The spend was real. The tools mostly work. And the company came out busier, not better — while everyone who tries to explain it blames the software.
In two to four weeks, we find what’s actually in the way and what to do about it. Mike leads the work personally. The scope is fixed, the fee is quoted before you commit, and no meter runs. From $25,000, fixed, for the assessment and the readout. The workshop is priced separately.
How we work across every engagement is on the Approach page, told as one story. This page covers one engagement.
Point it at a company pulling in six directions and it returns six directions, faster. The tools are usually fine. The problem sits underneath them: what the business is for, who’s accountable for which part of the promise. Fix it there, and the returns follow.
This is not a technical audit. We won’t grade your stack, recommend tools, or review your architecture.
Every AI project is a bet somebody made on what the business is for. Reading the bets tells us more about what’s agreed than a quarter of interviews would.
We start with the list of projects, and part of the job is spotting the ones that aren’t on it. We ask for the pitch that got each one funded, and the progress reports since. Then the part that matters most: about forty-five minutes with each project’s founder — our word for whoever the project truly belongs to, whether the org chart says product manager or something else — with a recorder running, while they demo what they’ve built and talk about where it started, where it is, what they want to do next, and what’s in the way.
It’s the questions and the answers, live, that make all the difference. A pitch deck answers the questions it chose. Sitting with the founder, we get to ask the other ones — Who asked for this? What did you have to promise to get it funded? If it works, what happens next? — and watch which answers come quickly and which ones need a moment. The pauses tell us as much as the answers do.
The founders get something out of it too, and we promise it up front: they’ll see what the other projects are, where missions line up, where collaboration is waiting to happen, and where efforts and resources could combine. Most have never seen their project standing in the company of the others — and the sponsor finally hears each one whole, in its founder’s own words.
We work the way we tell clients to work: everything we collect — the pitches, the progress reports, every recorded word — goes into AI, where patterns across projects have nowhere to hide. Client material is used only inside your engagement — never to train AI models. And anything you’d rather keep off the record stays off it: say the word and the recording stops.
Your sponsor orients us at the start and gets our findings at the end. Between those two points, we’re with the people doing the work. And the ask of your people’s time is small and known up front: one session per founder, an orientation, a readout.
• A goal nobody can state.
• Targets that work against each other.
• Busy work replaced with digital busy work.
• Assumptions the rest of the company doesn’t share.
• Requirements no tool can meet, now or soon.
• Big expectations with no plan to test them.
None of these arrives wearing a sign. It looks like an impressive demo that answers a question nobody asked. Two proud teams presenting the same feature under different names. A founder who can talk for an hour about how, and goes quiet at why. Any one of those is survivable. But when the third project in a row goes quiet at the same question, that isn’t a project problem. That’s the company telling you it never agreed on what it’s for.
And the whole time we’re listening for the opposite, too: ideas that deserve to be bigger, or to be implemented more broadly.
Nobody can put a confident number on what-if.
What we can count is how many goals each initiative serves. An efficiency lens asks every dollar in to bring a dollar and change back, and that kind of thinking narrows a company down to doing today’s work slightly better. That’s the busy work. The projects worth keeping serve several goals at once: the same initiative that raises inventory turns is teaching the factory floor robotics, and the one that lowers a cost is growing the people who run it.
Where real numbers exist, we use them: customer acquisition cost, rework rates, the same problem being solved three times by three teams who’ve never compared notes, and the time it takes to win back a point of market share — because misalignment usually costs share before it costs anything a statement shows.
And where a picture beats a number, we write the future as a story, often from an employee’s point of view. People will argue with a recommendation all day. A good story they repeat — and the repeating does the work.
The two or three misalignments costing you most, and the first moves to make. The costs get counted in more than cash: time, people, time to market, and the opportunities that expired while everyone was busy.
What your AI projects say about where the business is heading, and the chance to get it moving in one clear direction.
Your project list, after the questions: some efforts combined, some re-timed, something missing added — or the least disruptive finding of all, confirmation that you were pointed right all along.
It doesn’t come back as a binder. The working material — lists, prompts, spreadsheets, what we learned along the way — arrives in a digital form your teams can pick up and use in their own AI-powered efforts, so nobody spends hours redoing research that’s already done.
The readout is a working session with two attendance requirements: the sponsor, and representative founders whose projects are on the table. It’s recorded on purpose, and the recording is yours: the founders who weren’t there get the same telling, not a secondhand one — and if the work carries into a Leadership Alignment Workshop (one to three working sessions that end with every leader able to say where the company is going, in their own words), it travels with it.
We work it with you until you can give your own people a real answer.
And the assessment shows you where the business stands; it doesn’t change it. If a bigger engagement makes sense, you’ll know exactly why. If it doesn’t, the assessment stands on its own. Settling what the business is for is the step after, and it has its own doors: the Leadership Alignment Workshop, then Strategic Advisory (Mike as your standing advisor, meeting monthly, through the big decisions that come after).
This assessment is newly built. The thinking behind it is 30 years old; the engagement itself hasn’t yet run end to end with a client. Some leaders will want the version that has. Others will want to be the one it gets built around.
Most people who come asking about AI want a measurable AI result. That’s fair, and it’s also part of the problem. The improvements that matter most here are adaptability, and results that show up across the business instead of inside one project. Neither arrives as a number on a dashboard. If a dashboard number is the whole ask, this isn’t your assessment.
A working conversation about the future you’re trying to create — and what’s keeping it from moving. Around here it’s called a Chemistry Check: a fit test that runs in both directions.
No prep. No deck. No pitch.
Pick a time with MikeJust want to talk? Email mike@storyminers.com or call or text +1 404.229.5809. Mike reads every note himself and replies within a day.