What actually happened.

The best endorsement in this business isn't a testimonial. It's a CEO who takes a new job and calls you in his first month.

That's what happened here. Three years of work with a utility CEO on a formal leadership development program for his executive team. It didn't stay formal, and it didn't stay with the executives. It became an organic development effort reaching supervisors, foremen, and emerging leaders across the organization.

When he moved to lead a larger utility in another market, he brought the work with him. Same starting point: his new executive team. Then the same expansion, at greater scale. In-person leadership training for nearly 50 supervisors, and one-on-one coaching for a newly promoted plant manager responsible for more than 80 people in a rural community.

It has since moved up to governance: self-assessments for the board of directors, a 360 evaluation on the CEO himself, and a two-day board retreat.

Mitch is very talented, knowledgeable, and very personable, which helps him to connect and really help get to the root of the problems that need addressing. He is a huge asset to me as a leader when I need someone I can trust to be an honest sounding board or to provide advice.

An inbound request for executive team alignment and help facilitating strategic planning. Reasonable ask.

Three weeks of interviews said otherwise. Strategy wasn't the problem. The problem was that the executive team couldn't put a hard issue on the table and work it honestly. Individual agendas were doing the talking. Strategy was just where it showed up.

It began with a two-day offsite and a strategic playbook, then became something steadier. A regular seat in executive team meetings, facilitating, checking strategy against what people were actually deciding.

What it became: company-wide training on the focused execution of strategy. Mid-level leader development. A tiger team assembled to save a delivery commitment to a major partner, cross-functional, silos down, problem solved. They delivered. The partnership survived.

Since then: additional joint ventures and joint development agreements won on the strength of having delivered on the first. A capital raise that extended their runway. Program management now coordinated across centers of excellence, and the company moving out of R&D into real production.

The hardest change came first, and it was theirs to make. Two members of the executive team weren't interested in collaborative work, they were interested in position. The team got restructured. What everyone says now is that they have conversations and make decisions they simply couldn't have made before.

The first ask was a more cohesive executive team. It didn't stay there.

Over the next four years the work ran roughly monthly across their North American operations and at the parent company abroad. Strategy development, then execution support. Business intelligence systems so they could see whether the strategy was actually moving. Employee development across multiple locations. Coaching for nearly the entire executive team, and a restructuring of it. Two CEO transitions, onboarded.

Work continued at lower intensity through a quieter stretch, individual and team coaching, targeted training.

They've now asked for the largest piece yet: a global initiative to double the business by 2030. The chief executive and chief operating officer wanted someone who already knows the company, the history, and the people. The scope spans operations on five continents, clarifying the strategy, building regional executive teams that can carry it, and holding momentum long enough for it to happen.

Eight years of institutional knowledge is the reason they called. That's the part you can't buy from a firm.

An HR leader from a previous engagement took a new role and opened the door. The first job was mid-level manager training.

It didn't stay mid-level. Within a year the role had become something closer to an adjunct seat on the executive team. Coaching the CEO, coaching nearly every executive, running alignment work, developing emerging leaders, taking on special projects. More than 40 executive and mid-level leaders across the engagement.

The underlying challenge was one a lot of founder-led companies hit. The company had grown from a family kitchen operation selling to regional grocers into a nationally recognized brand approaching $175 million. Many of the leaders had grown up inside it. The scale had changed faster than the operating habits.

What changed:

• Manufacturing OEE moved from roughly 33% to roughly 80%.
• Scrap rate dropped from the low 40s to about 15%.
• Their first significant new product in years launched, with the innovation team building a better process for bringing stakeholders in early.
• The executive team got right. Some people left who needed to. Several emerging leaders moved into senior roles.

None of that came from a framework. It came from teams being able to name the most important issue and actually talk about it, and then doing the hard part themselves.

It started with assessment training for every general manager, assistant GM, and department manager across their facilities. Then an organizational health assessment. Then coaching for individual leaders.

The organization was invested in training, and the CEO wanted development conversations to be routine. What he needed was a way to turn a wealth of assessment data into verifiable patterns and practical recommendations, without adding weight to anyone's week.

So we built something. We simplified their 360 and rebuilt it around their competency model and their values, then used AI to consolidate everything into a single leadership inventory for each leader. Practical enough to actually read. Specific enough to tell you how to work with the person across the table.

Every location. All 140 leaders.

What's changed: recognition that a mature industry had made them tactical, and a deliberate effort to build strategic thinking, showing up now in capital investment decisions. And general managers who will tell you they know how to bring out the best in the person next to them.

It started the way a lot of this work starts. Someone inside the organization sensed something was wrong culturally, couldn't name it, and asked for leadership training.

The training went fine. Then came executive team work, and the executive team work kept not taking. Sessions would land. Agreements would hold for a few weeks. Then the same patterns returned. When that happens more than twice, the problem usually isn't the team.

It sat above the team. And that's the hardest kind of finding to deliver, because it isn't a consultant's to deliver. A board has to arrive at it, with its own evidence, on its own timeline.

The most valuable contribution here wasn't naming the problem. It was helping the board build a process it could trust: what to look at, what questions to ask, how to weigh what it was hearing, and what its fiduciary duty actually required. That work is slow by design. Boards don't get there because someone announces a conclusion.

They got there. They made a change at the top, carefully and cleanly.

They also reached a second conclusion that mattered as much: what the organization needed next wasn't a technical expert. It was a leader.

They hired one. He tells the truth, moves on problems early, and gets people talking honestly. The cohesion work that had been theory finally became practice. Strategic planning followed. Mid-level development that actually landed.

Today they're making sharp decisions about what they're genuinely best at, and making them cleanly.

They don't need much outside help anymore. That was the point.