For His Board, Advisors, and Teams
Answers to the questions that help navigate the situation.
If you are in business with him, or with what depends on him, you are weighing two questions:
How do we approach him and move through this?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 happen. I am. Every other advisor works on the situation. I work on the man.
The absence problem
Men in this position are 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 is sometimes the right call. When it is not, the absence forces a disclosure conversation, an interim structure, a leak risk you cannot fully control, and a recalibration on the back end. The work I do happens in real time while he stays present in his life. No absence, no gap for anyone to notice or exploit.
The first move
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.
How it begins
Every engagement begins with a private conversation with me, in complete confidence and with no obligation on either side. If we go forward, the first ten days are a private, contained, and structured look at the man and his current reality: where the drinking, or whatever the behavior is, actually stands, what it has affected, and what the reconstruction will require. If stabilization is needed, it starts on day one. The engagement itself is twelve months of private advisory, and the structure is discussed privately. If you are weighing how to make an introduction, that is the shape of it: one confidential conversation, not a program he has to sign on to in the room.
Confidentiality
Every engagement is covered by a mutual NDA and a contract. Nothing leaves the containment of the engagement, and no one else sees any of it. Records are kept to a minimum by design: my working notes and call notes, nothing else. If a court ever compels them, he and his counsel hear it from me first, and I produce nothing beyond what the law requires. I am not his attorney or his physician, so I do not carry legal privilege. I am not a licensed therapist or clinician, and this work is not a substitute for medical or psychiatric care. I coordinate with counsel and the team on anything that touches legal exposure, and with his physician when the situation calls for a medical opinion. I never speak about clients, publicly or privately, to media or to anyone else.
The background
Twenty-nine years in this work, on both sides of it: ten years of the steady decline into my own addiction, five years at the bottom of it, and the other side of the work since 2012. My professional engagements have included executives and teams from Google, LinkedIn, Uber, JPMorgan Chase, Keller Williams, and Amazon.
References
For serious inquiries, private conversations can be arranged with former clients who have offered to speak, under the same NDA.
How I work within the existing ecosystem
I do not replace the general counsel or the communications team. I operate underneath them, on the man they are all working to protect, in a way that reinforces their strategy. When needed, I coordinate with those teams.
What I will not do
I will not take an engagement a man does not choose for himself. Mandated help fails. 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.
Send me a confidential message