Where isn’t Strategic Advisory a fit?

You want to hand the decision off. This only works if you stay in it. If every question in front of you sits inside this quarter, you might prefer a more operational approach.

Strategic Advisory · Monthly retainer · Led by Mike Wittenstein

Some decisions are too big to carry alone.

That’s when Storyminers strategic advisory, with Mike Wittenstein on retainer, works best: a standing senior advisor who knows your whole picture, meets you every month, and picks up the phone when something big is forming. Like a deal on the table, a key hire, an AI bet, or a succession question. The decisions that are hard to walk back get worked in session, tested from a second angle, and announced once, not walked back twice.

Before you commit to a bold move, we build a working prototype of it together (the announcement, the offer, the reorganization) so you see it and test it before you fund it.

Mike has 30 years of first-of-a-kind work behind him, which means helping companies do things nobody has done before.

For founders, owners and CEOs who carry the big calls themselves, at companies with $20 million to $2 billion in annual revenue. From $9,000 a month, paid monthly in advance: three months to start, then a quarter at a time. You’ll know the exact number before you commit.

The right moment

A second frame, not a second opinion.

Typically, leases get signed and reorgs are announced before the board is told. That’s when people ask for a second opinion. The more valuable moment comes sooner, when options are still open and changing course only costs a conversation.

A second opinion is really the same frame with one more vote. What you get here is a second frame: another way of seeing the decision, one that shows you doors you couldn’t see from where you were standing.

How frames form and change: our free field guide, Change the Frame. Também em português.

In session

Bring the thing you’re planning.
We’ll work it.

We work on your actual projects. Mike shows up with sleeves rolled up, ready to collaborate. Bring the announcement, the offer, the reorganization, the product idea, and we work it right there with the same methods we use on our larger projects (for example, service design, customer experience, branding). In real time, you get quick grounding and reactions, then make improvements and adjustments. You leave with a better version of the plan than you walked in with, and the reasons you can defend it.

Together, we rehearse. The board pitch, the town-hall announcement, the answer to the hardest question in the investor meeting: say it here first, out loud, to someone safe. Mike plays the skeptical director or the anxious top customer, and you hear how it sounds before anyone real does. Part of the job is pushing back when he sees it differently. That’s half of what a thinking partner is for.

The moves are new. If you’re considering new territory, a new technology, or both, copying what others have done won’t get you ahead: by the time you’ve done what they did, they’ll be further along. Mike’s 30 years of first-of-a-kind work means he’s comfortable finding your what’s next and saying it in a way people can relate to. Once the new frame clicks, you can expect to win your team’s support and alignment. And because his work has spanned half a dozen industries (tech, professional services, specialty health care, hospitality and travel, retail, manufacturing), you get what’s already been tried and proven somewhere else, early, before you’ve paid to learn it yourself.

A good strategy pays more than once. Bring one decision and you’ll usually leave with more than one result. Choose a reorganization well and it can settle the succession question at the same time; place an AI bet well and it grows the people who run it. That’s the test every option gets held to: what else does this buy? You’ll start applying it yourself, to the people, budgets, and AI you already have, and you won’t go back.

The rhythm

Monthly sessions. Reachable in between.

We meet once a month, one session in every three in person, and you reach Mike in between. The rhythm is set together: “when do you want to meet next?” is a standing question, answered a month or two ahead so calendars and travel can sync. In-person sessions are the best ones: a couple of hours when we’re together, with video, phone, and emails in between, quicker and more organic. Travel for the in-person session is in the fee inside the United States; for Canada, Mexico, and overseas, travel is at cost.

With your OK, sessions are recorded and transcribed. The transcripts are how the work between sessions gets done: the next agenda comes from what we actually said, and the drafts, maps, and options you get back (more on those below) start from your words. You set the agenda with Mike, and you can strike anything from it. You bring what’s on your desk; he brings what he’s noticed since you last spoke. When something comes up between sessions and needs attention, you reach him on WhatsApp, and you handle it together.

The retainer is for you. Mike joins the leaders around you in shared sessions and meetings, and when he’s in your area he’s glad to join your own meetings; that’s your call. One-on-one work with any of them is Coaching, priced separately. If the work grows into something much bigger than one person’s decisions, you adjust the retainer and the scope together. The work is outcome-based, not time-based, within reason: a decision gets worked until it’s ready, not until the clock runs out.

Between sessions

I do homework.

Most advisors arrive with questions and leave you with assignments. It works the other way here. Mike comes having done the reading, and when a session surfaces something that needs more attention, he takes it with him and sends results back before you meet again.

Between sessions, that’s real work on your behalf: customer and employee journey maps, versions of your Reason for Being (the one-page answer to what the business is for), competitor analyses done with his own eyes, sharper pitch decks and presentations, press releases from the future, and service descriptions. He’s also advancing his understanding of your business and your competitors. AI lets him run more scenarios in less time, so you get better options, better draft responses, and communications that land. Say a competitor announces a move the week after you meet: by the time you talk, you have three ways to answer it and a view on which one to take. You get finished pieces, not a list of things to go do.

The written memory

The Captain’s Log: a Storyminers tool for your biggest calls.

The Captain’s Log is a Storyminers tool: a shared, password-protected written record of your significant calls, what was decided, what we believed at the time, what we expected, and what actually happened. The discipline ship captains have kept for centuries, and a way to sharpen your own judgment amid uncertainty. After all, uncertainty isn’t going away.

Its value compounds. Decisions stop getting relitigated from memory, because the why is written down. The people who take on your roles, or need to understand the decisions you made, inherit the thinking, not just the rulings. An interesting effect: patterns show up across entries that nobody could see one decision at a time. And managing gets easier, because “why did we do it this way?” has an answer that doesn’t need a meeting.

Mike co-writes the first entries with you until the habit forms, and you review it together regularly.

The payoff is a company that knows why it does what it does, and a leader who decides with more confidence because the reasoning is yours and it’s written down. Working this way stops taking effort. And when it’s time for others to work this way too, they have a model to watch.

What stays private

Your material stays yours, and you decide what’s on the record.

Client material is used only inside your engagement, never to train AI models. Recording stops when you say so, and notes continue by hand. You’ll know exactly which tools touch your material, and where; it’s all on our How we use AI page.

The Captain’s Log is password-protected by client and by user, and you can see it whenever you want. When we stop, it’s yours to keep. A mutual NDA is always available; just ask.

There’s no formal rule about conflicts; the working one is simpler. The work is to amplify your ideas, not to manufacture them or carry them anywhere else. And if your business handles regulated data, patient records for one, we set the rules for handling it before the first session.

What changes

Your biggest decisions get made sooner, and stay made.

Before the biggest decisions get made, they usually have to wait: for more data, more certainty, and more nerve. And while they wait, the cost of getting them wrong goes up.

With a standing advisor, they get worked in session, tested from a second angle, and announced once instead of walked back twice. The bad hire not made, the lease not signed, the launch not aimed at the wrong market: any one of those can pay for years of this work.

And the thinking spreads. Your reasoning meets pushback in every conversation with Mike before it meets reality, so you get sharper. Your team hears the why behind each call and starts deciding the way you would. The direction holds even when you’re not in the room.

Three clients

Two you can look up. One you can’t.

Julia Michaels and Mike co-founded FullCircle, a nonprofit. He advised it, paid, for about two years, then ran it as executive director, then advised it again from the board, unpaid, until the board chose to carefully close it with purpose. It is here because the advice ran the whole life of the organization. Julia’s own words about it are on the Client Stories page. ShineWell Health’s founder kept him on after the eight-week founder’s brief, as the first hires started running from it. Their stories, and their own words, are on the Client Stories page. The third is a European commodity trading company, anonymous by their choice, on retainer for a year and a half.

What was on the table: modernizing operations, making the business more adaptive, and leaning into an AI future earlier than the company felt ready for. The CEO read his own careful deliberation as reticence, and so did the team; idea exploration and decisions slowed down around it.

The second frame: the reticence wasn’t fear, it was deep care for the enterprise, and applied early it’s a strength. Underneath that, the frame the whole company needed: a commercial enterprise has to state its reason for existing and behave in a way that follows from it. Which jobs belong to people and which to machines is not a question you want to answer for the first time under pressure.

What happened: a foreign debt that had loomed as an existential threat went from something amorphous to precise numbers on a clear calendar, and stopped being one. A trading manual got written. The team that stayed understands what the company is about and what it’s trying to achieve. The CEO now uses that same care on future-oriented ideas and plans with greater confidence, avoiding downstream delays and the cost of slow starts, and is designing the company’s next decade on purpose, a written worldview and an architecture for 2030, instead of waiting for it to arrive. Asked point-blank whether the work was worth it, his answer was that he learned things faster, and differently, than he would have alone. That’s why he stayed.

Two more, worked in session and told without names.

One young leader learned that the effect she was having on the men on her tech team was very different from what she intended. She thought she was being kind and understanding; they thought she was out to get them. We explored the unvarnished feedback from several perspectives. It was hard for her, and it gave her what she needed to change how she worked with the team and how she showed up for it. The suspicion all but disappeared, and her collaboration with her team improved and kept advancing.

One leader felt unqualified to weigh in on company direction, and to lead the technical people who built what the company sold. The reframe: the skill she used every day was already strategy; she just hadn’t called it that. She learned to define strategy and planning in her own terms. It was her job to define what the technology would do, and the technology team’s job to build it. That opened up a run of ideas, some of which shipped.

Price and both our commitments

From $9,000 a month. Three months to start; a quarter at a time after that.

The fee is paid monthly, in advance. The first three months are the minimum, long enough to know whether this is useful; after that we work a quarter at a time. From $9,000 a month; you’ll know the exact cost before you commit. Strategic Advisory is for the company’s big decisions: one session a month on the company, plus the work between sessions and the Captain’s Log. Coaching, also $9,000 a month for the organization’s leader, is for you, growing into the job: two sessions a month on the person. The fee covers the monthly session, one of every three in person, plus whatever comes up in between (the WhatsApp messages, the extra calls, the conversations that can’t wait, within reason), the work between sessions, the Captain’s Log, and travel for the in-person session inside the United States; Canada, Mexico, and overseas travel at cost. The fee is flat; nobody counts hours.

The fee pays for Mike’s judgment on the move you haven’t made before, and for fitting it to the company you have. Say you run an insurance brokerage and decide to let AI answer client questions first, with a person behind it. The service team that knows each client’s renewal date by heart was built for a world where a person answered. Mike works out with you which of those people go in front of the machine, which get retrained to check what it wrote, and the job the company has never had and cannot go forward without: someone who owns every answer the machine gives. Your people build it. The work between sessions goes to catching that before the first client gets a wrong answer.

Here’s the why: a quarter of commitment lets both sides dig in without watching the clock, and lets Mike invest in the outcomes that matter most to you. You keep the retainer because it’s paying for itself, and you’ll be able to tell.

Want to hear how this would run for you? Book a free hour with Mike, no pitch.

Pick a time with Mike

The good ending

Advisory ends well on purpose.

A good ending looks like this: a new design conceived and vetted, people bought in, the results working, and the core ideas so absorbed they’ve become second nature in your company. Confidence has grown, focus has evolved, and maybe there’s something new for us to do together, and maybe not. Most things come to an end, and that’s okay. It’s a celebratory moment, not a remorseful one.

Is this you

This is the right fit if…

Big moves are forming: growth, AI, succession, an exit. You want senior counsel while they’re still open, not a post-mortem after.
You’re carrying the big calls alone, and the people around you are too close, or too invested, to push back.
You want a partner who holds the whole picture across quarters, so the thinking compounds instead of restarting.
You’re already a client, and you want the thinking we built together carried into the decisions that follow.

Where this isn’t a fit.

You want to hand the decision off. This only works if you stay in it.

The time horizon usually defines the fit. If every question in front of you sits inside this quarter, you might prefer a more operational approach. What Mike is good for is the strategic work: the advanced ideas, the thing nobody has been brave enough to try yet, the bets that matter most to the company and the outcomes they can open up. Strategic advisory works because it’s supported by committed time on both sides. Knowing you’ll spend the time, and have the support, is what makes it worth it.

Questions

Four questions people ask before they start, answered straight.

More are on the Questions page of this website.

What is the fee really for?

For a standing advisor on every big decision of the year: a session every month, one of every three in person, and meaningful work completed between sessions. The fee is flat, and nobody has to count the minutes. Measure the value against the year’s moves: new hires, new markets, and AI bets. When one lands right the first time, it’s because it worked in session first. You’ll see the result. You’ll measure the results in gains and avoidances: plans not redone, hires not replaced, and launches not pulled back.

Why not my board or the advisor I already have?

Keep both. Your board governs from a distance and sees an option after it’s formed. I work beside you to form it, before it reaches them. Having an advisor who already knows you and your business is worth a lot. You’ll know the difference because you won’t get second opinions from me. You’ll get second perspectives. Perhaps the most valuable one is the one you hadn’t considered at all before.

What if I just need someone to run it?

You’ll need an operator, not me. Maybe I know someone. Strategic Advisory is for the decisions that aren’t clear yet: the move you haven’t made before. I work with you before you commit to it. Once it’s clear, your own people run it. I can work alongside them in sessions, but the project management always stays theirs.

What do I walk away with when it ends?

The confidence of clarity. A written record of your biggest calls and the reasoning behind them (a Storyminers tool called the Captain’s Log, described above on this page), which your people will inherit. A team that has heard the why often enough to decide the way you would. And a habit: before any big move, asking what else it buys. A reorganization chosen well can also settle who steps up next; an AI bet placed well can also grow the people who run it. Once your team asks “What else can this decision or this money do?” about every budget and hire, you no longer need me to.

The next step

Book a free hour with Mike — no pitch.

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.