Why We Started

The work I am describing exists at an intersection that most advisors find uncomfortable: where strategy, leadership, and the very human difficulty of changing something that used to work all arrive in the same room. Most advisory practices pick one. They are strategy shops, or they are executive coaches, or they are organizational consultants. The inflection point does not let you pick one.

What I have seen, over and over, in private equity, in family enterprise, in PE-backed operating companies, is that the moments that actually determine outcomes are the ones where the strategic question and the human question are the same question. Who is the right person to lead this next chapter? Can this team make this change together? Is the board relationship strong enough to survive what we are about to ask of it? These are not separable problems.

The inflection point does not let you separate the strategy question from the people question. That is the whole challenge.

Changegoat was built to work in that intersection. Not to hand over a framework and leave. Not to run a process that produces recommendations no one fully owns. To be present in the room when the hard conversations happen, and to stay through the implementation, because the recommendation is not the product. The change is the product.

The name is a small provocation. A mountain goat goes where other animals cannot, not because it is reckless, but because it is precise. Patient. Willing to read the terrain before it moves. When it moves, it commits. I chose it because it describes the spirit of the work: the willingness to go to the hard place, and the patience to do it right.

This newsletter, Goat Shit, is where I think out loud about what I am learning. It goes out when there is something worth saying. That is the only promise.