Eleven companies that backed a hunch and went first — and what it was worth.

iPay was the first online bill-payment company to reach profitability and hold it, which meant there was nobody to copy. It was growing fast, in a small town, hiring people out of much larger markets.

Everyone expected us to start with the customer experience. We started with the employees. If the people closest to the customer can't feel the company's promise, the customer never will.

That mattered more here than it usually does, because iPay sat between three sets of people whose motivations pulled apart: the banks, the billers, and the account holders. We diagrammed how the company actually ran, extended the brand into the building itself as well as the screens, and designed the future employee and customer experiences together, down to the key moments and the scripts. Then we coached the executives and the operating teams through becoming it.

Decisions that used to wait for a manager got made on the front line. Subscribers went from one million to 1.8 million. Revenue went from $13 million to $58 million. In 2010, iPay sold for $300 million; the sale had many drivers, and we don’t count it in our numbers.

People who joined a small-town company got careers without having to move.

iPay reason for being, Storyminers working session

“We couldn't have grown profitably and comfortably without Storyminers.”— Mike Bowers, co-founder, iPay Technologies Source ↗

Transitions made lenses that darken in sunlight, and sold them wholesale. The customer met the product as a line on an order form: a promise about something that would happen later, outdoors, after they had already paid.

Nobody should have to buy the lenses to find out what the lenses do.

So we designed a store that didn't exist anywhere in the industry: a retail experience built to do three jobs at once: sell, train the people who sell, and test what the company should offer next. We laid out where every service would sit on the floor plan, designed the space and the interactive fixtures, specified the technology behind them, and then walked the leadership team through the working prototype with the demos running, before a dollar went into construction or leasing.

They could see it. So could their optical partners, who finally had a way to show instead of tell.

A wholesale supplier now had a retail business it could show. Transitions’ own projection put the Store of the Future at up to $500 million a year in added revenue over the following decade. The store never opened: Transitions was acquired before it could be built.

Storyminers storyboard for Transitions Optical, 2013

“[Storyminers] developed experiences designed to turn heads, and the underlying capabilities our businesses needed to deliver them.”— Renee Himel, VP of Marketing and Customer Experience, Transitions Optical Source ↗

Maier America is the U.S. arm of a fourth-generation German manufacturer: precision hardware, sold to engineers, in an industry where the parts conversation is a price conversation.

We spent time with their people and their customers' people. Nobody stays up at night thinking about a rotary joint. They stay up thinking about the line going down, the promise they made to their own customer, and the call they'll have to make if it breaks.

So Maier wrote down what it was actually for:

“Maier America exists to keep pressure in our clients' systems, but off of their people — so that everyone can keep their promises more easily.”

Same product, same people, entirely different job. But a sentence like that is worth nothing without something behind it, so we sketched more than fifteen new services they could sell, with the team rather than for them: predictive maintenance, smart parts, uptime sold as a service. We built the customer personas with them too, and mapped who owes what to whom (our name for that map is a Promise Map). Then Mike took it to their international sales meeting.

A multinational team came away able to say the same thing in their own words, in more than one language.

Photo by Homa Appliances on Unsplash

“Mike helped us find our Reason for Being and showed our multinational team how to become more customer-focused.”— Rob Kuehl, CEO, Maier America Source ↗

ShineWell Health is building support for people going through cancer, and for the people caring for them. When we started, the founder had a swirl of ideas and no document that held them.

The obvious move is a business plan. We designed the emotional arc of the journey first (diagnosis, treatment, whatever comes after) and mapped the services onto it afterward. The hardest parts of a cancer journey aren't medical. They're logistical, emotional and deeply personal. Most people don't need more information. They need the right question at the right moment, and one trusted human walking with them.

We used AI throughout, to get more passes at the thinking. A focus group that included a cancer survivor and her caregiver gave us the turning points no research summary would have.

In eight weeks, the founder got their brief: core messaging, fifteen players in the field compared, five personas, a tiered pricing model, and a future story tying it together: enough that their first hires could start running instead of interviewing the founder for a month.

What they got wasn't only a plan. It was the conviction to build it.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

“He brought leading-edge tools, including AI, to help us get to the crux of the matter faster.”— Founder, ShineWell Health Source ↗

The brief was lunchtime throughput at the drive-thru. Twenty-five percent more cars.

We came back with a different question: what if the restaurant knew your order before the car arrived?

There was no way to do that. Smartphones were eight years off. So we designed it around a phone in the customer's pocket anyway, and built it out far enough that people could poke holes in it — storyboards of the future customer experience, press releases written from the future, capacity math, financial models, and job descriptions for crew whose jobs didn't exist yet. Mobile-first ordering. Multiple pick-up lanes. Predictive cooking. Receipts printed to match the screens the sandwich makers were reading.

Our own projections said no existing restaurant could support it. They were right, for twenty years, while the rest of the world built the missing parts. What McDonald’s had at the end of 2001: the storyboards, the proof cases, the capacity math, and the role descriptions for a drive-thru the technology couldn’t yet support.

We can’t claim McDonald’s growth, and we won’t. What we can show is the 1999 design next to today’s drive-thru: mobile-first ordering, multiple pick-up lanes, predictive cooking, designed eight years before the smartphone existed. About 95% of U.S. restaurants now have a drive-thru, it brings in well over half of all sales, and the format works remarkably like the one we drew.

Julia Michaels, a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, knew Merced Guimarães, whose house in the city’s old port district stood on a mass grave from the slave trade; Merced had turned her home into a memorial institute. Julia told her to build a destination museum there. Merced said no: the same trade ran through every port on the Black Atlantic, and one museum couldn’t hold that. It needed a network, and nobody is going to visit a dozen museums on four continents.

Mike said it could be done virtually, which changes who the story is for: a network of buildings reaches whoever can afford the airfare; a virtual one reaches anyone. Within a year FullCircle existed. Mike co-founded it with Julia, ran it as executive director, then joined the board. Two boards, a talent pipeline with HBCUs, a funding model rebuilt from one donor to four sources, a working demonstration, and a short film made entirely with AI, so donors could see what nobody could yet point at.

Then a rule ended it. A 501(c)(3) has to broaden its funding base by its fifth year, and most of FullCircle’s still came from a founder. The board chose to close deliberately rather than drift, and designed the ending like everything else: the Sankofa quilt commissioned for FullCircle is on permanent display at the Roots 101 museum in Louisville, and the platform wireframes went to the Figma community under an open license, so the next people to try this start where we finished.

Image generated by AI · Leonardo.ai

“Mike is a superb visionary, communicator and business strategist. FullCircle would simply not exist without him.”— Julia Michaels, co-founder, FullCircle Source ↗