Questions founders, owners and CEOs ask most.

Stop explaining where the company is going to your leaders and start building it with them. People can agree with a plan all day and still not act on it; what they helped shape, they defend and bring to their own teams. So get the leaders who run execution together and have them write where the company is going, out loud, with you. In my working sessions that takes one to three half-days. Each session starts by reading back what the group decided last time, so people can correct it: somebody always says “that’s not quite right yet,” and each pass makes it stronger and more shared. By the end, each leader can say where the company is going in their own words, and nobody gets it wrong. In 2014–2016 Maier America, the U.S. arm of a German manufacturer, did this, and a multinational team came away able to say it in their own words, in more than one language. If your leaders can’t do that today, that’s the gap.

Get the strategy out of everyone’s separate head and into one place where the whole team can see it. I prepare well by reading everything the company has already written, and go into the field and the office, where the documents can’t tell me how people behave: I make a sales call, I work a shift in the warehouse, I pose as a customer. What I see there comes into the working sessions with your team, where one technique I use is to have a sketch artist draw what people describe. Ten executives describing the same idea are picturing ten different things, and none of them know it. Draw it while they talk, and the disagreements show up in ten seconds, while fixing one still means changing a drawing instead of changing something already built. By the second or third session the team has a strategy they argued over and kept. To see how that feels from the inside, the Approach page on this website tells one engagement as a story, session by session.

Get it before the decision is announced, while changing course still costs only a conversation. Most people ask later, after the reorganization is announced, and what they ask for is a second opinion: the same way of seeing the decision with one more vote attached. What helps more, and earlier, is a second frame: another way of seeing the decision, one that shows you options you couldn’t see from where you were standing. Change the direction after it’s announced, and you’re paying to unwind the plan already circulated, the hires made against it, and the standing of whoever announced it. So call while the options are still open. That’s what my Strategic Advisory work is for: a working session every month, a call when something big is forming (a reorganization, a succession, a deal on the table), and finished work in between. When I see it differently, I’ll tell you early.

A strategic advisor works your biggest decisions with you before you commit to them. We meet once a month, in person when we can. You bring what’s on your desk, the deal, the key hire, the succession question, and we work it right there until you leave with a better version of the plan and the reasons you can defend it. Between sessions I take the homework with me instead of leaving you a list: maps of how your customers experience the company, a competitor analysis done with my own eyes, the draft of the announcement. If a competitor moves the week after we meet, you have three ways to answer it by the time we talk. When a board pitch is coming, you rehearse it with me playing the skeptical director, and I push back wherever I see it differently. Your big calls go into a written record we keep together, so the why behind them is never reconstructed from memory.

An outside advisor is a senior person with no seat on your org chart, which means they can say what the people around you are too close or too invested to say. Your team reports to you and your family wants you to be right; an outside advisor wants you to decide well, and has no stake in which way it goes. You need one when two things are true at once: you’re carrying the big calls alone, and the next move is one you can’t easily undo. A new market, a key hire, a succession, an AI bet. For 30 years I’ve helped founders, owners and CEOs, at companies with $20 million to $2 billion in annual revenue, do things nobody has done before, and my pushback comes standard. It cost me jobs before I started Storyminers; here it’s part of the work. If you want someone who will agree with you, that’s not me. If you want someone who will tell you early when I see it differently, that’s my job.

Because the same words meant different things to each person, and nobody found out until the work started. Then, a little bit later, they built their own version, and those versions only meet when the budgets collide. The fix for that is to write it down: along with where the company is going, the team writes down the rules for how decisions get made when you’re not there. I call those the Principles, and once they exist, what used to wait for you gets decided where the work is. There’s a second reason, and I learned it the hard way. Years ago I spent two months with a team that got ninety percent of the way, and the sponsor who had skipped every session arrived at the end and sank it, because it changed the status quo. Now, attendance is a requirement in my contract: the decision-maker comes to every session. So before you replace anyone, check whether your leaders wrote down where the company is going and the rules together, or only heard them from you.

Make it something people can walk through. If you describe a future to people, they argue about whether it’s realistic; if you put them inside one, they argue about how to make it work, which is a conversation worth having. So build it far enough into the future that your leaders can stand in it, with storyboards, the story of the business written from the destination backward, and a working model of what buying from it will feel like. At Transitions Optical, a wholesale lens maker, the leadership team walked through a prototype store, which we made out of cardboard boxes, poster presentations, and some amazing software demonstrations. Then share that experience with people in your own company, in two rounds. First the people inclined to like it, to learn which parts travel on their own. Then, separately, the skeptics who have watched three strategies come and go; they find every soft part, and by the end of the afternoon the objections have become a list of what it needs. That list is your test result, in hand before you spend a dime.

Write three things down with your leaders, so the company can decide without you. If your team needs you in every room, the strategy isn’t clear enough; delegating harder won’t fix that. The first thing is a one-page answer to what the business is for, which the team thoroughly discusses, then keeps; I call it the Reason for Being. The second is the rules for how decisions get made when you’re not there; I call those the Principles. The third is your choice: the strategy written as a story people can test, which I call the Future Story, or a picture of commitments showing who owes what to whom, which I call the Promise Map. I write them with your leaders in working sessions, one to three half-days, in their own words, which is what lets you step back. That was part of the work at iPay Technologies, a fast-growing online bill-payment company: decisions stopped waiting for a manager, and over the same years revenue grew from $13 million to $58 million. If your leaders can’t write the first page together, that’s where the dependence on you lives.

Your AI is probably speeding up a disagreement your leaders already had. Every AI project is a bet somebody made on what the business is for, so when the bets disagree, the projects do too: three teams solving the same problem three ways, pilots nobody can bring themselves to kill. Before buying anything else, find out where the bets disagree. I do that in the Leadership Alignment Workshop, where a company’s AI projects get a reading of their own before the first session. I won’t grade your software or invent a return-on-investment number. You get the two or three places your projects disagree, and the first moves to make. A European commodity trading company I advised wanted to move into AI earlier than it felt ready for. The AI question turned out to be a business question: what the company was for, and which jobs belonged to people and which to machines. Once the leadership wrote that down, the team understood what the company was trying to achieve, and the CEO started planning the next decade with purpose.

Ask each of your leaders, separately, to write down what business the company is in and where it’s going, and compare. If they match, your strategy is clear enough to advance. If they don’t, what you have is five or six individual strategies, each leader working hard on their own. That test checks clarity. The second test checks whether it’s right. Write a page or two describing the company from a perspective three years in the future, specific enough that a smart person can disagree with it. Take it first to the people who want it to work, then to the people who have watched three other strategies come and go. Clear isn’t the same as right. At Alternative Apparel, a t-shirt maker, every leader agreed the customer was the buyer with the purchase order. Writing down what the business was really for, in working sessions with me, showed the customer was the person wearing the shirt. The company opened direct sales online, and sales rose 50% after implementation.

Decide it with one question: what else does this reorganization buy? A reorganization costs months of attention whether it fixes one thing or several, so it should fix several. Chosen well, the same reorganization can settle who steps up next and give the people who will run the new structure the experience they need. If yours does only one job, it is weaker than it looks. Then test how it sounds before you announce it, because that is the last moment when changing course is still inexpensive, to your budget and to your reputation. Before the announcement, a change of mind costs a conversation. After it, the budget pays to unwind the plan already circulated and the hires made against it, and your reputation pays for having announced it. I advise founders, owners and CEOs on moves like this one, and this is how we’d work it: you bring the org chart, I play the people who hear the announcement first, the skeptical director and the anxious top customer, and you hear how it sounds before anyone real does.

One who understands that running a company and inventing its next version are different skills. The people inside your company are good at the first, and nobody there is free to do the second while doing the first. So the hunch you’re carrying about what comes next stays a hunch. You want an advisor who has done the inventing before, who will build the next version with you instead of describing it, and who leaves the decision with you. The founder of ShineWell Health, a company that supports people going through cancer, had the whole business in mind and nothing on paper. In eight weeks, the founder had a brief: the core message, fifteen competitors compared, five customer types, a business model, a pricing model, and the story tying it together. The first hires could start running from it instead of interviewing the founder for a month. So ask any advisor you’re considering what you’ll have in hand after eight weeks that your first hires could run from.

Someone you can say the hard thing to first, who knows your whole situation, and who pushes back. A coach develops you. An operator takes a function off your hands. A thought partner works the decisions the company can’t easily undo with you, while they’re still open. That means a working session every month, where we work whatever is on your desk. Between sessions I take on homework and send it back finished: maps of how your customers and employees experience the company, a competitor analysis from visiting them myself, and the announcement of your move written as if it had already happened. One leader I advised felt unqualified to set direction for the technical people who built what the company sold. Deciding what the product should do next was her daily work; that was already strategy. Her job was to say what the technology should do, theirs to build it. A run of ideas followed, and some of them got built. If I see things differently, I’ll say so early and bring you the better option.

Stop refereeing between departments and give them a lens none of them owns: the customer’s. Each head wanting to run the business from their own seat is normal. Arguing it out between them produces one winner and three people waiting for the next round. So instead, take what each department wants and ask two questions: what would a customer actually experience, and how would that customer feel about it? At LeasePlan, a vehicle-leasing company with 6,500 people in over 30 countries, operations, finance, credit, maintenance, and sales each wanted the business run their way, and one director was charged with building a single way of handling customers that every country could adopt. We built it from the departments’ own requirements, seen through the customer’s eyes, and the result was a business easier to run, more profitable, and one customers stay with: something for every department. It was adopted in 27 countries within 18 months. Start from the customer and everyone can get more of what they want. Everyone wins.

A strategic advisor, which means someone who takes the ambiguity out of the decisions that are hard to undo. I do that by making your company’s future visible before you fund it: an unclear future turned into something your leadership team can see, argue with, test, and act on before the company commits heavily to it. I facilitate when the work needs it, and I coach a leader growing into a bigger job. Either way, what you’d hire me for is help with a decision that is hard to undo. Collins Project Management, a family firm that manages construction projects, could not get clients to see what a firm like theirs would add. In working sessions we found the value was already in the first meeting they ran on every project, where the design and construction teams agree what to do and what not to do, so we made that meeting the thing they sold. Within six months the new offer won the second-largest job in the firm’s history. The president said it this way: “We’ve been struggling with this for five years. You got it in one hour.”

No, and the numbers show it. My work for clients adds up to $3.2 billion in documented value: revenue growth, permanent savings, costs avoided. That comes from only 13 engagements; 30 years produced more, but I count only what’s documented, at the low end, never a sale price, and every figure is traced on the Sources page of this website. A t-shirt maker whose leaders rewrote what business they were in saw sales rise 50% after implementation. A $13 million bill-payment company whose executives co-wrote the rules for front-line decisions went to $58 million. The soft part is the method behind those numbers. Hand a leadership team a deck and a spreadsheet, and the smartest people at the table look for the hole in it. Give them a story they helped write, and they argue about how to make it work. That is what I’d build with your leaders.

Each is the right call for a different problem. A big firm brings research, frameworks, and people; right when what’s missing is capacity. I bring senior judgment, no junior team, and a different output: the strategy written as a story your leaders can walk through and test, in place of a slide deck, or beside it. A fractional COO runs a function; I leave operations with your management. Your board governs from a distance; I work beside you before a decision reaches it. Your advisor knows you; if they give you a second way of seeing a decision, keep them. The story part has a record: in 1999 McDonald’s asked the team I led, then at IBM, for 25% more cars through the drive-thru. We came back with storyboards and capacity math for a drive-thru that knew your order before the car arrived. Twenty years later, the drive-thru works remarkably like the one we drew. Hire me when the decision isn’t clear, the move is hard to reverse, and more people isn’t what’s missing.

Yes. One person with 30 years of this work, plus AI for the reading and the typing, plus proven specialists when the job needs them, a sketch artist, say, or someone who builds AI tools, can do it. There will be no junior associates learning on your dime. When a specialist joins, you’ll know who they are. Your own people run the project, and I work alongside them, in the sessions and between them, so nobody is left holding it alone and the thinking and learning stay in your company afterward. Vanta, an English school that bet on physical centers while other schools moved online, had a leadership team of about six and six weeks to get the first centers right. We designed how a prospect becomes a student, from the first message to the layout of the rooms, and the first two centers opened, in England and Mexico, on schedule and on budget. One advisor, their own team, and a clear outcome were enough.

The value is my judgment, applied to the decision on your desk. For 30 years I have helped founders, owners and CEOs, at companies with $20 million to $2 billion in annual revenue, make moves they had never made before, and I have seen which ones hold and which ones look right and fail. You get that judgment on your actual decision, in real time. You get taste: of the workable options, which one your people will actually follow. And you get a reframe when the question you walked in with turns out to be the wrong question. You cannot download any of that. The CEO of a commodity trading company in Europe had me on retainer for a year and a half; a foreign debt that had hung over his company became exact numbers on a clear calendar. Strategic Advisory starts at $9,000 a month. The Leadership Alignment Workshop, for your whole leadership team, is typically from $25,000. Both are quoted exactly before you commit.

The work fits a situation more than an industry. Thirty years of clients span hospitality, retail, distribution, technology, healthcare, manufacturing, and professional services. The pattern repeats when a company runs well and is about to do something it has never done. People looking for help rarely say “I’m in manufacturing.” They say “my leadership team doesn’t agree” or “we’ve never done this before.” The client stories on this website run from a drive-thru at McDonald’s to a lens maker to a vehicle-leasing company in 30 countries to a one-person startup. In each, the company first changed its answer to “what business are we in” (the lens maker stopped seeing itself as a wholesaler); the strategy followed. From other industries I bring what’s already proven. Your vocabulary I learn on the way in, by reading everything you’ve written and then going to look: a sales call, a warehouse shift. If your situation is “we’ve never done this and we need to see it before we bet on it,” a free hour with me is worth considering.

There are a few situations where I’m not your guy. If you need an implementation army, a technical audit, or an interim executive, those are real jobs, and I don’t do them. If you want this year’s strategy to be a little better, with everything else staying about the same, that’s good work, but it isn’t mine. A turnaround or a wind-down isn’t my favorite work; other people are better at it. And if you’d like to hand the decision to someone else and have it come back finished, that’s something I also can’t help you with. My methods depend on you staying in the work with me as the strategy takes shape. Where I’m at my best is helping you with the move you haven’t made before, where the answer isn’t obvious and the people who will build it don’t all see the same picture yet. If that sounds like you, the free hour I offer before any engagement is where we find out. If the fit isn’t there, I’ll say so in that hour, and you’ve lost nothing.

An hour with me, free, on Zoom, no pitch. Around here it’s called a Chemistry Check, because it’s a test for fit that runs both ways: you find out whether I can help, and I find out whether this is work I’d be good at. Bring whatever is on your desk, or just come to talk. Most often it’s a leadership team that agrees in the meeting and pulls apart afterward, or a year of AI spending that made the company busier without making it better. There’s nothing to prepare. I’ll ask questions, play your situation back the way I see it, and tell you plainly whether I can help. You’ll leave with a clearer view either way. If there is a fit, you’ll know the shape and the price of the next step before you commit. The call is recorded so I can listen instead of taking notes; the recording stays with me, and it stops when you ask. Pick a time on this website’s Get in touch page, or email me at mike@storyminers.com.

Yes, in a family company, each generation doesn’t always express clearly enough what it sees coming. I start by having each group draw its vision for what comes next.

The generation that built the current business values the lessons that got it here, and usually wants to apply them going forward. That’s understandable. The generation stepping up sees a different way forward and is smart enough to know it will need to experience different lessons as it leads the business into the future (a place the prior generation(s) may never see). They are anxious to learn some of those lessons on their own.

Both visions are right. Getting both approaches on the table is the first step. The next step is to expand the common ground a company’s decisions about the future rest on. That expanded context is what Storyminers calls a worldview. It’s what allows different perspectives to fully understand each other. It’s what lets each generation see the good in the other side’s contribution and apply it in a way that everyone can honor and support.

Nobody leaves this work with the same expectations they came in with. Each generation leaves expecting more of the other, and knowing why. We’ve written worldviews for a family-owned European trading company as its next generation stepped in. Storyminers’ own worldview is on its website. We consider it a work in progress.