Strategy · Central Valley · Solo Practice
I help stalled founders family operators 2nd-gen owners first-time leaders see the one decision they've been avoiding.
Twenty years inside operating roles. The last six independent. I work with one client at a time. Engagements last six to twelve weeks. I don't take retainers, and I don't write decks for the sake of decks.
Read more01 The work
Most strategy consulting is noise.
A binder. A workshop. A PDF nobody opens twice.
I find the one decision your team has been circling for months — and I help you make it.
That's the work. Everything else is in service of it.
02 Principles
- 01
The decision is already in the room. Someone there has been thinking about it for months.
My job is to make it speakable. That's harder than it sounds.
- 02
Strategy is choosing what you will stop doing.
Every initiative is a tax on the next one. I help you name the tax.
- 03
The brief gets twelve pages. No more.
If it can't be said in twelve, it isn't ready to be decided.
- 04
You make the call. Not me.
I bring the trade-offs. I leave with notes. You leave with a decision.
- 05
One client at a time. Always.
Four to six engagements a year. If we're not a fit, I say so.
03 How it works
Two-week diagnostic.
Interviews with the people who actually know what's broken. Quiet time inside your data. A written brief — twelve pages, no slides — naming the decision and the evidence for it.
Decision session.
One day, your full leadership. We work through the brief. We name the trade-offs. You make the call — not me. I leave with notes; you leave with a decision.
Four to ten weeks of execution coaching.
Weekly 60-minute checkpoints. I'm not in your meetings — I'm at the end of your week, helping you debrief and re-plan. The team owns the work. I own the clarity.
04 A case in motion
The agricultural distributor that had been circling the same decision for two years.
$22M in revenue. Four locations. Family-owned, second generation in operations. The decision: whether to invest in a packing facility or keep paying the co-op a margin that had crept up every year.
Two years of conversations. Three external consultants. A binder. A spreadsheet that everyone disagreed with. The board meeting kept getting moved.
The diagnostic took eleven days.
I spent two of them inside the co-op invoices going back four years. Another two in interviews with the operations lead, the CFO, and the founder's son who wanted the facility built more than anyone but couldn't get the math to land in a room full of skeptics.
The brief was twelve pages. The trade-off was named on page four: the facility wasn't a margin play — it was a customer-relationship play. The math worked once the framing changed.
The decision session lasted four hours.
They greenlit the facility before lunch. The remaining time went to the question that had been hiding underneath: who was going to run it, and what would the founder's son's role become after construction. We named that one too.
Eight months later the facility opened.
Their first season through it landed at +14% margin on the lines they moved in-house. The founder's son runs the facility. The co-op is now one customer of theirs, not the other way around.
— Engagement closed Q4 2025 · Anonymized at client's request
We had eight initiatives. We chose two. Within four months, both shipped.— Client · Central Valley family-business CEO
05 What I won't do
- No long-tail retainers.
- No off-site workshops with rented flip-charts.
- No implementation. Your team owns execution.
- No branded methodologies with trademarked names.
- No "trusted advisor for life" pitches.
- No decks. The brief is the artifact.
I'm trying to do good work and leave. That's the whole pitch.
06 Who I work with
Founder-led companies. $2M to $40M in revenue. Family ownership welcome. Tech-enabled service businesses. Operators who are tired of having the same strategy conversation for the third year.
I take four to six engagements a year. If we're not a fit, I say so on the first call and recommend someone who is.
07 Reading
What I keep coming back to.
Less than fifty pieces of writing have stuck with me long enough to recommend. These are some of them.
- Good Strategy / Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt · 2011
- The Innovator's Dilemma Clayton Christensen · 1997
- Skin in the Game Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2018
- Influence Robert Cialdini · 1984
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ben Horowitz · 2014
- How to Solve It George Pólya · 1945
- Letters from a Stoic Seneca · c. 65 AD
08 What people ask first
What does an engagement cost?
Two-week diagnostic plus decision session: $35,000 fixed. Add the four-to-ten-week coaching: $4,500 to $7,500 per week. No retainer. No surprise add-ons.
How fast can you start?
My calendar runs three months out. Diagnostic windows open every six to eight weeks. Same-week starts only when a client cancels — rare but it happens.
Do you take an equity stake?
No. Engagement is fee-only. I've turned down equity offers because they distort the work. I want to leave when the decision is made, not stick around.
What if we're not the right fit?
I say so on the first call and recommend someone who is. I keep a short list of three peers who do work I respect. Referrals are free.
Will the engagement actually change anything?
Only if the decision was actually present in the room. If it isn't, the diagnostic surfaces that, and we don't proceed. I've ended three engagements at the diagnostic stage in the last six years.
09 The next move