For His Board and Advisors
Honest answers to the questions that matter.
If you are responsible for him, or for what depends on him, you are weighing one question: does bringing in an advisor reduce your exposure, or add to it?
Here is where I sit relative to everyone else at the table. The lawyers have the legal. The communications team has the narrative. The wealth managers have the finances. All of them need a client who is stable, credible, and capable of showing up unencumbered, and none of them are responsible for making that true. I am. Every other advisor works on the situation. I work on the man.
The absence problem
A man in this position is usually offered two things: talk therapy that barely scratches the surface, or a facility that takes him away from his life for a month or longer, which, honestly, is sometimes the right call. When it is, I will say so. When it is not, the absence potentially forces a disclosure conversation, an interim structure, and a leak risk you cannot fully control. What I offer is another path forward. The work happens in real time while he stays present in his life. No absence, no gap for anyone to notice or exploit.
How this moves
When the situation is acute, the work starts at the speed the situation demands, not according to a calendar. If the moment requires it, he can fly me in, and the first forty-eight hours of stabilization happen in person.
The first step is bounded
Every engagement begins with The First Ten Days, a private assessment or stabilization of the man and his current reality: where the drinking, and the surrounding behavior, actually stand, what they have affected, and what the reconstruction will require. It is a flat fee, amount discussed in our first conversation, and it ends with a documented plan he keeps either way. It commits him to nothing beyond the ten days, unless he chooses to continue. If you are weighing an introduction, that is the shape of what you would be proposing: ten days, in complete confidence, not an open-ended engagement.
Confidentiality, as architecture
Every engagement is covered by a mutual NDA. The only records are our call notes and my working notes. Nothing leaves the containment of the engagement, and no one else sees them. I am not his attorney or his physician, so I do not carry legal privilege, and I will never pretend otherwise. What I offer is a disciplined container, deliberately kept off the record, full coordination with counsel on anything that touches legal exposure, and with his physician when the situation calls for a medical opinion.
The background
I have been in this work for twenty-nine years, on both sides of it: ten years of the steady decline into the depths of my own fire, and five years at the bottom of the abyss, my first trip to rehab in 2007, and I have been on the other side of it since 2012. The professional side includes executives and teams from Google, LinkedIn, Uber, JPMorgan Chase, Keller Williams, and Amazon. That history is public and verifiable. The private practice is not: no client of this work is ever named, including to you.
References
For serious inquiries, private conversations can be arranged with former clients who have offered to speak, under the same NDA architecture.
How I work alongside the apparatus
I do not replace the general counsel or the communications team, and I do not step into their work. I operate underneath it, on the man they are all working to protect, in a way that reinforces their strategy rather than complicating it.
What I will not do
I will not take an engagement a man does not choose for himself. Mandated help fails, and you have likely watched it fail. If he does not believe he needs this, I am not the answer, and I will tell you so directly.
If you want to talk before he does, that conversation is confidential and commits him to nothing.
Reach me directly