Insights
The short version: we kept solving the same problems inside that we could solve outside.
We are married. We should get that out of the way since it is the first question everyone asks. Yes, we work together. No, it is not weird. Or maybe it is and we have been doing it long enough that we forgot to notice.
Between the two of us, we have spent about thirty years inside one of the world's largest medical technology companies. Dave on the talent and learning side. Hillary in operations, running integrated business planning and supply chain analytics. Different functions, different buildings sometimes, and we kept bumping into the same problems from opposite angles.
The leadership program that was beautifully designed and changed nothing on the floor. The planning process that generated pristine decks and fell apart in the first week of execution. The technology deployed to solve a problem nobody had while the real problem sat in someone's inbox getting ignored.
We have talked about this a lot. Most of it over wine, which is how most of our real conversations happen. What we kept coming back to is that the organizations struggling most were not short on talent or budget or ambition. They were short on someone willing to connect the pieces. People strategy in HR. Operational strategy in supply chain. Technology strategy in IT. Nobody owning the space between them. And an instinct to restructure and reduce when the real problem was never the headcount. It was how the capability was understood, organized, and used.
At some point that conversation became: we could fix that. From the outside.
We live in Leelanau County. We have watched businesses here come and go for years, and we have a strong hunch about why most of them struggle. It is almost never rent. It is almost never location. It is underleveraged data and insights sitting inside their own operations. A restaurant that does not know its real margin. A shop that has never looked at its booking data. A seasonal business running on instinct when the numbers could tell them something genuinely useful.
We can see things in an afternoon that take most owners months to notice, if they notice at all. We want the businesses in this area to thrive. That is not a positioning statement. We live here.
Dave will tell you that AI is the most significant shift in how work gets done in decades, and he is not being hyperbolic. Most organizations right now are using it the way people used Google in 1999 — you can ask it a question and get an answer. That is useful. It is also a fraction of what is actually available.
The shift most companies are not ready for is agentic AI. Systems that do not just answer questions but go do things. Research, drafting, file management, tracking, scheduling. Work a person does click by click that an AI handles in seconds. One person managing AI agents can produce what previously required a team. This is not a future prediction. It is happening now, and the gap between organizations that understand it and those that have locked it out entirely is growing faster than most people realize.
We are not here to sell AI. We are here to help organizations figure out where it actually applies and what it will take to make it real inside the way they already work.
Leland Blue stones are slag from old iron smelting furnaces on the Lake Michigan shore near our home in Leelanau County. Industrial byproduct that tumbled in the water for over a century until it became something people collect and treasure. Industrial origins, refined by time and environment. We liked that.
We are not building a big firm. We are building a focused one. Two principals. No associates getting trained on your dime. When you hire us, you get us.
If that sounds like what you need, let's talk.
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