The leadership team you have got you here. You need a different one to get you there
Second Stage growth requires a different kind of leadership. Building it is one of the hardest things a private company does.
Most Second Stage companies have a leadership gap before they know they have one
The early leadership team at a private company is built for execution. They're great at doing the work, managing up to the founder, and getting things done in a fast, flat organization.
As the company grows, the job changes. It stops being about doing and starts being about leading: building teams, setting direction, holding people accountable, and developing the judgment to make decisions without asking for permission. For most high-performing managers, this transition doesn't happen automatically - it requires deliberate development.
The companies that navigate Second Stage growth well invested in their leadership bench before the pressure was at its worst. The ones that struggle are the ones where the founder stayed in the middle too long because no one was ready to step up.
Private companies where the work is personal.
Dave's clientsare owners and leaders of private companies: family businesses, closely-held companies,and founder-led firms where decisions carry real weight and relationshipsmatter. Not publicly traded. Not on a venture capital timeline. Running on thefounder's conviction, the leadership team's trust, and years of built equity.
These are $1M to$20M companies. Thirty employees or a hundred. Services businesses,manufacturers, professional firms. What they share: a leader who takes the workseriously, cares about the culture they've built, and needs a thinking partnerwho can hold up in the room.
Three kinds of leadership development work
Executive team development
The leadership team as a unit: individual leaders and how they work together. Strategic alignment, decision-making culture, accountability dynamics, and the ability to have the hard conversations that organizational health requires. Dave facilitates working sessions that address both individual and team performance, and shift the behaviors and culture of the leadership team.
Working with rising leaders
High-potential managers being prepared for larger roles - worked with directly through workshops, facilitated sessions, and one-on-one development conversations. Built around the specific challenges of leading in a private company: how to stop doing and start leading, how to navigate a founder-led organization, how to build your own leadership voice rather than imitating the one above you.
One-on-one leadership coaching
For individual leaders - typically C-suite or senior VP - navigating a significant transition: a new role, a meaningful stretch in responsibility, or a specific leadership challenge they're working through.
Built around your organization, not a curriculum
Generic leadership training has a place. This isn't that.
Dave's leadership development work is built around the specific challenges the leaders in your organization are actually facing: the dynamics of your ownership structure, the culture you've built, the gaps between where your leadership team is and where it needs to be. The frameworks create immediate self-recognition - leaders see themselves in the concept, not a textbook case study.
The work is facilitative, not didactic. Dave leads conversations more than he delivers content. The goal is changed thinking and changed behavior, not completed modules.
Developing high-potential managers before the pressure is at its worst
Most Second Stage companies have managers who are talented, hardworking, and not yet operating as leaders. They're still in doing mode: executing well, but not yet leading teams, setting direction, or building the capability around them that the next stage of growth requires.
Dave works with these managers directly through workshops, facilitated group sessions, and one-on-one development conversations built around the specific gaps in their company and their role. The focus is the transition from individual contributor to leader: how to delegate without losing control, how to have hard conversations productively, how to build a team identity rather than manage a collection of direct reports.
It's built around the leadership challenges those managers are navigating in their specific organization.
.webp)
.webp)
