At some point last year I realized I was doing everything right and getting nowhere.
Which is a special kind of frustrating when you’ve spent 20 years helping other people get unstuck.
So I made a decision.
I’d been watching founder CEOs struggle with the same problems on repeat — the people problems, the scaling problems, the “why does this keep happening” problems. I knew I had something that could genuinely change how they lead. My heart had been pulling me in that direction for a while.
I decided to stop watching and go there.
New market. New audience. New approach. Hired a well-respected coach with a proven process for reaching exactly that audience. Followed it without deviation. Created content every week. Ran ads. Invested real money.
Crickets — and a lighter bank account.
In the meantime —
In the background of all of that, I was building something else entirely.
For 20 years, I’ve been doing cognitive neuro-axiology work with individuals and organizations. Sitting across from people. Surfacing the thinking patterns quietly running their decisions, creating their emotions, impacting their relationships, and shaping their results. Watching it change people — not just professionally, but personally. Repeatedly.
The constraint was always my time. I could only reach the people I could personally sit down with. And unfortunately, I have not yet figured out how to clone myself. Believe me, I’ve looked into it.
So I spent 11 months building VQMe. A report that delivers that same depth of insight — powered by intelligent systems, available to anyone, in about 20 minutes.
Here’s how it works: you describe your challenge in plain language. What’s happening, how it’s affecting you, how long it’s been going on, what you’ve already tried. Then the intelligent system maps your thinking patterns against what you wrote and delivers a personalized report.
Last month, I ran my own challenge through it.
I wrote: “For the past year, I’ve been trying to shift my business to founder CEOs and speak at Vistage and other CEO groups. I wasn’t getting much footing. How can I use my talents to better market myself and reach my target audience? I’m starting to get frustrated as nothing has worked over the last four months, and I’ve been following my marketing coach’s advice without fail.”
Did you catch it?
Sandwiched right in the middle — one question about my talents. Then immediately back to my coach’s process.
For 20 years, every client relationship I’ve built came through a direct, personal connection. Showing up. Speaking to audiences. Demonstrating value. Letting people experience the unique perspectives that I bring. And when I decided on a new audience, my brain said I needed a new approach — I quietly walked right past two decades of evidence that I already knew how to do this.
Turns out the thing about building a tool that finds blind spots is that yours can still be running while you build it.
I showed my results to my wife.
She read it, looked up, and said — very kindly, very lovingly, with the patience (and sarcasm) required of someone who married me — “Hmm, I think I might’ve said that.”
She had. Multiple times, apparently.
So, here I am… I built a tool that surfaces what people can’t see about themselves. My wife has been offering the same service for free for years. She’s been significantly underutilized.
All kidding aside, once you see it in black and white, your brain responds differently. Your thoughts go looking for evidence in your own memory bank. Yet when someone tells you the same thing in person, they’re “just trying to be nice.”
Let’s get closer to home…
Where are your wheels spinning right now? Where does something feel a little (or a lot) off?
This doesn’t have to be something new. It’s usually that problem that’s been sitting there for a few weeks… maybe months… maybe longer. The one you keep approaching with a new strategy, a new system, a new book, a new program, a new hire — and it’s still there.
When you try to fix it, where do you look first?
Most of us look at the execution. The market. The process. The approach. The next cutting-edge tool. The timing.
We rarely look at the thinking underneath all of that.
That’s the layer VQMe was built to surface. Your specific cognitive patterns — the assets you may be walking right past, and the biases quietly narrowing what you can see as an option — mapped against the challenge you named.
- Currently, it’s just $27.
- About 20 minutes.
- Receive your report.
The wheels don’t have to keep spinning.
