Real leaders.
Real decisions.
Real outcomes.

The Challenge

Dave needed a transition plan with three interlocking objectives that rarely get addressed together: define a governance model that would protect the company's culture for generations; provide financially for his family long-term; and restructure ownership to reward the key leaders who had helped build the business.

He also wanted to ensure that any future leadership transition would preserve the Christ-centered foundation — not just on paper, but in how decisions got made day to day.

What We Did

• Conducted one-on-one interviews with leaders and key contributors throughout the company to clarify and document the organization's culture.
• Assessed existing practices that supported and protected the culture — and identified gaps.
• Recommended a comprehensive business operating system to embed the culture into daily operations.
• Facilitated a strategy workshop to refine the operating system and prioritize implementation.
• Working alongside Dave, legal counsel, and the company's accountant, designed and implemented an F-reorganization (IRS Section 368(a)(1)(F)) to transition ownership in alignment with Dave's goals.
• Built a governance structure into the new Operating Agreements to protect cultural continuity through future leadership changes.

Russ continues to meet monthly with Dave and Tim, providing strategic coaching focused on cultural alignment and sustainable growth.

The Challenge

Gabe had built a bestselling book, a viral Kickstarter campaign that raised $1.7M, and a pre-seed round of $4.9M. What he hadn't yet built was a framework for making consistent decisions, a leadership team with shared strategic alignment, or the habits of mind that make a first-time CEO effective.

The goals were direct: help Gabe learn what it means to be CEO, create a strategic framework for consistent planning and decision-making, and unite the new leadership team around a shared foundation.

What We Did

Gabe and Russ began meeting weekly via Zoom, working through current challenges — and designing monthly virtual strategy workshops that Gabe would lead with his globally distributed team. The workshops were designed to be engaging, to build team skills, and to answer the critical strategy questions a company at that stage needs to answer.

Together the team aligned around five foundations:

• Defining a clear company purpose.
• Crafting a growth strategy.
• Prioritizing initiatives.
• Establishing KPIs and accountability.
• Conducting a competitive assessment through wargaming.

With the core strategy in place, the advisory relationship continued — coaching Gabe through key opportunities including new product offerings, market expansion, and potential acquisitions.

The Context

Altimeter's value proposition was built on tracking student check-ins to live in-person events — which came to a halt in March 2020. Its primary market was small Christian universities, several of which were themselves at risk of closing. Had the company still been operating, it would have faced a genuine existential question: pivot, acquire, or wind down?

Rather than treat that question abstractly, Russ walked through the full strategic response — using the real company, real market data, and real decision-making frameworks.

The Process

• Macro-environmental and industry analysis to identify key trends and uncertainties.
• Selected two primary uncertainties to construct four distinct future scenarios.
• Applied scenario analysis to assess the likelihood and implications of each path.
• Identified four strategic options for navigating the crisis.
• Defined evaluation criteria and applied a strategy sieve to select the strongest path forward.
• Designed an ongoing monitoring process to adapt as conditions changed.

What This Illustrates

The Altimeter walkthrough demonstrates what rigorous strategy looks like for a small organization under real pressure: not just a list of options, but a structured process for making a defensible decision in uncertainty.

This is the kind of thinking — scenario-based, criteria-driven, adaptive — that I bring to every engagement. The tools scale down for small businesses without losing their rigor.