I spent three decades advising CEOs and founders through their most consequential decisions. What I discovered is that the most consequential decisions are never really about the business.
I know this because I lived it.
During my own climb I burned out. Badly. And in rebuilding I discovered something I hadn't expected—that the most successful people I had worked alongside were quietly struggling with the same things I was. Health sacrificed for status. Relationships deprioritized for results. A definition of success borrowed from someone else and never examined..
The toll gets paid silently. Over years. Without ever connecting the cause to the cost.
I help CEOs and founders see it before the bill comes due—whether they’re still climbing, questioning the route, or standing at the summit wondering what comes next.
My Story:
In my thirties, at what looked from the outside like the height of a promising Wall Street career, I burned out. The climb had cost me more than I had acknowledged—my health, my relationships, and any honest sense of why I was climbing in the first place.
What brought me back wasn’t a program or a book. It was the kind of honest, unsparing guidance from someone who had been there—a mentor who helped me see what I couldn’t see myself. That experience changed everything.
What followed surprised me. A longer and more successful Wall Street career than the one I had nearly destroyed myself building—three decades across some of the most competitive institutions in the world, advising on transactions that shaped industries and generating meaningful wealth for my clients and my family. A serious run as an endurance athlete. A family I am genuinely present for. And wealth built not by chasing it, but as a byproduct of living with more clarity and intention than I ever had before.
The burnout wasn’t the end of the story. It was the beginning of the right one.
I’ve summited the mountain. What I know now is that the summit was never the point. How you arrive is.
That's what I’m passing on.
I crossed the finish line of my first IRONMAN at 34. We started in the dark and finished in the dark. Two years earlier, I was the guy stepping outside for a cigarette between meetings—which, at the time, passed for a wellness routine. A year later, I completed the same race in 11:06, a PR that placed me in the top 100 overall for the race.
The next part of the story is yours to write.