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SKIPPER He's The One Come Back

For Businesses

Give Him The Wheel

Imagine the quarter you are quietly dreading — and the person walking into it beside you has already had this exact one, in a business your size, and knows by Wednesday which three things actually matter. He is not bringing you a framework. He has stood where you are standing.

A Day A Week

Somebody In The Room Who Has Nothing To Prove

He is not building a career here. He will say the thing your people are too new, too loyal or too frightened to say, and he will say it on the Tuesday rather than at the review.

A Hard Quarter

For As Long As It Takes And Not A Month Longer

A turn, a launch, an integration, a year that has to go differently. He comes for the shape of the problem and leaves when it is over.

One Call

Ten Minutes With The Man Who Has Made It Before

The decision you cannot get wrong, put to somebody who has already made it and can tell you what happened on the other side.

Six Shapes The Work Takes

He Does One Of Six Things, And The First Conversation Is Working Out Which.

Most briefs go wrong here rather than anywhere else — a business asks for help and gets a shape that was never the shape it needed. Naming it first is half the work, and it takes about a minute.

  1. SteerYou know where it is going. Somebody has to hold the wheel while you build.
  2. BuildThe thing does not exist yet and you have never made one before.
  3. SteadyIt works, and it is fragile, and it cannot wobble this year.
  4. RescueIt has already gone wrong and everybody is being careful with each other.
  5. OpenA new market, a new country, a door somebody has to walk through first.
  6. Hand OverYou are leaving, or somebody is, and it has to survive the leaving.

How You Find Him

Start With An Hour Of His Thinking.

  • An hour, a day, a week or a month.Somebody to go over your pricing on Thursday is a different ask from somebody to steer a quarter, and he says which of them he is open to. Begin at the small end and see.
  • Search what happened, rather than what he was called.A manufacturer eleven months from the wall. A founder who would not say it out loud. You are looking for the man who has already had your year, and a job title has never once told you that.
  • Keep the right man for when you are ready.The work is six months away and he is the one. Keep him on your list and come back to him then, rather than starting again from a blank search.
  • The handover is part of it.Every other board stops caring the day you hire. He leaves you a record of what he did and where the bodies are, because one of the six shapes is handing it over properly.

What The First Conversation Is

He Listens First, And You Will Know Inside The Half Hour.

He will tell you what he is hearing, where he has seen it before, and how long it took him last time. What he will not do is write you the plan before you have engaged him — because the plan is the job, and a man who hands it over has done the work and been paid for none of it.

Engage him and his thinking is yours from the first morning. That is what you are actually buying, and it is why he is still worth having at fifty-eight.

The Skipper Atelier

You Never Write
A Job Advertisement.
You Write A Brief One Man Answers.

Seven questions, and what comes out is an invitation written to one man rather than to a market. Nobody has ever known how to ask for decades of knowing how it goes, which is why the words for it have never existed on a job board.

When it opens, most businesses find they have described the role properly for the first time. It takes about ten minutes, and you keep what it writes whether you go on with us or not.

What It Will Cost When It Opens

A Dollar, Never A Slice Of What You Agree.

  • $349, onceOne job posted, and thirty days of writing to the men you want. Afterwards it drops to the membership if you would like to stay.
  • $199 a monthWrite to the men, hold several conversations at once, and hear when somebody who fits what you are after arrives. Posting opens from your second month.
  • $75 a postingEach job you put up once you are a member, for as long as you are one.

The others take a fifth to two fifths of everything you agree with him, every month, for as long as he is there. We take the figure above and none of what passes between you.

Where We Are Up To

The Men Are Arriving.

Skipper opens to businesses once there are men here worth your afternoon. We would rather you met six and wanted three, than a hundred and wanted none.

Leave your name now and it is held for the day it opens, while the good ones are still unspoken for.

Come In Early

He Has Already Had The Year You Are About To Have.

He is fifty-eight, he has run three of these, and he can tell you in the first week which month it turns. You are hiring the twenty years that taught him where to look — and that is the part nobody on your side of the table has yet.