How It All Started
CCF Origin
Why can't we have this here?
Not another networking group. A room where small business owners get real.
I opened my coaching practice in 2019 and joined a local networking group. That's where I met Wayne, a local experienced small business owner. Not long after, he left to join a different networking group, and life moved on. Over the next five years, we crossed paths maybe once or twice.
Then Wayne ended up back in the same room with me.
Because five years had gone by, he saw something that other people had watched happen too gradually to notice. My work was evolving. I was talking about executive coaching, and I was talking about peer learning. I was talking about the groups I was facilitating and the places my practice was taking me, all over the U.S. and even abroad.
At its core, peer learning is learning from the lived experience of other people. It isn't book smarts. It isn't a seminar or a training. It's sitting down with a handful of owners walking a similar road, far enough apart to see around each other's corners, and going deep enough that everyone leaves with something they can actually use. You grow faster because you're not figuring it out alone.
Seeing Wayne again led to breakfast in the summer of 2025. Somewhere between the coffee and the check, he asked me, "Why can't we have this here?"
I'll be honest, it caught me off guard. I asked him what he meant.
"I need this," he said. "I need a place where I can talk about things that I don't share anywhere else. You're right, I don't have one. There are things I carry as a business owner that I can't say to anyone inside my business. And I don't want to bring them home, because I don't want my family carrying the worry."
That conversation became Crafted Catalyst Forum.
What I actually do
My work comes down to one thing: I create safe spaces for the conversations that aren't happening anywhere else.
Some of those conversations can't happen anywhere else. Some of them could, but the leader decides not to have them. Either way, the conversations don't happen, and the weight stays where it is.
I make room for them three ways. One-on-one, through executive coaching. With teams and organizations, through workshops and facilitation. And with groups of peers committed to each other's growth and development, which is what I also now get to do right here, close to home, through Crafted Catalyst Forum.
Building peer learning groups in our community matters to me. A lot of my coaching happens on a screen. Some peer learning does too, and much of it happens in person, after a plane ride. Crafted Catalyst Forum (CCF) is the part I get to do close to home, with business owners who build where I build: Warrenton and Fauquier County, western Prince William County, southern and western Loudoun County. Rooms like this exist in bigger cities. Out here, they mostly don't. So I built one.
CCF is for business owners who have reached, or aspire to reach, $1 million in annual revenue, up to about $3.5 million.
Let's Talk
If you read Wayne's words and recognized yourself, let's have a conversation. Happy to meet over coffee or connect virtually. No pitch. We'll talk about what you're carrying and whether a room like this is the right fit.