Selected Experience

Situation

A 450-member Episcopal parish had grown by 25% in the years following COVID. That growth was a gift, but it created real tension. Longtime members and newcomers had different expectations for the parish's identity, and leadership faced a tangle of interconnected decisions about vision, programming, staffing, and a potential building expansion. The instinct was to jump straight to a facilities plan, but the real question was upstream: what kind of parish is this becoming, and what does that imply for everything else?

Approach

Over ten months, Joshua worked alongside clergy and lay leadership to answer that question in the right way. Congregational surveys and interviews surfaced the aspirations and tensions that weren't being spoken aloud. A series of structured workshops applied a strategic choice cascade: defining the church's distinctive identity and aspirations before evaluating any capital investments. Board briefings and congregation-wide presentations built alignment incrementally, so the final plan reflected broad ownership rather than a top-down directive. The deliverable wasn't just the strategic direction; it included the governance model and accountability structures needed to sustain execution.

Outcome

The vestry adopted the plan unanimously. Governance transitioned to parish staff for ongoing execution, a capital campaign entered development grounded in real strategic choices, and over 25 new initiatives launched in alignment with the plan.

Related service: Strategic Planning & Discernment.

Situation

A $4B government services contractor, under private equity ownership, faced pressure to improve profit margins. Leadership needed more than a generic cost-cutting exercise. They needed to understand where sustainable savings actually existed across the organization’s overhead structure, and where what looked like inefficiency was actually a strategic investment worth protecting.

Approach

In a fast-paced seven-week engagement, Joshua benchmarked the organization’s workforce and overhead against industry comparators and identified approximately $120M in potential sustainable savings, roughly 25% of SG&A. The findings were structured as executive decision points rather than a simple cut list. Where benchmarking surfaced apparent overspending, the analysis framed the question that actually mattered: is this a cost problem, or a capability that wins revenue? Leadership could make those calls with data and context rather than instinct.

Outcome

Leadership selected approximately $80M in savings for pursuit, and the diagnostic shaped broader strategic decisions around investment priorities and operating model design well beyond the original cost mandate.

Related service: Operational Transformation.

Situation

A major energy company was evaluating the acquisition of a regional natural gas utility for approximately $3B. The investment bankers advising the deal had projected significant cost synergies, and the client needed an independent model before committing to the transaction.

Approach

Joshua led a four-person team building a bottoms-up cost and synergy model. The critical insight came from understanding the deal structure: the target was being carved out of a highly integrated holding company where shared services already existed. The bankers had applied a standard acquisition synergy playbook, projecting significant SG&A savings from consolidation. But those savings had already been realized within the parent’s operating model. Moving the target from one shared-services structure to another would produce a fraction of the projected value. The analysis surfaced a major gap between the banker assumptions and modeled reality.

Outcome

The analysis directly informed the board's decision to withdraw the bid. The value of the engagement was in preventing a bad deal, not blessing a good one.

Related service: M&A Diligence & Integration.

Situation

A $5B regulated utility acquisition required comprehensive integration planning across five states before close. The target was being carved from a highly integrated parent company, which meant Day 1 readiness demanded separating not just back-office functions but field operations, customer systems, and regulatory reporting. Contested regulatory approval added political complexity to an already tight timeline.

Approach

Over more than a year, Joshua led pre-close integration planning and Day 1 readiness across all five operating regions. That meant building governance forums and KPI dashboards that gave executives clear visibility into risks and milestones, negotiating transition service agreements across more than ten cross-functional workshops, and coordinating the dozens of interdependencies that had to resolve before the transaction could close cleanly. On the regulatory front, a proactive regulatory strategy secured regulatory approval on schedule.

Outcome

The deal closed successfully. Day 1 executed cleanly across all five states with no service disruptions to ratepayers.

Related service: M&A Diligence & Integration.

Situation

A parish was spending roughly five hours of staff time every week producing a worship leaflet. The process involved copying readings, liturgical content, and announcements from multiple sources into a Word document, then manually reformatting fonts, spacing, and layout. It was fragile, error-prone, and entirely dependent on one staff member’s desktop publishing skill.

Approach

Joshua designed and built a web-based production tool using agentic AI coding methodologies. The application auto-fills lectionary readings and prayer book content based on the liturgical calendar. The liturgist and music director select their weekly choices from structured inputs, the communications director adds announcements, and one click generates a perfectly formatted, print-ready document. The tool replaced a manual workflow without requiring anyone to learn new software or change how they think about the work.

Outcome

Weekly production time dropped from five hours to under one. Formatting errors were eliminated, and the parish removed its dependency on a single person’s technical skill. This is a small but meaningful example of how purpose-built automation can address real operational pain in mission-driven organizations.

Related service: Operational Transformation.