Build Your Bench Coaching, san fransisco, CA (2026)

06/17/2026

I read this quote in Unreasonable Hospitality a while ago, and it has stayed with me ever since.

Guidara’s point is simple: "Service" means getting the right plate to the right table with competence and efficiency. It is transactional. It is black and white.

But genuinely connecting with the human sitting at that table? That is hospitality. That is color.

Last week, I built a "Retail Chief of Staff" AI agent to manage the operational plumbing of running my Athleta store. I let the machine handle the task lists, the logistics, and the shift follow-ups. The "black and white" parts of my job.

I didn't build it so I could hide in the back office.

I built it so I could have a Saturday like the one I just had. Because my cognitive bandwidth wasn't consumed by task lists, I was entirely free to be on the floor. And that is where the color happened:

First, meet Alice. She is in her 60s and had never shopped with us before. She came in just to explore. As we talked, she shared that she was finally recovering from a long, difficult season of major health issues. She was finally able to move again, starting yoga, hiking, and gardening. We were able to kit her up with incredible sun-protective gear, find her great deals, and celebrate her first steps back into the world.

Then came Chelsea. Chelsea is in her 30s and has recently lost a significant amount of weight. She stood in the center of our store, completely overwhelmed. She had no idea how to dress her new body, and she was terrified of the idea of even looking at smaller sizes.

She and her friend stayed with us for almost two hours. We pulled options, we tried things on, and when the anxiety crept in, we stopped to breathe. We affirmed her hard work, celebrated her progress, and honored her transformation. She walked out with a new wardrobe, standing taller, feeling absolutely amazing.

Spreadsheets can manage service. Only humans can deliver hospitality.

I use AI to manage my tasks, so I can preserve my energy for the humans.

If you are drowning in the administrative noise of your own business or team, and you want to buy back your capacity to focus on the work that actually matters—I want to share my operational blueprint with you.

Comment "CHIEF OF STAFF" below, and I will DM you the exact sample prompt template I used to build my AI Chief of Staff agent.

No catch. No pitches. Just a clean starting point to help you get your time back.

06/16/2026

True allyship requires vulnerability.

In 1996, I left my childhood church in search of a new spiritual home. I joined a young adults group where I met Brian. Brian was the most beautiful man I'd met in real life. We became fast friends, instituting a regular Monday date night for happy hours and movies.

As we got closer, he shared that he was gay, but he was fighting it. He was attending conversion therapy. He even dated a woman for a while and planned to marry her. I encouraged him to ditch the therapy and just live his life. Spoiler alert: he did. He and his husband Tom have been together for nearly 30 years now, and he is brilliant and happy.

A few years later, I was living in San Francisco, working on the edge of the Castro District. I had befriended a rep from World Vision who ran a caregiver kit program for AIDS patients. I wanted to host a kit-building event in SF, in cooperation with the gay community.

I hosted a dinner with the World Vision rep, PR executives, and big names in the local gay community. The men who showed up were hesitant. They were not eager to get involved with a religious organization because of the profound trauma they had experienced from the church.

I stopped the conversation.

I looked at each of those men individually, and I asked for their forgiveness on behalf of the "religious" people who had hurt them.

They wept. They dissolved into tears over years of exclusion and derision.

It changed me forever. You cannot ask a marginalized community to trust you until you acknowledge the trauma inflicted by the systems you are a part of.

06/11/2026

Last week I wrote about watching the AIDS crisis unfold on the evening news in the 1980s. But it didn't stay on the television.

It came to my home church in the form of a young man named Brett Graves.

Brett wasn't gay. He was a hemophiliac. When the AIDS virus hit the blood banks and began to impact people outside the gay community, Brett—an energetic, dedicated young man who worked with the youth in our church—was caught in the crossfire.

I watched him get sick. I watched him lose a lot of weight. And then he just... disappeared.

A few months later, we heard he had died.

Then came the whispers. It was AIDS.

But we couldn't talk about it. That was it. He was a great guy who had an experience completely out of his control, and it thrust him into a situation that our community had absolutely no framework for. We couldn't hold space for his reality because of the incredibly narrow margins in which we were supposed to live.

When a system's "margins" are so rigid that they require silence in the face of human suffering, that system is broken.

It taught me early on that a culture of whispers and forced silence doesn't protect a community. It slowly destroys it from the inside out.

06/11/2026

Who is holding space for the coach?

If you are a professional coach, you know the exquisite weight of the job.

You spend your entire week holding space for other executives. You guide their strategy, you manage their anxiety, and you help them Design their futures.

But when the session ends and the Zoom room closes... you are left staring at your own invoicing, marketing copy, and administrative backlog. Coaches are notorious for fiercely protecting their clients' Capacity while completely abandoning their own.
You cannot scale your empathy if you are drowning in administration.

On July 13th, I am thrilled to be speaking to the Houston Chapter of ICF (International Coaching Federation).

We are going to talk about how to stop operating like an exhausted practitioner and start acting as a Strategic Architect. I am going to share exactly how I use a Digital Bench to handle my own back-office noise so I can preserve my energy for the profound, human work of actually leading people.

If you are in the Houston ICF chapter, I cannot wait to see you there.

06/04/2026

Why my allyship didn't start at a parade.

(A couple of days late for Tuesday, but kicking off a series I'll be running every Tuesday for the rest of June).

June is Pride Month, and my feed is already full of corporate logos turned into rainbows.

I appreciate the visibility, but for me, allyship didn't start with a marketing campaign. It started in the middle of a plague.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in a strict evangelical environment. In my world, being gay was considered the absolute worst thing you could be. It was the beginning of the strongest gay rights movement yet, but you wouldn't know it in my house. I wasn't even allowed to watch Three's Company because John Ritter's character pretended to be gay just to live with two women. It was scandalous. The only representation I saw were the tropes—the "sassy gay neighbor" like Jim J. Bullock on Too Close for Comfort.

Then, the mid-80s hit. I was in high school, becoming more aware of the world, and the AIDS crisis exploded onto our TV screens.

People were dying of this terrifying new "gay cancer." I vividly remember the news reports—young men, emaciated, covered in Kaposi's sarcoma lesions, going blind, and practically begging the world to care that they were dying.

The response from my religious community? "This is your own fault."

There was a distinct, chilling lack of compassion. Looking back, I can confidently say that my "deconstruction" began at that exact moment. When you watch a community fight for its literal life while the people meant to protect them turn their backs with judgment, it changes you.

I am an ally because I remember.

06/04/2026

You cannot develop a team while you are drowning in checklists.

We are officially entering the "Talent Review" season in the retail and corporate world.

It is the time of year when we sit down with our teams and ask beautiful, ambitious questions like, "What ignites you?" and "Where do you want to be in your career?"

But here is an Earned Perspective from the front lines:

Those conversations are completely useless if your managers do not have the Capacity to actually mentor their people.

Right now, front-line leaders are buried under daily compliance audits, safety checklists, and corporate reporting. You cannot ask a leader to actively Design a career path for their best employee when they are actively fighting a war against their own administrative tasks.

If you are serious about talent development, you have to automate the noise.

A Strategic Architect builds a Digital Bench to handle the compliance, freeing up the human manager to handle the coaching.

05/26/2026

The Operator works late. The Architect goes to dinner.

I haven't posted in a few weeks.

I am one month into my new role as General Manager at Athleta. I am in the middle of unpacking a new house in Portland. The sheer volume of the operational noise of taking on a big P&L and a new city has been, frankly, overwhelming.

Last week, I had a dinner scheduled with another brilliant local CliftonStrengths coach who is also in the throes of starting her practice, raising a child, and renovating a home.

As the end of the workday approached, the to-do list was massive. The instinct to cancel dinner and stay late at the store to "catch up" was overwhelmingly strong.

But here is the uncomfortable operational truth: The list is never done.

Working late is not a badge of honor; it is usually just an inability to triage.

So, I didn't cancel. I took control of the list. I used my Digital Bench to organize the chaos, mapped out the next day, and I walked out the door. We had a phenomenal dinner. Today, on my day off, I took my dog to a gorgeous rose garden while my laundry was in the dryer.

If you do not fiercely protect your own boundaries, the business will happily consume every hour you give it.

Hold the line. Go to dinner.

04/30/2026

Today is my birthday. Most people ask for a spa day or a nice dinner. I apparently asked for a million dollar P&L and a high-performing retail floor.

Let me explain. When I moved to Portland in January, I decided I wanted to pick up a part-time retail gig to get out of the house while I built my consulting business. I love retail, and I spent a decade at Gap Inc. previously, so I threw my hat in the ring for an Assistant Store Manager role at the Athleta in Brewery Blocks.

They called me the next day.
They didn’t want me for the ASM role. They had an unposted opening for a General Manager, and they specifically wanted someone with my exact background in leadership design and people development.

It was the absolute right fit at the right time. So, on April 20th, I officially stepped into the GM role.

This is a small store with a mighty, brilliant staff driving spectacular results, and I am deeply grateful to be part of an organization that looks at a Strategic Architect and says, "Yes, we want that on the front line."

To answer the inevitable question: No, I am not being hired to install a corporate AI system at Athleta.

Instead, I am doing exactly what I tell my clients to do. I am bringing my own personal Digital Bench with me. I am using my Custom AI Systems to manage my own operational noise—so that I can dedicate 100% of my "Human Premium" to coaching this brilliant team on the floor.

I'll be writing all about this integration tomorrow in To Prompt, Divine.

If you are in Portland, please come say hi. I'll be the one fiercely protecting my team's capacity, organizing the leggings, and accepting birthday coffee. ☕️

04/22/2026

Today is a rare calendar overlap: It is both Earth Day and Administrative Professionals Day.

I spent the early part of my career as an admin. My mother was an admin for most of her career. So I can say with absolute, earned perspective: much of the time, the job feels exactly like being shoved face-first into a pile of... well, compost.

Because of this, I used to have a very dark joke about these two holidays sharing a date. I would tell executives that they needed to make sure they were properly composting their administrative professionals once they were done using them.

In the corporate ecosystem, we have historically treated our support staff as infinite, consumable resources. We take brilliant human beings and burn them to the ground doing manual data entry, playing calendar tetris, and acting as human bridges between broken software platforms.

Thankfully, we are finally seeing a brilliant, long-overdue shift. We are watching the "Assistant" evolve into the "Administrative Business Partner." We are recognizing that these professionals are strategic assets, growing far beyond filing and scheduling.

I desperately hope this trend continues.

But here is the uncomfortable operational truth: You cannot ask your admin to be a strategic business partner while simultaneously drowning them in mechanical friction.

A Strategic Architect protects their most precious ecosystem by building a Digital Bench. You automate the 85% administrative noise so your people actually have the Capacity to be the strategic partners you need them to be.

Celebrate your admins today. And then stop treating them like human APIs.

Build Your Bench Coaching

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