The talent questions are really strategic questions
Who to hire at the leadership level. How to structure the team as the company scales. How to build a succession bench before you need it. These are among the most consequential strategic calls a private company makes.
Most private companies hit their talent ceiling before their market ceiling
Second Stage growth creates a predictable talent problem. The team that built the company to its current size isn't always the team that can take it to the next level. The organizational structure that worked at 20 employees doesn't work at 60. Hiring decisions made by feel accumulate into an org chart that reflects history rather than strategy.
The companies that navigate this well don't solve it by hiring better alone. They develop a deliberate approach to talent: how they identify what they need, how they develop the people they have, and how they build the organizational structure the next stage requires.
Dave helps private company leaders treat these as organizational design calls that will determine whether the growth strategy is executable, rather than HR problems to be managed.
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.
Four areas where talent and strategy intersect
Leadership-level hiring strategy
Strategic clarity on what the leadership team needs, upstream of recruiting. What roles exist today that won't scale. What roles need to be created. What profile to hire for at each level. How to evaluate candidates against a strategy.
Organizational design
How the company is structured - reporting relationships, functional responsibilities, where decisions live - directly affects how fast it can move and how well it executes. Dave helps leaders treat organizational design as a strategic question, not a management question.
Succession planning
Most privately-held and family businesses don't have a succession plan. Most know they should. Dave helps companies build a succession approach that's realistic: a plan for developing the people who will actually lead the company forward, not a theoretical org chart exercise.
Leadership bench development
Identifying high-potential leaders and building a deliberate development path for them. The talent question and the leadership question are usually the same question.
Talent decisions in family businesses are more complicated. That's a problem to solve, not avoid
In a family business, talent and ownership are often entangled. Questions about who leads the company get intertwined with questions about who owns it, who has worked for it the longest, and what promises have been made - explicit or implied - over years of building the business together.
Dave has worked in family businesses long enough to understand these dynamics without being paralyzed by them. The goal is to help leaders make good decisions that respect the relationships while still putting the right people in the right roles.
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