The approach
Fix the root,not the symptom.
Almost nobody is stuck for the reason they think they are. Here's how I find the real blocker, help you make the call, and turn it into something you can actually keep building on.
Almost nobody is stuck for the reason they think they are. Here's how I find the real blocker, help you make the call, and turn it into something you can actually keep building on.
These are the six sentences I hear most often from people trying to build something. In every one of them, the thing being described is a symptom — and the fix lives one level down.
Nothing here is exotic. It's just done in the right sequence, with someone next to you who has made these calls before and isn't afraid to be direct about them.
We start with what's actually there: what you've built so far, what people said when you showed them, and where the work keeps stalling. Not a workshop — a hard look at the real constraint. We usually find it in the first session, and it's rarely the one you booked the call about.
Building is mostly choosing what you're not going to make. We name who it's for, the problem it ends, and the smallest version that proves it — and write it down so it stops getting re-litigated every week. This is the uncomfortable part, and the part that changes everything downstream.
A decision on paper isn't worth much. We get it built and in front of real people fast — in conversations, in a demo, on a live page — and watch what happens. If it doesn't land, we say so and adjust, instead of defending it for a quarter.
Then we turn what worked into a rhythm you can run without me: a cadence, a short list of things that matter, and a way to tell whether they're working. The goal is always that you keep building, not that you keep the coach.
Advice evaporates. Artifacts don't. Every session leaves behind something concrete — usually something you built during it.
One page: who it's for, what it replaces, and why it's worth making. Short enough that you can repeat it from memory.
The smallest version that proves the idea, with everything else explicitly parked — not deleted, parked, which is the only version people accept.
A live page, a working prototype, a first version in someone's hands. Not a plan to ship it — the shipped thing.
The one line that makes the right person lean in, and one channel you'll actually run — in what order, with what you expect it to do.
The weekly rhythm that keeps the build alive after the excitement of starting it wears off — which it always does.
The one that compounds, and the whole reason this is teaching and not doing. After a few months you make the next calls yourself, faster and with less second-guessing.
And these days a visible body of work beats a resume — it's evidence, not claims. So I help people build both: the thing itself, and the reputation that makes people trust them before the first conversation.
This approach isn't a framework I invented for a slide. It's twenty-five years of building and teaching, distilled into four principles — and told as a business fable in my book, What Holds Up the Roof. If you want the thinking before you want the help, start there.
Book thirty minutes. Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck, and I'll tell you what I think is actually going on — whether or not we ever work together.
Book 30 minutes with me