An operator, not a career consultant.
For ten years I owned and ran a company through one of the most challenging stretches in recent memory. Major restructuring, rapid growth, big shifts in the industry, a pandemic, contraction, serious financial trouble, clawing the lost ground back, and out the other side to a successful exit. I'd argue I saw more in those ten years than a lot of owners see in twenty.
I know what it's like to lose sleep over payroll. To have a leadership team that nods in the meeting and then goes and does its own thing. To want the business to be better, to know it could be, and to not know how to get there. I lived all of it, and I came through it the hard way: my own education, bringing in the right people, making plenty of mistakes and learning from them, and leaning on good outside advisors when I needed them.
It wasn't the first time, either. Before I owned my own company, I helped grow a previous employer's business from three employees to thirty, as its operations leader and part of the leadership team. I wasn't the owner that time, though I did hold equity, but I was right in it, hands on across every part of the business.
Along the way I also spent years in a peer group of business owners, learning from and helping dozens of others work through their own hard problems. I've watched a lot of owners face a lot of different challenges first hand, and been part of getting them through.