About
I'm a docent. I stand with you while you see it for yourself.
A docent is a non-directive guide on the side. I stand with people as they encounter something for the first time, asking questions, trading interpretations, surfacing details they hadn't found and correlations they hadn't drawn, and letting the understanding emerge rather than telling them what to think. That is the role, and it is also the method. All the results, none of the pressure, never a rush.
You built the thing. You'll be the one running it long after I'm gone. So the work has to leave you understanding your own business better, not understanding me better.
Peter on this page
(coming)
The Role
A docent does not own the museum.
Most consultants are valets. You hand over the keys, they drive your business around for a while, and it comes back with the seat moved. I never take the keys. You were driving the whole time. I ride along, I know the route, and when you don't need the route anymore, I get out of the car.
Most of the answer is already in the room, sitting in plain sight, and the people who built it are the ones best placed to see it. My job is to ask the question that turns it over, put traction under what's there, and train the people who have to run it Monday.
I don't guarantee results. Anyone who guarantees results is selling snake oil. What I hold is the standard of the work and the shape of the engagement: a fixed price, a fixed timeline, and a named finish line, all of it published before you start.
The Argument
The third spaces are closing. Human relationship is the last moat standing.
Business used to get made in third spaces. The conference hallway. The industry bar. The standing Thursday lunch. The guy who knew a guy. None of it sat on a dashboard, and all of it was the pipeline.
Those rooms went digital or went away, and what replaced them is process. We score people now. We assign a number to a human being using variables that broke two years ago and metrics that describe a market that no longer exists, and then we let the number decide who gets our morning. Everyone knows the number is soft. Everyone cites it anyway.
Scoring is not judgment. It's an excuse with a decimal point.
AI moved everything on the supply side and nothing on the demand side. A model can write your outreach, score your pipeline, and read four hundred résumés before lunch. It cannot be owed a favor. It cannot vouch for you. It cannot be the person a founder calls at eleven at night. Supply went infinite. Demand still runs on trust, and trust is still made between people.
The businesses that come through this stretch are the ones whose relationships were real before they needed them to be. That is the moat. It cannot be copied, it cannot be automated, and it cannot be bought late.
Which is why, when we work, we treat your relationships as infrastructure rather than networking. Who owes you a callback, and why. Who will say your name in a room you are not in. Which customers renew because of the product and which renew because of a person.
The Range
I joke that I've worked in every industry except Caves and Horses.
Cars, beer, restaurants, delivery logistics, experiential, federal, developer tools. Multi-racial, multi-location, multi-demographic, multi-dollar, multi-industry. I'm a strong believer in Standpoint Theory, and I am not going to borrow a frame built by and for marginalized communities to describe my own path.
Here is exactly what the range is for. Not that it makes me better, but it helps me relate with more people, understand collaboration better, understand growth better, and just experiment better than folks coming from one spot. It is an aid to relating. It is not a credential of insight, and I won't sell it as one.
I've built big and lost big. Proud failpreneur. You don't want a guide who has only ever won.
I don't have anything to prove that I can't. I'm looking for opportunities to prove more.
The Rules
What I run on, in the room and out of it.
- Always try to be nice, never fail to be kind. Soft and false is flattery. Hard and useless is cruelty. I aim for a soft delivery and the total truth, and when I miss, I miss toward the truth.
- Dissent is the highest form of growth. Tell me I'm wrong, out loud, in the call. I'd rather be corrected in an hour than agreed with for a quarter.
- Engineer growth, don't chase it. Chasing is a spend. Engineering is a system that still runs when the spend stops.
- Don't confuse effort with results, and you don't have a customer until you have a renewal. Two different ways of counting a win too early.
- Any problem that can be solved with money is not a problem at all. That one is my mother's.
Still in the Arena
None of this is work I used to do.
The tools, the courses, and the thinking on this site come out of what I'm running today.
The One I'm Bad At
The cobbler's kids have no shoes.
I can build the revenue engine for someone else's business and go quiet about my own. Selling myself is the one thing I'm genuinely bad at, which is part of why the prices, the scope, and the terms are published on this site instead of pitched at you. If the work has to speak, let it speak in public.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
Bring the thing you can't get a straight answer about. Your product, your pricing, your pipeline, the story you keep having to re-explain. We'll work it live, and you'll leave with the details you hadn't found and the correlations you hadn't drawn.
One first call, the same call for everyone, no tiers and no qualifying round. If it isn't something I do, I'll say so, and I'll probably have someone to refer you to.