Red Team 1 — Where the Plan Should Change

A 50-agent adversarial review stress-tested every load-bearing piece of advice in this package: each was steelmanned, attacked from three angles (unit economics, market reality, founder-fit), defended, and judged by a neutral adjudicator told to default toward the critic. The verdict: the instincts are right, but the sequencing and urgency framing were systematically off. None of the advice was thrown out; all of it was sharpened.

The keystone — and it gates everything below: the income-replacement floor. Until two numbers exist — the all-in mission comp ending March 2027 (salary + housing + insurance + schooling), and whether it's a cliff (income stops) or a glide (savings/pension/sending-church tail/spousal income cushions it) — none of the changes below can be calibrated. Every price, gate, and deadline derives from that floor. It's the first thing to compute; until then this is a strategy, not yet a financial plan.

Status legend: ✓ APPLIED · PENDING (waiting on a Jer decision).

B2 — The Scorecard is Move 2, not the engine ✓ APPLIED

What it was: the website was "rebuilt around one action: the Scorecard," fed by a 2–3×/week LinkedIn cadence, modeled on a creator who hit ~$1M/yr.

The change: the nomination/trust-graph is the front door — the four named alumni, the July asks to the Fall cohort, the people your people vouch for. That's how every client you've ever had arrived, and it's nearly free to build. The Scorecard is demoted to a Move-2 screen that sits behind that door, catching people who arrive un-nominated — built small, second, text-first, in your sober voice, with no badges, scores, or leaderboard (that's the McDonald's of formation; you're the 529 Steakhouse). Traffic comes from referral + podcast guesting, not a LinkedIn grind — the founder-fit channels for someone whose edge is trust, not self-promotion. LinkedIn stays optional and light.

Why: calling the Scorecard the highest-leverage move contradicts the project's own finding — "you didn't find them, you formed them; this isn't advertise-to-strangers- and-filter" — and your 100%-warm pipeline. The LinkedIn content grind is the exact ego/self-promotion "marketing machine" you named as a walk-away, imported from the wrong founder archetype.

B3 — "Cohorts feed coaching" is a hypothesis, not a fact ✓ APPLIED

What it was: the plan asserted cohorts feed the coaching book and stacked Pack rituals and the Guides certification track on top of that as if it were established.

The change: state plainly the feeder is N=0 — every coaching client you have came from a pre-existing relationship; none from a cohort (you've run exactly one). Mark it a bet you're testing, not a pipeline you're counting on, and add a gate: a cohort must produce at least two paying coaching clients before any Pack/Guides infrastructure gets built. Make the cohort earn the downstream scaffolding.

Why: you don't want to build two expensive structures (Pack, Guides) on an unproven causal claim. The gate turns an assumption into an experiment with a clear bar.

B1 — Lead with repriced 1:1 coaching, not as a "fallback" — PENDING

What it is now: cohorts are the centerpiece; 1:1 coaching sits in Phase 3 and is framed as the fallback if the fall goes badly.

The change: make repriced 1:1 coaching off your existing referral graph the primary near-term revenue engine and the live primary call-to-action. Reprice the work that already converts now; treat the flagship and B2B as upside, not the floor. Delete the word "fallback." Cohorts stay your core product and craft — this promotes coaching to the default revenue lane, it doesn't demote cohorts.

Why: coaching converts faster, costs almost nothing to acquire (runs on relationships you own), and is the work you said you want most. Putting the proven, preferred, fast lane in "fallback" position against a 9-month deadline is backwards.

Gated on: your call — lead with coaching or cohorts? — and the income floor.

B4 — The Pack: free now, paid later — PENDING

What it is now: Phase 2 launches a paid alumni community (~$25–40/mo) with a platform migration to support it.

The change: in Phase 2, keep the Fall cohort warm for free — no pricing, no migration, no recurring obligation; run a $0 "each one brings one" email ask as the referral mechanism. Move the paid, migrated Pack out to Phase 3, gated on a real population (a few dozen genuinely active members across 3–4 cohorts) and the coaching floor secured. A deferral, not a kill — the Pack is still the long-term retention/Guide layer once it can stand up.

Why: the economics don't clear platform cost at the current ~25–30-person, mostly-discounted pool (you'd net low-single-digit payers against a $49–89/mo platform). 1–3 payers scattered across 15 time zones reads as dead and accelerates churn. And a standing paid room of people you formed pulls continuously on the exact resource — hours and family energy — you named as the hard line.

Gated on: the income floor (for the Phase-3 gate).

B5 — Re-fit the March-2027 sequencing to the founder — PENDING

What it is now: go/no-go gates (2+ nominations, 1+ host), an Aug-15 mechanical fallback trigger, and "single worst outcome" cliff urgency.

The change: keep the backward-planning frame and the July checkpoint, but: gate everything on the income floor; drop the manufactured cliff voltage until cliff-vs- glide is confirmed (and note that over-urgency is itself a risk for a founder who named ego and family energy as deal-breakers); add a hard-currency criterion to the July gate — at least one new, non-warm contact who pays a deposit or premium rate, so it tests demand, not warm-room enthusiasm; cut Phase 1 to the 3–4 items that actually move the gate, honestly costed against a 30-hour total budget minus mission hours; and recast the Aug-15 mechanical kill-switch as a discernment prompt co-owned with your wife or a named alumnus — a relationship-led founder won't self-execute a cliff-cut on his best-ever cohort.

Why: the July gate as written measures whether a $200 faith-bonded beta will say nice things, not whether a stranger will pay a dollar — it can flash green while real demand is zero. And the plan asks ~1.5–2 FTE of a ~0.75-FTE founder.

Gated on: the income floor + cliff/glide, and your ranking of the 2026 fallbacks.

B6 — Demote the B2B/HR wedge to year-two upside — PENDING (part already settled)

What it is now: the B2B wedge (HR lifecycle audit → cohort → coaching) is implied to help hit the March 2027 floor.

The change: demote it to an explicitly-labeled year-two premium layer — 6–15- month B2B sales cycles land cash after the cliff, so it can't fund the handover. Pull the one warm Canadian relationship into a small Phase-1 paid pilot to validate the premium price now. Delete the rigged "the audit surfaces what it always surfaces — leader capability" line (a pre-rigged closing script that contradicts the thesis's own finding and your intellectual honesty). State economics as net-per-Jer-hour, not gross.

Already settled by Jer: the idea of repackaging the 2008 thesis as a B2B audit product is killed — that's OD work, and Wild Dogs is intentionally training/ development/coaching, not OD. What remains open is whether the HR-lifecycle wedge itself crosses that same OD line, or is the HR-function consulting you already do — your call.

Gated on: the income floor + your OD-scope read on the HR wedge.

The detailed, file-by-file apply-spec for these changes lives in the working notes (tasks/red-team1-recommended-changes.md). The decisions that unblock the PENDING items are in Questions for Jer — and the income floor is the one to answer first.