engagement will help bring that friction out to light so we can solve it.
The baseline is a regular cadence — roughly two check-ins a month — with the flexibility to step in closer when something's actively unfolding. The value is in being available for what matters.
Capacity for 2027
5
Partnerships
I keep this work limited because the work depends on proximity: enough access to understand the decisions, relationships, and patterns as they develop. Applications open now and close at the end of November 2026, or when the five engagements are filled.
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