I step in for 90 to 120 days to get your initiative delivering the business case, then hand your team the system to run the next one without me.
Former COO of Field Productivity at New York Life Led Capital One’s Secured Card from launch to one million customers
The situation
Most organizations set the direction for a big initiative and assume the work will specify itself.
So the team building it makes dozens of reasonable local decisions every week, and nothing ties those decisions back to the business case. Nobody owns the handoffs between teams, and irreversible choices get made by default. People keep their concerns to themselves because raising them feels like standing in front of a moving train.
The activity underway looks like delivery — updates, artifacts, and meetings — right up until you compare what shipped to what was intended. By then the forecasted results aren’t coming, and your credibility takes the hit. The next time someone proposes a big bet, the organization is more gun-shy.
The conventional playbook doesn’t solve this. A strong project manager, more town halls, and more feature work help only after the strategy is sound and the organization is behind it. Before that, they just paper over the problem. The work that comes first is surfacing and closing the gaps between the vision and expected results.
What I Do
Status reports track milestones, so they stay green while those gaps stay open. Here’s where gaps arise and what I do about each.
What breaks: The plan rests on assumptions nobody has tested against customers or the numbers.
What I do: I stress-test the business case and talk directly with customers, producers, and your team.
What breaks: What you’ve learned about customers and the organization never makes it back into the strategy.
What I do: I rework the strategy and plans around what’s actually true and get the stakeholders behind it.
What breaks: The product and technology plans each make sense alone, but don’t add up to the strategy or support each other.
What I do: I test the plans against the strategy and each other, and we resolve what doesn’t line up.
What breaks: It ships, and then…silence. The numbers never move.
What I do: I lead the rollout, enablement, and go-to-market so producers, customers, and staff actually use it.
Close all four gaps and the initiative delivers what the business case promised. Your team keeps the system for the next one.
Who It’s For
You’re responsible for an initiative you can’t afford to fall short on, and:
Recognize any of these? The 10-question diagnostic shows where your initiative is exposed and what to fix first.
Get the free guide →How It Works
The engagement runs 90 to 120 days, in three phases.
I stress-test the business case and talk one-on-one with customers, your team, and the stakeholders who’ll decide whether it gets adopted.
I test the product, technology, and rollout plans against the business case and against each other, and we resolve what doesn’t line up.
We run the operating system together until the initiative has momentum, then I hand it to a named successor.
Results
30%
higher sales conversion for new agents
Before: A 12,000-person field force with no modern selling tools, at a company that had never shipped a digital product for agents.
What I did: Built New York Life’s first digital product function and took a proof-of-concept prototype to an enterprise selling platform.
1M+
customers acquired
Before: After the financial crisis, millions of Americans were being declined for credit with nowhere to go.
What I did: Launched the Secured Card, from product design and underwriting model to acquisition strategy. It became Capital One’s highest-volume online credit product.
Testimonials
I’ve built and led product, marketing, credit, and sales enablement teams, first at Capital One and then for ten years at New York Life. Initiatives tend to break in the handoffs between those functions. I’ve sat on every side of them, so I can usually find the problem and fix it directly.
I’ve also built and sold two businesses with my own money, one in direct-to-consumer publishing and one in direct-to-consumer medical device sales. Launch discipline is different when every dollar is yours.
JD from Harvard, MBA from Wharton.
The guide shows where initiatives like yours break down and where yours is exposed. It includes one exercise you can use right now that will tell you more than the last six weekly status reports did.
Send me the Guide and Diagnostic
Running a function well and holding together a cross-functional initiative take different skills. And everyone you’d assign already has a full-time job keeping the current business running.
Most consulting engagements are staffed by people who’ve studied organizations like yours but never run one. I’ve sat in your chair, and I stay in the work until the critical decisions are made and the system runs without me.
If you have a permanent need and can afford an executive at this level, hiring makes sense. For a finite initiative, most companies can’t justify the headcount, and a search takes time you don’t have.
It’s free, it’s 30 minutes, and it isn’t a sales presentation. I’ll walk you through the same questions I use at the start of every engagement. By the end you’ll know what’s missing, what risks you’re exposed to, and what order to address them in.