I have sat in your chair.

Bowery

I co-founded Bowery Valuation and ran it as CEO from zero to 300 people. We raised over $80 million from Goldman Sachs, Capital One and others. Deloitte named Bowery one of North America's fastest-growing companies in 2022. The company is profitable, does tens of millions in revenue, and I am still on the board.

I also over-hired before rates spiked, raised more money than we needed and used it to paper over problems instead of fixing them, and spent years without a clear enough answer to which customer we were for. Most of what I coach is the list of things I would do differently.

I left in 2024 to coach full time. Today I work with about a dozen CEOs. Combined, their companies do over $100 million in revenue.

How I coach

I am opinionated. Not about your domain, but about the failure patterns and best practices I have seen repeat. Think sports coach, not therapist. There is a right way and a wrong way to shoot a basketball, and there is a right way to run a leadership meeting. I will show you what I see, tell you what I would do, and hold you to what you said you would do.

What I believe about running a company

• Leadership is talent density plus context. Hire fewer, better people, and give them a clear answer to the five questions.
• Every engagement starts with the single most important thing right now. If your objective is not strong enough for everyone to say no to everything else, it is not an objective.
• Most companies die from indigestion, not starvation. Fix the thing before you scale the thing.
• CEOs create narratives around facts. My job is often to separate the two.
• Sequence instead of choosing. Both things can be true. The question is which one comes first.

Student of the game

I came up in baseball operations, where the whole job is studying how other people won. I never stopped. I've read hundreds of business books and CEO interviews, and I steal from the ones that hold up: Lencioni's five questions, Geoff Smart's Who, Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers, Basecamp's Shape Up, the burn multiple. When I tell you what I'd do, it's usually because I've seen five people try it and know which version worked.

Before Bowery

Baseball operations with the Toronto Blue Jays. McGill University, applied mathematics and commerce. Guest lectures at Columbia and NYU.