Overview
Through AspirationalX, I worked with Leadership Council and its sibling Presidents Council — a family-owned Saint Louis company that has run executive peer groups for presidents, C-suite executives, VPs, and function leaders at Midwest mid-market companies since 1974 — to document its operations and set it up for its next stage of growth. The engagement ran from July 2023 to May 2024.
The company was not starting from nothing, and neither was I. Decades of working practice already existed. My role, as part of the team, was to understand how the business actually ran and help codify that knowledge into processes other people could execute.
Context
The company was at an inflection point. It had operated for decades with a larger staff; by 2023 the staff was at its smallest, and the company planned to add a cohort to each council. The processes that ran the business existed in daily practice and in the owner’s experience, but not in writing. Before the company could grow, that knowledge needed to be documented so a small team could carry more of the operation and new staff could be brought in against written processes rather than verbal training.
The System
The sequence was audit, then document, then delegate. Documenting before understanding the real workflow produces documents nobody follows, so the audit came first.
Audit. A working session in September 2023 with the owner and staff mapped how the business ran: what was tracked and where, what existed only on paper, where the same data was entered twice, and who needed access to what.
A shared workspace. Jira and Confluence became the place work lived, structured around objectives, intentions, and strategies so each task had a visible parent. A task in a shared system can be assigned to someone; a task in one person’s memory cannot.
Written procedures. The recurring parts of the business became standard operating procedures: meeting setup for each venue, conventions for meeting notes, a member orientation checklist, a recruiting meeting checklist, templates for prospect outreach, meeting reminders, and guest-leader preparation, an inbox procedure, and a CRM procedure. These were written from what the team already did, then reviewed with them.
Access and records. Calendars were consolidated into one Google Workspace account with edit access for staff. CRM permissions were set so team members could see the records their work required. Council finances were separated into their own drive and accounting procedures were written.
Pricing and payments. We tuned the pricing and payment strategy for membership.
Entity work. The two councils had operated as separate businesses. I helped assemble the documentation needed to merge them into one entity, working with an outside accountant.
Outcomes
Outcomes were not quantified during the engagement, so this page does not state numbers. What the engagement left behind is the documented operating layer itself: a shared workspace, written procedures for the recurring work, consolidated calendars and permissions, separated financial records with written accounting procedures, and a pricing and payment strategy — knowledge that had existed as practice, now existing as documents the team owns.
Artifacts
There are no public artifacts for this engagement. The deliverables were internal operating documents — procedures, checklists, correspondence templates, a Jira and Confluence workspace, and financial process documentation — which are not mine to publish and which contain member and prospect information. Leadership Council itself operates publicly in Saint Louis and describes its programs on its own site.
Patterns Worth Reusing
Audit before you document. Procedures written from an assumed workflow describe a business nobody works in. Start from what the team actually does.
Codify, do not invent. In a business with decades of working practice, the value is not new process design — it is making the existing knowledge explicit so it can be taught, assigned, and improved.
Delegation is a documentation problem before it is a hiring problem. Work stays with the owner when explaining it costs more than doing it. Writing it down changes that once, for every future handoff.
Separate what must stay personal from what must not. In a relationship business, the sessions themselves depend on the people in the room. The scheduling, records, correspondence, and finances around them do not, and those are the parts to systematize.