In terms of completed projects, you can either click through the index below for specific roles or scroll for an overview. These are the things I’ve had to figure out how to do…
Manukora
Receipts
- Manukora · 11 months · Mar 2025 – Feb 2026
- Premium DTC · ~8 figure $/yr
- CEO from full-time operator → 1–2 hrs/wk by handoff
- 83 people onboarded, 8.96/10 onboarding experience, 9.15/10 "excited to use Notion"
- KR delivery 7/13 → 13/16 quarter-over-quarter
- $12K/mo external agency replaced in week one of engagement
- 210-step NPD lifecycle, 9 departmental owners, still running 2.5+ months post-handoff
- Stepped into acting Head of R&D mid-engagement to fill a structural hole
- Multiple supply chain crises absorbed and resolved without founder pulled in
- 50+ hours of pure synthesis on the Final Report alone, across 29 sessions, 99% focus time
- Every working hour logged in 15-min increments across all 11 months
A note before you read
This engagement was not a Decision Engine install. The capability for that didn't fully mature until April 2026 — two months after the handoff.
This was get Mike out. That meant doing whatever the company needed, in whatever order the company needed it. Some of it was systems work. Some of it was crisis management. Some of it was filling roles that opened up unexpectedly when the operational backbone stabilised and exposed gaps underneath.
What you're reading is a generalist-operator engagement with a single mission: build the substrate that lets the founder step away without the company shaking apart. Eleven months of whatever-it-took, sequenced by which bottleneck mattered most that week.
The Decision Engine work is what comes next. This is what made it possible.
Architect The Sabbatical-Ready Operating System
Chief Of Staff
Apr 2025 - Feb 2026
Mission: build the system that replaces founder-driven execution with repeatable coordination. Clear decision rights, adopted workflows, stable ownership at critical nodes. Success measured by quieter execution — and by whether the CEO can take a real sabbatical.
Today (May 2026): Mike is working 1–2 hours a week. The system holds. That is the result, not the prediction.
Scope: 11 months end-to-end. ~50 hours of pure synthesis work on the Final Report alone, across 29 sessions, 99% focus time. Almost zero meetings. Almost all deep work.
Where the company was: fundamentally reactive. Force-of-will execution. Trade-offs implicit, unintentional, paid as the cost of moving fast.
Where it is now: behaviours practiced, systems utilised, decisions logged. A fragile but promising stage — and one that survived the handoff.
Where the 11 months went
Every working hour logged in 15-minute increments across the full engagement. The three views below are the evidence layer underneath the Past branch of the report — the data the strategy section had to answer to. Department-level shifts surface where the centre of gravity moved; project-level detail shows when each workstream took the foreground; the donut closes with the at-a-glance share.
Customer Research Coach
Dec 2025 - Feb 2026
The customer research work that started as my entry point became a department capability. The last two months of the engagement were spent training the marketing team to run the research engine without me.
- Designed the research philosophy — hypothesis → test → evidence → refine. Built around scientific method, with the explicit anti-pattern of drinking our own bathwater (only listening to loyalists).
- Installed bet-sizing logic — qual before quant before ad-testing. Step-by-step down the staircase rather than tumbling down it.
- Trained two researchers from zero — funnel mapping, pool segmentation, qualitative interviewing (laddering, non-leading questions, traps to avoid), and the bridge from groomed insight to live testing.
- Customer journey as the north star — the exercise that always produces a new insight. Per-channel funnels mapped (DTC / Amazon / Retail), drop-off pools sized, value-weighted, and selected for interview targeting.
Result: customer research now operates as a discipline inside marketing, not a Henry-only activity. The team can run iHUTs, qual, and quant independently.
Tools: Notion (research hub), FigJam (funnel maps), Loom (workshop deliveries)
Acting Head Of R&D
Oct 2025 - Feb 2026
When the innovation department needed to mature into a real R&D function, I stepped in.
- Transitioned innovation → R&D — formalised the function, defined the discipline, set the operating standards
- Built the 3-year product pipeline with Mike — long-horizon planning grounded in real customer research and validated reference-class data
- Roadmap survives the handoff — pipeline now lives as documented strategy, not founder intuition
Tools: Notion (roadmap database), FigJam (pipeline visualisation)
Supplier Relations + Crisis Manager
Multiple incidents, 2025
R&D doesn't operate in a vacuum. When supply chain fires hit, I went into the foxhole.
Lid sealing incident — 35,000 units in port
The fire: 35,000 jars of finished product in port in New Zealand. Lids not sealing properly. Chinese supplier's CEO flying in. Mike abroad.
What I did:
- Got to New Zealand. Worked the floor with the team to map where the supply chain broke down.
- Built the cost-to-business model under different resolution scenarios.
- Mapped who was affected: customers, retailers, internal teams, the supplier relationship itself.
- Interviewed the supplier-side process end-to-end to find the exact failure point.
- Brought Mike and the Chinese supplier CEO into a problem-solve focused on the solution timeline, not just the problem.
Outcome: Root cause diagnosed, incident contained, supplier relationship restored.
Why this matters: Mike could be abroad focused elsewhere because someone else was in the foxhole. That's the install in miniature.

Build A Project Management Department
Operations & Quality Auditor
Oct 2025 - Dec 2025
With projects in flight and PMs in place, the next bottleneck was how things actually get done. SOPs lived in too many heads. Quality processes were inconsistent across product lines.
- Mapped existing SOPs across departments
- Codified the highest-leverage ones into Notion master files with version control
- Built quality system documentation that survived audit-level scrutiny
Tools: Notion, FigJam
Hiring Manager
Sep 2025 - Nov 2025
The systems needed people. I built the role spec, ran the hiring, onboarded the project managers into the new operating model.
- Wrote the role specs for the PM hires
- Ran the interview process end-to-end
- Onboarded incoming PMs directly into the Air Traffic Control rhythm
- Department now operates as a discipline, not a Henry-only activity
Director Of Project Management
Aug 2025 - Oct 2025
Built the master file that surfaced every project in flight. Cross-functional visibility, owners explicit, deadlines logged, blockers surfaced before they escalated.
Modeled on actual air traffic control — every plane in the air visible, every controller knowing their patch, no plane lost to a handoff.
- Air Traffic Control ritual — weekly cadence, replaced the previous pattern of Slack-pings-as-project-management
- S&OP cadence installed to align sales forecasting with operational capacity
- Still running today, 2.5 months post-handoff
Map The Full Company Lifecycle
Director Of New Product Development
Jul 2025 - Sep 2025
Built on the GTM systems work. Mapped the entire company process from idea inception → validation → approval → through every stage to shelf.
210 steps. 9 departmental owners. Relational database structure. Master files for each stage. Role-based punch lists. The thing that previously lived in Mike's head and a slide deck nobody opened became a living system the team could run.
- Stage 0 became non-negotiable — the decision whether to do the project at all got its own dedicated, ungated phase
- Marketing-Led Council installed — membership clear, authority explicit, decisions trusted. Replaced the pattern of marketing surfacing ideas that ops absorbed reactively at scale
- KR delivery improved: 7 of 13 to 13 of 16 quarter-over-quarter
- V2 frequency dropped — fewer products requiring a follow-up build to fix what Stage 0 should have caught
Origin story: the hexagonal lifecycle wheel — the structural backbone of the 210-step database — came as a vivid semi-lucid dream during a silent retreat at Esalen. "Fun fact, a guy called Kekulé who discovered the benzene ring — he had a dream of a snake eating its own tail."
Tools: Notion (relational databases), FigJam, Loom
Migrate The Company Onto A Single Operating System
Training & Enablement
Dec 2025 - Feb 2026
Adoption is the real work. A migration doesn't stick unless habits change.
Six months after the initial migration — when Mike began signalling he was ready to step away — I ran a second wave of deeper Notion workshops to lock in the operating system before handoff.
- 83 people onboarded through a 15-video curriculum
- 8.96 / 10 — onboarding experience score
- 9.15 / 10 — "I feel excited to use Notion" (post-onboarding survey)
- Departmental workshops on advanced Notion — relational databases, automations, master files
- Factory floor adoption — cleanly inputting data at point-of-event rather than retroactively
- Replaced an external Notion agency in week one of the original engagement — rebuilt their entire scope in 2.5 weeks
Cost saved on agency: $12K/month, redirected into the system itself.
Tools: Notion, Loom (15-video onboarding course)
Notion Wizard
Jun 2025 - Jul 2025
The bet: bring the entire company onto Notion in two weeks. Train every team. Get every department's filing system into one data lake.
Why it mattered: the robot can't work on what it can't see. The single biggest leverage move I made at Manukora was getting every department's information into one place — because the day the company hires a Head of AI, they walk into a defined data architecture instead of a scavenger hunt.
- 2-week sprint: full migration, full training
- Every department onto Notion as primary filing system
- Hygiene standards installed from day one — naming conventions, database structures, master-file logic
- This made everything downstream possible
Tools: Notion, Loom (training videos), FigJam (information architecture maps)
Bring New Products To Market
Go-To-Market Lead
Apr 2025 - Jun 2025
The qual/quant work surfaced a deeper question: how does the company actually take a product from validated insight to shelf? The answer was — inconsistently. So I built the system.
- Mapped the full GTM cycle per channel (DTC, Amazon, Retail)
- Built content posting systems with single-source-of-truth master files
- Codified handoffs between marketing, product, and ops so the next launch didn't reinvent the workflow
This became the foundation for the lifecycle work that followed.
Tools: Notion (relational databases), Figma, Loom
Customer Insight Lead
Mar 2025 - Jun 2025
Mission: Design a research strategy for taking a new product line to market. Get the data clean enough to inform labelling, positioning, and channel strategy.
This was the entry point to the engagement. The qual/quant methodology became the seed of everything downstream — once you've designed a real testing protocol, every department starts asking what evidence do we have?
- Designed qualitative testing protocol — pool segmentation by drop-off behaviour, non-leading interview structure, laddering technique
- Designed quantitative testing protocol — sample sizing, hypothesis structure, confidence thresholds
- Ran the testing waves before handing methodology off to the marketing team
- Data fed labelling decisions, positioning hierarchy, and channel prioritisation
Tools: Notion (research hub), FigJam (funnel maps), Loom (workshop deliveries)
Still Life
Launch A Podcast
Producer / Editor
Social Media Coordinator
Videographer / Audio Mixing Engineer
Build 9x Digital Courses
Sales Funnel Designer & Specialist
Digital Media Buyer
E-Learning Curriculum Designer
Capture a 350+ Person Event On Film
Director
Keynote Speaker
Graphic Designer
Fill 160 Seats For 6 Month Program
Go-To-Market Lead
Events Director
Growth & Recruitment Strategist
Build A Digital Marketing Department
Marketing Officer
SEO / ASO Analyst
Email Marketer
Create A B2B SaaS Sales System
Sales Operations Manager
Customer Success Manager
Data Scientist
Recruit A Software Development Team
Product Marketing Manager
Product Manager
UI / UX Designer & Research Analyst
Oversee Facility Build-Out
Project Manager
AV Technician
Construction Assistant
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