Why Changegoat

Investors, founders, and management teams hire me when they want to break something bad and build something better.

Break something bad (habit), broken (bone), or wild (animal). Most companies past their first decade have at least one of the three. The habit is a weekly meeting nobody can say the purpose of, the bone is a decision from five years ago that everyone works around, and the animal is a market or a sales motion that has gone through three heads of sales. Each one costs a little every quarter, and the meeting where somebody could say so happens every week.

I get hired at transitions. A founder is handing the company to someone who isn't him, a family is deciding whether the business is still a family business, or a sponsor's thesis that was right in year one has the management team arguing with it by year three. All three arrive at the same moment, when yesterday's answers return an awkward silence. Nobody wants to be the one who says it, because saying it starts the change, and the people who built the company are listening.

Changegoat is a spirit animal, a coyote. The changegoat appears around transitions. When in transition the old is going and the new is not yet. The changegoat stays until the replacement is running.

A framework and a deck would be the easier sale. No widget-based quick fixes. Changegoat was set up to offer a gift, not sell a commodity. In this trade the gift is saying the sentence your team has agreed not to say, and staying through the change it starts.

I post when there is something to say.