That’s when strategic advisory with Mike Wittenstein on retainer works best: a 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. Mike has 30 years of first-of-a-kind work behind him, which means helping companies do things nobody has done before.
For owners and CEOs of companies from $20 million to $2 billion who carry the big calls themselves. From $9,000 a month, month to month for the first three, quarters after that. You’ll know the exact number before you commit.
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.
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.
We meet at least monthly, and on-demand 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 meetings are always preferred: a couple of hours when we’re together, with video, phone, and emails in between, quicker and more organic. Mike plans travel so overseas clients see him about twice a year, and U.S., Canada, and Mexico clients about four times.
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. Within reason, Mike works with the leaders around you too, and when he’s in your area he’s glad to join your own meetings; that’s your call. 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Julia Michaels at FullCircle kept Mike on as an advisor from the nonprofit’s founding through its funding model and, in the end, its deliberately designed close. 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.
The first three months are month to month; leave any time, while you decide whether this is useful. After that we work in quarters, paid monthly, renewing a quarter at a time. Typically from $9,000 a month; you’ll know the exact cost before you commit. It covers the monthly session, 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 domestic travel expenses for one in-person visit per quarter. In practice that’s one to two days of Mike’s time a month. The fee is flat; nobody counts hours.
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 MikeA 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.
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.
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.