11 months · DTC · ~$65M/yr
Installed an operating system that holds while the founder takes his first sabbatical in a decade.
The problem
The CEO was the company.
Ten years solo-founding a premium DTC brand to $65M/yr had left Mike Bell carrying every operational decision in his head. Execution was force-of-will. Trade-offs were implicit. Mistakes got paid for in cash and product runs. A regulatory event or supplier failure would have pulled him into a foxhole he couldn't climb out of.
He needed to take a sabbatical. The company couldn't survive him taking one.
"Our biggest problem is execution." — Mike Bell
The solution
Get Mike out of the operational foxhole. Build the system that runs without him.
Eleven months. Almost zero meetings. Almost all deep work. Six interlocking systems installed, adopted, and stress-tested across nine departments.
Handoff was Feb 2026. ATC ritual, S&OP cadence, NPD lifecycle, research discipline — all still running 2.5+ months out. The exit was the deliverable. Talk to Mike.
What I didn't do
I didn't fully install the brain.
The departmental LLMs, the always-on cognitive layer, the cross-functional correlations surfaced in real time — that tooling has only matured in the past few months. At Manukora, we built the substrate. The brain coming online is the next chapter, not the closed one.
The work I did at Manukora put the company in the position to receive that capability the moment it became viable. Most companies aren't there. Manukora is.
I did however build one for myself after the Manukora install. It took me 69 hours over 23 days and is a direct reflection of my brain.
What got installed (Highlights)
Notion migration | 83 people onboarded.
8.96/10 onboarding experience.
9.15/10 on "I feel excited to use Notion."
The single most leverageable move — every department in one filing system. |
Stage Gate | Redesigned NPD lifecycle.
210-step database with Stage 0 non-negotiable.
Shift in OKR measurement as key feedback loop now visible and measurable. |
ATC ritual | Air Traffic Control operating cadence. Cross-functional visibility on every project in flight. Still running, 2.5 months post-handoff. |
Marketing-Led Council | Cross-functional decision body. Membership clear, authority explicit, decisions trusted. |
Customer research | Trained two team members from zero to running iHUT, qual, and quant independently. |
Lid-sealing crisis | 35,000 jars in port, lids not sealing. Got to New Zealand, ran the diagnostic chain root cause → solution → supplier handoff. |
Final Report | Every working hour logged in 15-min increments across 11 months.
Becomes a reference class for forecasting: real distributions of how long systems builds, emergency airdrops, and maintenance actually take.
25-min executive Loom overview for final report. Six-piece sabbatical playbook incl. Hell/Heaven scenarios and the Colonel → General leadership memo to Mike. |
→ See Full Overview Of Completed Work
The proof
Today (May 2026): Mike is in Hawaii for the second week running. Working 1–2 hours a week. The system holds.
That is the case study. The work speaks for itself.
What this teaches
Founders don't need consultants who deliver decks and stay. They need operators who install systems and leave.
The work of systematising a founder out is not glamorous. It's two weeks of full-company Notion migration. It's 210 stage gate steps. It's hiring project managers. It's weekly cadences nobody applauds because they just work. It's writing a coaching memo to the CEO about how they need to evolve when they come back from sabbatical.
The result is glamorous. The work isn't.
That's the discipline. That's what I install.