How I work
Strategy and direction
Most of what gets called strategy is really a queue of decisions with no obvious right answer and nobody to argue with. Where the company goes next. What to stop doing. Which of six urgent things is actually the priority, and what happens to the other five when you pick. I'm useful here mostly because I've made these calls under the same conditions you're making them — incomplete information, not enough money, everyone waiting on you.
Capitalization and cap table
Entity structure, equity splits, option pool sizing, what a term sheet says as opposed to what you heard in the room. This is where early mistakes are the most expensive and the least visible: the cap table you assembled in year one to solve a year-one problem is still there in year five, and by then unwinding it costs money and goodwill. I raised every round we did, and got parts of it wrong.
Team, board, and advisors
Who to hire, in what order, and what to pay them. When the first real management layer becomes necessary, and how to build it without demoralizing the people who got you there. Who belongs on a board, who belongs on an advisory list, and who belongs on neither — a distinction founders tend to learn expensively and late. Hiring at scale is one of the few things I did enough times to have pattern recognition rather than opinions.
Product and go-to-market
Positioning, pricing, what to build next, and what to kill. Whether the thing customers are telling you is the thing they'll actually pay for — those come apart more often than anyone expects. I've been on both sides of it, with products that found their market and products that didn't, and the difference was almost never the engineering.
Finance and accounting
Not bookkeeping — I'm not going to run your books — but the layer above it: how they should be run, who should run them, what reporting you need before you need it, and what your numbers have to look like before anyone outside the company takes them seriously.
The cadence
Most engagements settle into a standing call every week or two, plus asynchronous access in between — you send me the thing, I read it and respond.
The hours are capped on purpose. It sounds restrictive until you realize the constraint is what makes it work: it forces us to spend the time on decisions rather than stockpiling hours toward a project that never gets properly scoped.
What this looks like in practice
A founder came to me through a mutual contact. The company was real — customers, revenue, a product people used — but it wasn't built to survive the next stage. The financial reporting wouldn't have withstood a serious look. The entity and equity structure had been built one decision at a time, never designed. And the founder was carrying every decision personally, because there was no one else to carry any of it.
Over several months we worked through the structure, the reporting, and the sequence of hires that would take the load off. A standing call every week, plus whatever came up in between.
Another engagement is nearly the opposite in shape. An early-stage AI company with real technology and no settled answer to what the product should be. That work is product strategy — what to build first, who it's for, what would have to be true for a customer to care, and how to find that out before spending a year of engineering on the wrong thing.
Two very different engagements. Underneath, the same job: help the founder see the decision clearly, then make sure something actually happens.
I also sit on the other side of this
Some of the same work happens in businesses I own rather than advise. I'm an owner in a staffing and business-process company and in a roofing company, and in both I work directly with the person running it on exactly these questions — reporting, hiring, structure, what to do next.
It isn't client work and I don't count it as such. It's where a good deal of the pattern recognition comes from, and it's the reason the advice is current rather than remembered.
What I don't do
I don't raise capital. No fundraising, no investor introductions for a fee, no placement work. That's a different business with different regulation and different economics, and I'd be worse at it than the people who do it full-time.
I don't give legal, tax, or investment advice. I've spent enough time with lawyers and accountants to know where the line is, and I'll tell you when you need one.
I don't run your company. I help you decide how to run it.
Interested?
That's the work. If some of it is what you need, tell me what's in front of you.