Wild Dogs Leadership — A Strategy Brief for Jer

This is the business strategy for Wild Dogs Leadership: what to sell, at what price, to whom, and how the pieces connect — built from your four course docs, your promo video, wilddogsleadership.com, and market research on the leadership-development space (June 2026). The core idea in one line: scale the front and the back; keep the middle deliberately small.

The positioning foundation: an empty quadrant

You are sitting in an empty quadrant. Soul-formation programs (Barton's Transforming Center, Arrow Leadership) serve pastors and stay out of the marketplace; team-effectiveness programs (Table Group, Multipliers, Franklin Covey) serve the marketplace and stay out of the soul. Nobody leads with both soul language and research evidence. A faith-adjacent-but-not-religious program doing genuine interior formation for marketplace senior leaders, in small long cohorts, with each soul claim paired to its empirical twin — that's white space, and it's exactly what you already do. The job is not to change the product; it's to name it, price it, instrument it, and build the on-ramps.

The origin story is part of the moat. Prairie farm → Maasai elders and the Leadership Training Institute of Nairobi → 15 years leading HR at a multinational food company → Stephen Ministry → SE Asia. No competitor in either quadrant has that arc — shared leadership learned from the Maasai, validated in a corporate boardroom, now practiced across two continents. It's the About page, the podcast-guest hook, and chapter one of the book (bio captured verbatim in the source documents).

The big idea: scale the front and the back — keep the middle small

The small, slow, soul-deep cohort is your moat. The big leadership brands can't sell what you sell precisely because it doesn't scale — so don't try to scale it. Instead:

• Scale the front (reach): content, a free assessment, an AI companion — your ideas touching thousands who may never buy anything.
• Keep the middle small (cohorts and coaching): premium, fit-screened, delivered by you. "Deliberately small and slow" isn't a limitation to apologize for — it's the positioning. Say it out loud.
• Scale the back (multiplication): an alumni community, organization-paid cohorts, and eventually certified alumni who teach your material.

Here's the part that should feel right: this isn't a growth scheme bolted onto your philosophy. Your ripple model — self → team → organization → community → world — already is a theory of scale. And Robert Greenleaf's famous test of servant leadership ("do those served grow… become more likely themselves to become servants?") is, read commercially, a referral-and-certification flywheel stated as conviction. The business model and the philosophy are the same shape.

The ladder (each rung funds and feeds the next):

ATTRACT   LinkedIn + referrals + your promo video
   ↓      Free "Leadership Soul Scorecard" (~40% lead capture)
   ↓      5-day email mini-course in your voice
   ↓      Free quarterly live workshop (5–10% of attendees convert)
ENROLL    Flagship cohort: Soul of the Leader        $950–1,500/seat
   ↓      "The Pack" alumni community                 ~$25–40/mo, annual default
DEEPEN    21 Laws formation track (15-month)          premium continuation
   ↓      1:1 coaching retainer                       $400–1,200/mo
MULTIPLY  Same course, org-paid, per-seat             $2,500–5,000/seat
   ↓      Wild Dogs Guide certification               hand-picked alumni, $3–5k + annual license

Three things to hear first

1. You're undercharging by 3–7× — and your answers shaped how to fix it. 100/hrisbelowentry − levellife − coachingrates; theNAaverageforexecutivecoachingis 288/hr, and you have 25 years. Move to a monthly retainer ($400–600 individual; $750–1,200 when the organization pays) and grandfather current clients. Price the flagship at 950–1, 500—coursespriced≥950 earn 50–100% more per landing-page visit, because buyers read price as quality. Structure it as the barbell you already practice: highest rate for those who can pay (Canadian and B2B clients), pro bono where the work matters more than the fee (the India cohort) — "the hunters feed the pups," formalized. One transition to design deliberately: the Fall cohort paid ~$200 as a beta. The story is simple and true — the beta is over, the program is proven, founding alumni get founding terms. One communication norm keeps the barbell honest: say it out loud — premium seats fund access for leaders doing high-impact work in under-resourced places. Stated upfront and celebrated, it's partnership; hidden, it curdles into worthiness-by-geography. Three governors keep the barbell disciplined rather than just well-intentioned: a published, fixed flagship price; a capped scholarship/pro-bono quota per cohort (a number, not a mood); and quote from a published rate, never negotiate it live — so a money-indifferent founder isn't the one quoting $1,200 to an admired leader. Keep price out of the referral/nomination ask entirely, so the new number can't chill the one irreplaceable asset — the warm-intro flywheel.
2. The Maxwell question — defused (worth a mention, not a worry). You're not licensed, you've taught from the 21 Laws for years with no issue, and the 19-lesson curriculum shows why: it's 75–80% your own frameworks, stories, and research; Maxwell supplies the law names and the assigned reading. The 21 Laws are a published framework anyone may teach from and cite. The one place it would ever matter is if you license the track to Guides to deliver — at that point, rename the arcs and attribute Maxwell once in the intro. Until then, this is housekeeping, not risk.
3. The 15-month course can't be the front door. Market norm for a first purchase is ~6 weeks. Keep the long course — it's the most defensible thing you offer — but position it as the prestige continuation, and extract a 6-week "Foundations of the Wild Dogs Way" as the entry product.

Make the website hunt

Today the site is a brochure with a contact form (which converts roughly nobody). But first, be honest about what actually fills your cohorts: nomination through the trust graph you already own — the four alumni you named, the July asks to the Fall cohort, the people your people vouch for. That's the front door, it's how every client you've ever had arrived, and it's nearly free to build (see Finding the Pack). Build that first.

The website's job is narrower: catch and screen the people who show up without a nomination. The screen is the Leadership Soul Scorecard — a 15-question self-assessment against your four values (Excellence, Sacrificial, Team, Resilient), diagnosing where a leader is strong in head but starving in soul. It's a Move-2 tool that sits behind the nomination front door, not the front door itself. Build it small and second, text-first, in your sober voice — no badges, no scores, no leaderboard (that's the McDonald's of formation; you're the 529 Steakhouse). A quiz-style screen still captures far more than a contact form, and it doubles as your mutuality screening, automated. (ScoreApp ~$39/mo, or Interact, builds it.) Treat completion rate as a rough UX signal only, never a go/no-go gate — the deselection line is designed to make wrong-fit people quit, so low completion can mean the screen is working, and the visitor volume before March 2027 is too thin to read either way. The real demand test is harder and cleaner: one closed sale at the repriced rate proves willingness-to-pay; a capture funnel never can.

Around it: your promo video front and center (the head-vs-soul message is the pitch), the four values, honest pricing, and your deselection line — "if you want leadership training to advance yourself, this isn't for you" — right on the page. It's true, it's your voice, and it converts the right people harder.

Build the funnel dual-outcome from day one. The Scorecard's results page ends in two doors, not one: join the next cohort or book a coaching conversation. Same assessment, same email spine, same deselection screen — the visitor picks the container. This is what keeps the whole machine valid whichever way the cohorts-vs-coaching mix settles: the front of the funnel never has to be rebuilt, only the emphasis on the two doors.

Traffic to that screen comes from referral and podcast guesting — the founder-fit channels for someone whose whole edge is trust, not self-promotion. Referrals are what actually fill high-trust practices; podcast guesting borrows other people's audiences (the wild-dog metaphor is a bookable hook, more so once the book exists). LinkedIn is optional and light if you want it — a post when you have something to say, not a 3×-a-week content grind that would cost the family energy you named as the line you won't cross. SEO stays a slow secondary play at most.

The email spine behind the Scorecard: a 5-day mini-course in your voice → a monthly note → a quarterly free live workshop run 2–3 weeks before each cohort opens (webinars convert 5–10% for $1,000+ offers, and ~25% of sales come from the follow-up emails).

(How to actually build all of this — the front door, the Scorecard, the course platform, the AI layer — with build-vs-buy verdicts and cost, is laid out tool-by-tool in The Platform.)

The delivery stack

• Get off Radix before March 2027. The flagship currently runs on Radix, a portal borrowed from the mission org (videos, async chat questions, virtual meetings). It handles the core loop but not peer pairing, accountability dyads, or an alumni space — and when you retire from the mission in March 2027, the borrowed vehicle goes away. Migrate between cohorts, on your own terms, not in a scramble.
• Platform: Heartbeat (~49/mo)orCircle( 89/mo) — courses + community + chat in one place, replacing Radix and "online platform + some emailing." The full stack (platform + ScoreApp + email tool + AI companion) runs ≈ $100–150/mo.
• Business plumbing, before the first repriced invoice: legal/tax structure (a Canadian in SE Asia selling globally — entity, residency, and tax treatment need an accountant's hour, not guesswork), a payment processor (Stripe or equivalent), pricing currency (recommend fixed USD with regional scholarship seats rather than floating regional prices), and standard terms for B2B invoices (org buyers often need expense-claimable invoicing). Boring, cheap, and very expensive to fix late.
• Instrument everything (details in the course-design doc): Working Genius + the Five Dysfunctions team assessment + a free psych-safety survey, pre/post. This creates the "did it work" evidence B2B buyers and future Guides need. Cohort completion rates of 85–96% (vs 5–15% self-paced) are the format's own proof — measure and publish yours.

Beyond the course

The Pack — alumni community. You already wrote it yourself: "a special community is formed between the learners." That's an unbuilt asset with the brand name attached. Don't launch a cold paid community (~70–83% fail; the killers are founder-centric design and no rituals); launch it as continuity: free for three months after each cohort, then ~$25–40/month with annual as the default (annual plans cut churn ~51%). One ritual you lead (a monthly fireside or hot-seat); everything else member-to-member. Seed it with all past grads at once and expect 12 months before it feels alive. The Pack becomes your retention engine, referral engine, and the pool future Guides come from.

Your Off Leash Bytes plan (the ~30 podcast-style blurbs you're recording for the client area) slots into this perfectly — with one change: don't gate all of them. Release ~5 free as the email mini-course and the taste-of-the-voice on the site; the rest become a named Pack member benefit ("new Byte every month"). They give the Pack the steady Jer-touchpoint the community model needs without consuming live hours, and the name is already perfect brand language.

The Pack Companion — an AI between-session helper. The research is consistent: AI does well at accountability, reflection prompts, and session prep between human sessions — and cannot produce presence, which is what you actually sell. You said it yourself in the promo video: the AI tools failed because "what was missing was the soul." That sentence is the product's positioning. Scope it small and safe: a voice-less private prep/journaling workbook loaded with your frameworks and reflection questions, offered to active clients only — and built only after a paying client explicitly asks for between-session support, not before. No voice clone, no public "ask AI Jer" version — that directly contradicts the soul thesis (see Risks), and the cost that matters isn't the ~$30/mo, it's your scarce hours and an unbuilt story corpus. It's plumbing for the crock-pot, never the crock-pot.

Same course, organization-paid. Your flagship delivered per-seat to a company's leadership team runs $2,500–5,000/person at market rates — same work, 5–10× the revenue per cohort — and your HR Support line becomes the door into those accounts instead of a standalone offering. The assessment pre/post data is the sales collateral. And the pipeline isn't cold: you already consult for organizations in Canada and Asia on leadership, team building, and HR — those relationships are the first three conversations.

The wedge now has a shape, because your HR Structure Overview is in the repo: the six-stage employee lifecycle (Attraction → Recruitment → Onboarding → Development → Retention → Separation), framed as "HR needs to become a culture, not just a function." The B2B engagement model writes itself: (1) HR lifecycle audit — solves a concrete, expensive problem (turnover, talent gaps); (2) the audit surfaces what it always surfaces — leader capability — so the leadership team does the flagship cohort; (3) 1:1 coaching for the executives as the long engagement. Audit opens the door, cohort builds the floor, coaching is the years-long relationship — which is also the work you said you'd most want to do.

(A note on your 2008 thesis: it's tempting to repackage its values-audit methodology as a B2B product, but you've ruled that out — and you're right. The thesis is organizational-development work, and you've intentionally scoped Wild Dogs to training, development, and coaching, not OD. So the thesis isn't a product to sell; it stays what it is — a Masters credential and part of the origin story that gives the brand its depth. Don't build the OD tool.)

One open question you raised, worth its own decision rather than a guess: would the Wild Dogs products be more attractive accredited? You looked into it once and judged your target clients wouldn't care — but weren't sure. It's now a live Round-2 question, with the prior research already in hand (the growth-ideas doc covers HRCI/SHRM vs. ICF and leans SHRM-only).

Wild Dogs Guides (18–24 months out). The only way your material makes leaders everywhere is if other people can deliver it. Pilot with 2–3 hand-picked alumni licensed to run the flagship ($3–5k certification + annual license — the GiANT guide model at micro-scale). The contrast writes itself: Maxwell certified 40,000+ people and produced the dilution you talk about; you'll certify three, the way you screen everything — fit first. Both courses are licensable: the flagship is own-IP outright, and the 21 Laws track needs only a rename-and-attribute pass before a Guide delivers it (see "Three things to hear first"). Worth saying plainly: you have done this before. The Maasailand program — learn with the elders, build the program, hand it to the community to run — is the Guides model, executed twenty years ago. And Stephen Ministry, which trained you, is itself a multiply-the-caregivers model you know from the inside.

Deepening the courses (the short version)

Keep Maxwell and Lencioni as the spine — then give every session two companions: a soul text and a research twin. Greenleaf's servant test beside Adam Grant's data showing sacrificial ("otherish") givers finish first. Parker Palmer's leader's shadow beside Liz Wiseman's "Accidental Diminisher." Lencioni's trust pyramid beside Brené Brown's vulnerability research and Google's finding that psychological safety is the #1 team dynamic. Ruth Haley Barton's Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership is nearly your course title in book form. And Loehr & Schwartz's The Power of Full Engagement gives you a business-credible architecture that runs literally body → spirit — connective tissue between "Body of the Leader" and "Soul of the Leader." This pairing is the empty-quadrant positioning made visible inside the course: evidence-armored soul. (Full session-by-session design and reading list are in the companion course-design document.)

The Kahneman evidence (positioning, in brief)

Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is the head-vs-soul message, proven. System 2 is the slow, deliberate self that knows things (your "head"); System 1 — the fast automatic self formed only by prolonged practice — is what actually runs a leader's behavior under pressure. Kahneman's own confession — "my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence… as it was before I made a study of these issues. System 1 is not readily educable" — is the crock-pot with a Nobel attached: information doesn't form character; only practice does. That's your answer to "can't I just read the books?" and your marketing copy for the skeptical buyer. Two strategy-relevant corollaries: power is a "wicked learning environment" — the more senior the leader, the more they need a pack that tells the truth (the scientific case for both your cohorts and The Pack) — and people only learn by catching themselves in the act, which is why the Scorecard asks gut-trap questions instead of self-ratings. The deep session-by-session integration lives in the course-design companion doc.

Five more ideas (researched, ranked)

1. Partner with Painted Dog Conservation — do this first. African wild dogs are endangered (~6,000 left). Painted Dog Conservation in Zimbabwe publishes concrete numbers: $800 funds one anti-snare radio collar. Imagine: every cohort funds a collar. It turns "Sacrificial" from a value statement into a receipt, costs $2–5K/year, takes days to set up — and no leadership brand anywhere has a species partnership. Free storytelling bonus: BBC's Dynasties "Painted Wolf" episode (Attenborough, 9.1 on IMDb) is a documented saga of pack succession and sacrifice — ready-made session material.

2. A premium in-person retreat — this year. Leadership retreats run $2,000–10,000/person at 60–85% margins; a 3-day retreat for 8–10 alumni at $3,500–5,000 is the best revenue-per-hour available to a solo practice, and your alumni are the natural first buyers. The moonshot for year 2–3: a leadership safari at Mana Pools — where Dynasties was filmed — watching actual wild dogs hunt, visiting Painted Dog Conservation, doing the soul work in the bush. Leadership-safari operators and African destination-management companies already exist to handle all logistics; comparable trips retail $12–22K/person. As a brand capstone it is almost unfairly good.

3. A short book: The Wild Dogs Way — start drafting, ship in 9–12 months. Your curriculum is already the manuscript. $3–6K to produce professionally; royalties are irrelevant — the book is the authority asset that multiplies everything else (retreat pre-read, podcast hook, the thing an HR buyer hands their CEO). Comp: Michael Bungay Stanier's self-published The Coaching Habit became the engine of an entire training business.

4. Podcast guesting, not hosting. Don't start a show (92% of podcasts die before results appear; hosting costs 5+ hours/episode). Instead: 1–2 guest appearances a month on other people's leadership podcasts — the wild-dog metaphor is a highly bookable hook, more so once the book exists — about 2 hours each, borrowed audiences, all routed to the Scorecard and newsletter.

5. HR recertification credits — when the HR line matures. For $525–1,425/year, HRCI provider status lets you stamp "earn recertification credits" on HR-facing offerings — HR professionals must collect 60 credits every 3 years, so credits are a known purchase trigger and a B2B checkbox. (Skip ICF coaching credits — wrong audience.)

Why these five aren't five separate bets: the book explains the metaphor → the cohorts and retreats live it → the conservation partnership proves it → the safari is the pinnacle experience, at the very place the BBC filmed the story. One arc.

The 1:1 coaching signal — said out loud

Your note: "in an ideal world, I think I would end up focussing most on the one-on-one coaching (I think…)." The plan can honor that without giving up the moat: the idea is that cohorts are how strangers become people you'd coach — they compress the knowing, prove the value, and feed the coaching book; the Pack keeps alumni close between engagements; and coaching is the highest-margin, most Jer-shaped work in the ladder.

One honest caveat, flagged by the red-team review: "cohorts feed the coaching book" is a hypothesis, not a fact — and right now the evidence runs the other way. Every coaching client you have came from a pre-existing relationship; none came from a cohort (you've run exactly one). So don't build the expensive downstream scaffolding — Pack rituals, Guides certification — on the assumption that cohorts manufacture coaching clients. Make a cohort earn it first: the gate is a cohort must produce at least two paying coaching clients before any Pack/Guides infrastructure is built. Until then, treat the feeder as a bet you're testing, not a pipeline you're counting on. The dial can still turn toward a fuller coaching book — the architecture doesn't change, only the mix.

The honest answer is that Jer doesn't know yet, and shouldn't have to: the answer depends on the adoption he gets between now and early 2027. So everything we build is mix-agnostic by design — the website funnel ends in two doors (cohort or coaching conversation), the platform serves cohorts, Pack, and coaching-client spaces equally, the Scorecard screens for both, and the Companion works between-session for either. The fall results — July buy-in, whether the 2026 cohort fills, whether repriced retainers land — will tell us which way the dial points. Nothing built this year gets thrown away in either future — with one honest exception worth naming: in a pure coaching future (zero cohorts), the Pack and the Guides track lose their feeder and would wind down rather than grow. That's the real cost of that fork, and it's why the plan's floor is "fewer cohorts, run selectively as client-formation engines" rather than none.

Sequencing

The sequenced roadmap — what to do when — lives in "The Path." The anchor date, from your answers: March 2027, when you retire from the missionary position and Wild Dogs becomes the main work. Everything in Phase 1 and 2 exists to make that handover land on a running business, not a standing start.

The precondition, not a footnote: the income-replacement floor. This is Item 0 — it gates every other number in the plan, and until it exists this is a strategy, not yet a financial plan. Two figures you can supply in a week: (1) the all-in mission comp ending March 2027 — salary plus housing, insurance, schooling, anything that disappears; and (2) cliff-vs-glide — is there savings, pension, a sending-church tail, or spousal income that cushions the drop, or does income stop cold? Every urgency dial derives from these: how hard to push repricing, how patient to be with the Pack, how fast to ramp coaching. We have been calibrating gates and trigger dates against a blank — so compute the floor first, and treat the rest as provisional until it's a real number.

Risks to respect

1. Maxwell branding — defused (years of use, no issue; curriculum is 75–80% own IP). Mentioned, not a worry: rename/attribute before any Guide licenses the 21 Laws track.
2. Community patience — The Pack needs 12 months and member-to-member design, or it dies like most of them.
3. The 15-month outlier — keep it back-of-ladder; never make it the front door.
4. SEO won't save the site — LinkedIn + referrals + the Scorecard will.
5. AI brand risk — two failure modes. The loud one: positioning it as "talk to AI Jer instead of Jer" undercuts the soul thesis (so: no voice clone, no public companion). The quiet one, easy to miss: a "good enough" AI silently commoditizing the codifiable scaffolding of an already-hard-to-price intimacy product. Either is a kill condition. Companion, never coach — and only if a paying client asks.

What not to lose

The "no strings attached / no love lost" warmth in your documents is the brand. Every funnel email, every sales page, every AI prompt should sound like you — a crock-pot person in a microwave industry. That's the whole point, and it's why this can work.