Pick 1 Problem, and call me.

When a high-growth founder or executive has a problem that needs solving now, I step in to help. You get senior level execution starting this week, without recruiting lag, without the full-time cost, without more lost sleep.

The right full-time hire is three to six months away. Your problem will still be there in the morning. I can help you now.

Over the past 25 years, I lived on the front lines of community, strategy, ops, product, and growth as Community Architect at Zappos, COO of Revelry Labs (7 years, 100+ products shipped), as Chief of Staff at Venteur through its acquisition by Thatch, and as a founder with two prior exits (LaunchRock, Primeloop). Along the way I coached more than 1,200 leaders through their toughest problems, taking more than one company from chaos to clarity, and building systems that outlast me.

Point me at your biggest headache

A dangerous backlog in customer service that isn’t getting resolved. A secret war between sales and marketing sabotaging the roadmap. A controversial high-performer who has started affecting the culture. A strategic pivot that needs extra care and attention. Your own inability to dig out of your inboxes and meetings. (Should I go on?)

This is the one thing I do: I solve the gnarly, high-stakes problem you can’t hand to anyone else.

• The offer: I dig in, get to the bottom of it, and either solve it outright or hand you a clear plan and a referral to the right person for delivery.
• You get: the problem resolved on a deadline, and your attention freed up for vision and strategy.
• Why me: founders bring me their hardest, least-defined problems precisely because they don’t fit anywhere else — and I’ve spent a career untangling them.

High-growth founder, this is for you

You have real runway, real momentum, and real problems to solve, but the person who should own it is a full recruiting cycle away. Every week you wait is a week of growth you don’t get back. (And growth compounds.)

• You need the work done now, not just a JD posted soon.
• You haven’t found the right hire yet, or cannot justify an FTE before the next milestone.
• You’d rather someone senior take it off your plate than manage someone through it (or, more likely, try to do it yourself).
• You want to come out the other side with a running system, not a dependency.

I can help you across this valley.

Not sure yet? Start with a call

One person you can dump the truth on.

The best first step is almost always a conversation. If you’re lonely at the top, carrying too much on your shoulders, and just need someone safe to speak openly with, start here.

• The offer: I hold a safe/confidential space for you to unload on someone who has been in your seat. I won’t offer unsolicited advice, but I will ask questions that cut through the bullshit.
• You get: someone who isn’t your spouse, or investor, or cofounder, or employee who you can unload on, and the truth told to your face.
• Why me: I’ve been there myself. I’ve coached and mentored over 1,200 founders through the deepest questions, and I believe nothing is more valuable to a company than the mental health of its executives.

It’s also the cleanest way to figure out whether the thing keeping you up at night is something I can take off your plate.

What solving your headache can look like

The problem you bring me rarely stays in one box. Here’s the kind of range that untangling founders’ hardest problems has demanded, and what I’ve built when it did.

When the founder had become the bottleneck. The company was growing faster than the operating machinery. I translated the strategy into an operating cadence, set up the planning and team rituals, dashboarded the metrics that mattered, and unblocked the team so small decisions stopped routing through the founder. They got an installed operating system and a team that runs it, plus the space to work on the business instead of in it. (This is the COO/CoS work I’ve done at Revelry Labs and Venteur.)

When growth needed to come from the customers themselves. The product got better and spread faster when users brought more users and members created value for each other, but a full-time Head of Community was out of reach. I found the real reason their people would gather, designed the experience, seeded and activated the first cohort, and built the rituals that kept it alive without the founder. They got a live growth loop, a documented playbook, and the hire profile for whoever runs it next. (I’ve built community-owned ventures from zero at Interwoven, Zappos, LaunchRock, Seesmic, and Uservoice.)

What this is not

• Not advice from the sidelines. I do the work alongside you and hand you a running system — not a slide deck of recommendations.
• Not a full-time hire in disguise. Every engagement is built to hand off. The goal is for you to stop needing me.
• Not a fit for everything. If what you actually need is a different specialist or a full-time hire, I’ll tell you.

How these engagements work

• Every engagement is a scoped project with a named win and deadline before we start. You’re buying a result, not an hourly rate.
• I start as early as tomorrow. We get things moving while a full-time search would still be scheduling first-round calls.
• You keep an always-open line. A light async channel runs through the engagement so nothing is waiting on ‘our next weekly sync’.
• It is built to hand off. Each engagement ends with you owning a running system and, if you want it, the profile and shortlist for the full-time hire who inherits it.

If this seems too good to be true, pick one problem that you will lose sleep over tonight, and give me a free call to find out.

The ball is in your court

If you have a problem you’re carrying right now, let’s find 20 minutes.

Bring the messy version. I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right operator for it and how I’d scope it.

Anything open here is yours:
https://cal.com/thomasknoll/20-min-discovery