That question is at the core of how I work — and how I've always worked. Too often the assumption is that something is somebody else's job. I've never been able to leave it there.  If I'm in the room, and it needs doing, I do it.

That approach has held across every role I've ever had, in more industries than most people work in across a lifetime — fine dining, a family bakery, food production, high-end specialty grocery, technology strategy, direct-to-consumer retail, executive search, chief of staff to a chairman, special projects for a global CEO, trade association leader. In almost none of those roles did I arrive with deep industry knowledge. In almost all of them I rose to a senior management position.

That's not a coincidence. It's the same lesson repeated across forty years and a dozen-plus contexts: the thing that moves businesses forward is not knowing the industry. It's knowing how to move people — how to read what's actually blocking progress, assess the skills and will of the people inside the business, and close the gap between where things are and where they need to be.

I work with founder CEOs and the CEOs of growing businesses who have reached the point where they know something has to change. Some clients arrive wanting everything to be better and nothing to be different. The ones I do my best work with have already moved past that — because they're ready to start asking and actually putting into place the answers for the hard questions.