Strategy for private companies at the inflection point
A working relationship with a strategic advisor who helps you figure out where you're going, make the call, and get your leadership team to own it too.
You're making big decisions without anyone to push back on them
CEOs and owners of private companies are unusually isolated when it comes to strategic thinking. The board, if there is one, isn't in the weeds. The leadership team has functional agendas. The trusted advisors - accountant, attorney, banker - are expert in their domains but not equipped to think about the business as a whole.
The owner ends up doing most of the strategic thinking alone, or in conversation with a team that has too much at stake in the outcome to challenge the premise.
Dave serves as the strategic thinking partner: the person who holds the tension between ambition and reality, asks the uncomfortable questions, and helps you make decisions you can actually defend.
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.
What strategic advisory looks like
Direction-setting
Where is the company going? A clear, grounded answer to what you're building, who you serve, what tradeoffs you're making, and why. The conversations that produce that clarity are the foundation of everything else.
Decision support
The strategic calls that matter most - entering a new market, restructuring the leadership team, navigating an ownership transition - benefit from a thinking partner who has seen similar situations and can stress-test the logic before the decision is made.
Leadership team alignment
A strategy the leadership team doesn't believe in doesn't get executed. Dave facilitates the working sessions that build alignment, not the room where everyone agrees and then nothing changes.
Planning without the planning theater
Many private companies have had strategic planning experiences that produced documents but didn't change how decisions get made. Dave's work produces clarity that shows up in daily decisions, not a deck that lives in a shared drive.
Private company owners who need a thinking partner, not a methodology
The clients who get the most from strategic advisory work with Dave tend to share a few characteristics.
They're the decision-maker. Dave works at the CEO and owner level: the person who has to own the strategic direction.
They're at an inflection point: rapid growth, a leadership transition, a market shift, a question about whether to stay independent or explore a transaction. The situations where strategic stakes are highest and operating on instinct alone is no longer enough.
They take the work seriously. They want their thinking challenged.
Most of Dave's strategic advisory work happens at the Second Stage
A Second Stage company has outgrown its startup model but hasn't yet developed the systems, leadership team, and organizational capacity of a mature company. Strategy becomes more complicated, not because the market is harder, but because the company's own internal dynamics start generating as much complexity as the external environment.
Dave has spent 20 years working in this zone. The pattern recognition he brings to strategic conversations comes from hundreds of these inflection points across industries and ownership structures.
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