Culture Building & AlignmentUpdated July 2026

Alignment your team keeps after we're gone

We get your leadership team rowing the same direction, shared goals, clear decision rights, and an operating rhythm that runs on its own. Alignment is infrastructure you install, not an offsite that fades by Friday.

Most teams aren't short on talent. They're short on agreement, about what matters most this quarter, who owns what, and how decisions actually get made. When that's fuzzy, smart people pull in slightly different directions and call it busy. We make the direction explicit, build the rituals that keep it true, and then hand you the controls. The goal isn't a better offsite. It's a team that stays aligned without us in the room.

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No pitch. You'll leave with two or three concrete next steps, whether or not we work together.

Alignment that holds when you're not in the room.

Most culture and alignment work creates a high. An inspiring two days, a fresh set of values on the wall, a group text that stays warm for a week. Then the quarter swallows it. We do the opposite of memorable. We make alignment boring and durable: written into how you set goals, run meetings, make decisions, and hold each other to them. The greatest achievement you can have as a business owner is to build yourself out of day-to-day operations, and you can't do that on a team that needs you in the room to agree on anything. Every engagement is designed with a defined exit. When the rhythm runs without us, we've done our job. Culture work sticks when the managers who carry it are trained too: see leadership training.

The evidence

Culture is a measurable operating risk, not a soft one

Culture problems are measurable, and they are expensive. Two findings anchor this work: culture drives attrition far harder than pay does, and most of the day-to-day experience of culture comes down to the manager running the week. That's why we build alignment into the operating rhythm, not into a poster.

Toxic culture: 10.4x more predictive of attrition than pay

MIT Sloan Management Review's analysis of the Great Resignation found a toxic culture was 10.4 times more predictive of employee attrition than compensation. Misalignment doesn't show up on the P&L until your best people start leaving.

MIT Sloan Management Review, Jan 2022
Managers drive 70% of engagement variance

Gallup finds managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. Alignment work that skips the people running the weekly rhythm is theater. Ours starts there.

Gallup
The manager half of this is leadership training

An offsite versus installed alignment

The difference is whether it survives contact with a normal Tuesday.

The offsite that fades

Energy peaks on day two. Values get written, then live in a slide deck nobody opens. Decisions still funnel to the founder. Within a month the team is back to guessing what matters most, and quietly disagreeing about it.

Alignment as infrastructure

A shared set of priorities everyone can recite, decision rights people actually use, and a weekly and quarterly rhythm that surfaces drift early. It's written down, owned by your leaders, and it holds whether or not anyone remembers the offsite.

What we install

Five pieces that turn 'we should be more aligned' into a system your team runs.

  1. 01

    A shared scoreboard

    One short list of priorities for the quarter that every leader can name without looking it up. If it's not on the list, it's not the work right now. This is what 'rowing the same direction' actually looks like in practice.

  2. 02

    Clear ownership and decision rights

    Who owns what, and who actually gets to decide. We map the handful of decisions that keep stalling or bouncing back to the founder, and assign them, so the team stops waiting and stops re-litigating.

  3. 03

    An operating rhythm

    The meeting cadence that keeps everyone in sync, a tight weekly to surface blockers, a quarterly to reset priorities. Agendas, not vibes. We give you the templates and run them with you until they stick.

  4. 04

    A way to handle disagreement

    Aligned does not mean everyone agrees on everything. It means you have an agreed way to disagree, decide, and commit. We build the norms that let people raise hard things early instead of nodding in the room and grumbling after.

  5. 05

    Values that pay rent

    A small number of operating principles tied to real behavior, how you hire, how you give feedback, what gets praised and what doesn't fly. Not poster words. The few rules of the road that make the rest of the system self-enforcing.

How an engagement runs

Built around a graduation, from the first conversation.

  1. 01

    1. Listen

    We talk to each leader one-on-one before we change anything. Where do priorities actually conflict? Where do decisions stall? The gap between what the team says it values and how it spends its days tells us most of what we need to know.

  2. 02

    2. Name the direction

    We work with you to get the priorities, ownership, and decision rights written down and genuinely agreed, not assumed. This is the part most teams skip, and it's why their alignment never holds.

  3. 03

    3. Install the rhythm

    We stand up the weekly and quarterly cadence and run the first cycles with you in the room. Real meetings about real work, not a rehearsal. The team feels the difference inside the first few weeks.

  4. 04

    4. Hand over the controls

    We coach your leaders to run the rhythm themselves, then step back on a defined timeline. You keep the templates, the norms, and a team that can realign itself when things shift, because they will.

I've built teams that run without me

I built expansion operations at Uber, Lime, and Sealed. Those were roles, not clients, and I label them that way on purpose. Those were my roles, not ESLR clients. The proof I trust most is my own companies. I co-founded Freaky Foot Tours in 2015; it now runs in Flagstaff, Prescott, and Tucson without me in the day-to-day. That only works because the team is aligned on what matters and runs its own rhythm. Building yourself out of the day-to-day is the whole point, and it's the standard I hold for your team, too. I'm based in Flagstaff, Arizona, and was named to the Arizona Daily Sun's 20 Under 40.

Questions

Questions founder teams ask

What does a team alignment consultant actually do?
I get your leadership team agreed on the same priorities and install the system that keeps them there, a shared scoreboard, clear decision rights, and a weekly and quarterly operating rhythm. The difference from a typical consultant or facilitator is that I don't run a great workshop and leave. I build the infrastructure into how your team operates and then coach your leaders to run it without me.
How is this different from a leadership offsite or team retreat?
An offsite creates energy; it rarely creates durable alignment. Most of what gets decided on the mountain doesn't survive the first busy Tuesday. This work is the opposite, quieter, written down, and built to run in normal weeks. We may use a working session to kick things off, but the value is in the rhythm and decision rights that hold for months after, not the day itself.
Is culture work really worth paying for?
The research says it's one of the most expensive things to ignore. MIT Sloan found a toxic culture is 10.4 times more predictive of attrition than pay, and Gallup ties at least 70 percent of engagement variance to the manager. Losing one good person costs real money and months of momentum. Installed alignment is cheaper than the turnover it prevents.
Is this for small teams or big companies?
Founder-led and small-to-midsize teams. This is built for companies where the leadership group is a handful of people, decisions still funnel toward the founder, and 'we're not aligned' is starting to cost real time. It is not an enterprise change-management program, and it's not for org charts with dozens of layers.
How long does it take, and when do you leave?
Every engagement is designed with a defined exit from the start. A typical alignment engagement runs over a small number of months: listen, name the direction, install the rhythm, then hand over the controls and step back. The goal is to make myself unnecessary. If your team still needs me in the room to agree on things, I haven't finished the job.
What if my leaders genuinely disagree about the direction?
Good, that's the point of doing this. Alignment doesn't mean everyone agrees on everything; it means you have an agreed way to disagree, decide, and commit. A lot of what I do early is surface the disagreements people have been avoiding, then build the norms that let the team resolve them in the open instead of in side conversations.
Does culture work overlap with the rest of what ESLR does?
Yes, and that's by design. Alignment, SOPs, AI workflows, project management, and leadership training are one operating layer under one senior roof. A team that's aligned on priorities but has no project-management system will still stall, so I look at the whole picture and we sequence the work to fit where your company actually is.

Let's get your team rowing the same direction

Start with a conversation about where your leadership team is pulling apart.

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