Sunday Dinner, Not Boardroom: Why I Coach Founders the Way I Do
I spent twenty-five years in CPG, and a good part of that time was spent in boardrooms. I ran trade budgets up to $100M at Johnson & Johnson. I carried $150M+ in direct sales at Walmart. Later I sat in the president’s chair at a CPG company, where the P&L was mine to answer for.
I learned an enormous amount in those rooms. And when I started coaching founders, I made a deliberate decision about what to bring with me and what to leave behind.
I kept the discipline. I left the polish.
This post is about why, and about what that means for you if you’re a founder trying to figure out whether you need help, and what kind.
What help looks like in a boardroom
In a big company, help comes in a particular shape. It comes as a deck. It has a framework with a name, a few quadrants, maybe a maturity model. It’s presented to a room of people who all already speak the language, and it assumes there’s a finance team, an analytics team, and a sales operations team waiting to put it to work.
That’s not a criticism. In that setting, it works. There really is somebody down the hall to run the numbers.
But I’ve watched that same shape of help get handed to founders, and it almost never sticks. Not because the founder isn’t capable. Because the help was built for a building full of people, and she’s running one warehouse with no finance department.
If you’ve tried a generic business coach who never actually ran a P&L, or followed a playbook written for VC-backed startups, or spent late nights on business videos and still don’t trust your numbers, you already know what I mean. None of it was wrong, exactly. It just wasn’t built for you.
What a founder actually needs at the kitchen table
When I sit across from a Scaling Founder, the conversation I’m trying to have looks a lot more like Sunday dinner than a board meeting. Here’s what that means in practice.
Plain words. My language is pretty simple, and I’ve made peace with that. If I can’t explain trade spend, or a deduction, or why your margin by retailer matters, in words you’d use with your own family, then I don’t understand it well enough yet. Jargon is a way of sounding smart. Plain words are a way of being useful.
Your numbers, not a template. Every founder’s story is as unique as a fingerprint. Your trade spend, your retailer terms, your cost structure, your co-packer, your cash position. A template can’t hold that. So we start with your real numbers, even if they’re messy, especially if they’re messy.
The truth, said kindly. Family tells you the truth. Not to hurt you, but because they want you to be okay. If your fastest-growing account is quietly losing you money, you deserve to hear that plainly, and you deserve to hear it from someone who’s clearly on your side.
Capability, not dependence. This one matters to me more than almost anything. My job isn’t to become the person you can’t run your business without. You probably already have one of those, and it’s you. My job is to help you build the habits and the confidence to see your own numbers clearly, so the business can run without anyone being the bottleneck. Partner, not preacher.
Why the discipline still matters
I want to be clear about what I didn’t leave behind.
The big companies are very good at one thing that founders often aren’t: they know what their growth costs them. No program gets funded without someone knowing what it should return. No promotion runs without someone checking the math afterward. That discipline is the whole reason the Margin Recovery Framework exists. In the president’s chair, sales went up 17%, costs came down 6%, and gross margin improved 5%, and none of it came from a brilliant new idea. It came from doing unglamorous things in the right order.
That part comes home to the kitchen table with me. It just comes in plain clothes.
So when I say “Sunday dinner, not boardroom,” I don’t mean casual about the numbers. I mean serious about the numbers, and human about everything else.
Why I do it this way
I’ve been a servant, an encourager, and a motivator for as long as I can remember. Somewhere in my corporate career I started half jokingly calling myself the Chief Servant Officer. Turns out it was true.
For a long time that lived inside a demanding career. Then a family circumstance made me stop and ask what actually mattered, and Catapult Group came out of that decision. Not out of a business plan, out of a reset.
And here’s the part I didn’t expect: founders were already finding me. Calling for advice, sending their contacts my way, long before I called any of this a business. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It turns out that works both ways.
What those founders needed was never a fancier plan. It was someone who’d actually owned a P&L, sitting at their table, speaking their language, and cheering them on while telling them the truth. That’s the job. I’m not chasing more clients, I’m trying to serve people! That’s really my business model.
If you’ve been waiting for the right kind of help
Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you’ll get help once things settle down. Maybe you’ve been burned by advice that didn’t fit and you’re not eager to try again. Both make sense.
Here’s what I’d offer instead. One conversation. No pitch deck. Just your numbers and mine side by side, in plain words, at the kitchen table. You’ll leave knowing more about where your profit is hiding than when you sat down, whether we ever work together or not.