Private Client Work
For those shaping what's next.
Coaching, strategy, and research for 0-2 builders.
Narrative Executive Coaching · Strategic Advisory · Organizational Advisory · Social Impact & Applied Research
I work with founders, executives, researchers, creators, and social-impact leaders who are building, leading, and making consequential decisions. Sometimes that work is individual. Sometimes it involves an entire organization navigating growth, change, and the challenge of building structures that can sustain what comes next.
I have been there. I founded and led companies, raised money, built teams, made hard calls, closed chapters, started again, and lived with the consequences of my decisions. I bring that experience, along with Narrative Intelligence research, coaching, and strategy, into every engagement.
The premise
The hardest problems are rarely only strategic.
A decision about the company can also be a decision about identity. A conflict can rest on an assumption no one has examined. A transition can ask you to release a story that once helped you succeed.
Narrative Intelligence is my research into how the stories we live by shape what we see, what we believe is true, and what we think is possible. In private work it gives us a way to look at the story shaping the problem alongside the problem itself.
The problem comes first. The framework helps us see it.
Narrative Executive Coaching
Coaching for leaders who want a real sparring partner.
Founders and executives work inside pressure, competing responsibilities, ambition, relationships, money, power, and consequence. You need room to think and someone willing to challenge you.
We work with the stories shaping how you lead, how you interpret events, how you relate to yourself and other people, and what you imagine is possible. I will ask the question you have not asked yourself, tell you what I see, and build the strategy with you when that is what the moment needs.
Insight is where we start. The work continues until there is a choice, and then until that choice shows up in what you do.
My approach is grounded in Narrative Intelligence and informed by my ongoing study of narrative coaching with David B. Drake, PhD, founder of the Moment Institute.
What we may work on
- Leadership identity and transition
- Founder pressure and over-functioning
- A decision you have been circling
- Your relationship to achievement, success, and responsibility
- Team and relationship dynamics
- Agency and boundaries
- Burnout and reinvention
- The space between one chapter and the next
Strategic Advisory
An experienced thinking partner for complex, original, high-stakes work.
Some moments call for working the problem directly. Strategic Advisory is for founders, researchers, executives, creators, and innovators building something new, or facing a decision where the variables keep moving and no playbook exists.
Together we map the system, pressure-test assumptions, separate signal from noise, examine the narrative shaping the decision, and find the strongest move available. I bring research, pattern recognition, and more than a decade of operating experience to the table.
A three-hour Strategic Intensive can break open one stuck problem. A longer partnership lets me stay close enough to the work that we never start from zero when something moves.
Organizational Advisory
Build the organization your next stage requires.
Growth changes what an organization needs from its people, leadership, and structure. Roles that once worked become unclear. Decisions bottleneck. Workloads become uneven. The founder or executive director keeps carrying responsibilities the organization has outgrown.
I work with nonprofits, foundations, creative organizations, and founder-led companies to understand where those pressures are coming from and what needs to change.
My approach combines organizational assessment, confidential stakeholder listening, leadership development, and strategy. I look at how the organization actually operates: who makes decisions, how responsibility is distributed, what expectations are understood or unspoken, and where existing structures are no longer serving the work.
I also examine the narratives shaping organizational behavior. The beliefs about who must carry responsibility, what good leadership looks like, or how things have always been done can be just as consequential as the formal structure.
The goal is a healthier, more capable organization with a clear path forward.
Organizational Leadership & Capacity Assessment
A structured engagement to understand the organization's current reality and build a practical roadmap for its next stage.
01 — Diagnose
Begin with individual conversations with staff and leadership, relevant board perspectives, and a review of organizational structures, roles, and planning materials.
Examine workload, communication, accountability, decision-making, leadership capacity, and the assumptions shaping how people work together.
02 — Design
Translate the findings into a written organizational assessment and prioritized recommendations.
Clarify what needs to change, where leadership capacity must grow, which roles or investments matter most, and how to sequence changes over the next 12–18 months.
03 — Implement
An assessment can clarify the path. Implementation is where leadership habits, responsibilities, and organizational practices begin to change.
For organizations seeking continued support, I offer a 90-day leadership advisory partnership following the assessment. This includes executive coaching, strategic guidance through difficult decisions, and leadership and board check-ins as the organization begins putting its recommendations into practice.
The outcome: A clearer picture of the organization, a practical roadmap, and leadership support to turn recommendations into action.
Best suited for: Organizations navigating growth, leadership transitions, strained capacity, unclear roles, founder dependency, or consequential decisions about structure and future investment.
Social Impact & Applied Research
Understand the people inside the system before trying to change it.
Some problems cannot be solved from a conference room. This work combines qualitative inquiry, narrative research, documentary practice, stakeholder listening, and strategy to show how people are experiencing a problem, especially where institutional assumptions and lived reality have drifted apart.
I work with communities, nonprofits, foundations, researchers, and public-sector leaders. We begin by listening.
- What are people experiencing?
- What stories shape how the problem is understood?
- Where do institutional narratives differ from lived experience?
- What becomes possible when the people closest to the problem help frame it?
The outcome may be research, strategic recommendations, facilitated learning, narrative analysis, documentary film, or a combination. On selected community-based projects I collaborate with Holly Truitt and other researchers and practitioners.
One practice
One practice, four ways in.
Real problems ignore service categories. A strategic question can uncover a leadership pattern. An organizational assessment can expose structural gaps and assumptions that have gone unexamined. A coaching conversation can become a concrete business decision. Research can reveal something no one knew to ask.
I move across those lines on purpose. Whether the work calls for executive coaching, strategic advisory, organizational assessment, or applied research, we begin with the problem and build the right engagement around it.
How I work
Reflection, with movement.
I listen closely, ask hard questions, name patterns, bring relevant research, and tell you what I see. I won't manufacture certainty where none exists.
The work follows the five proposed capacities of Narrative Intelligence, in plain words:
See
the story shaping how you read the situation.
Sort
what is true from what you are interpreting.
Expand
what else this could mean and what else is possible.
Choose
how you want to respond.
Live
the choice in how you act, decide, and lead.
What you can bring
Questions with consequence and no obvious answer.
A consequential decision where the answer is not obvious
A leadership role that no longer fits the way it once did
A company or organization entering a new stage of growth
A pattern you understand and keep repeating
A conflict where competing stories about what is happening are fighting for authority
A transition between who you have been and who the next chapter asks you to be
A social-impact problem that can only be understood by listening to the people living inside it
An organization that has grown beyond its current leadership structure, roles, or systems
You do not need to arrive with the problem neatly framed. That is part of the work.
About Paige
I have been in the room where the decision has to get made.
Paige Williams is a Narrative Intelligence researcher, founder, narrative executive coach, strategic advisor, filmmaker, and bestselling author.
She spent more than a decade building AudPop, a media technology company that grew into a global community of more than 80,000 filmmakers and creators. That work took her through fundraising, growth, leadership, failure, reinvention, and decisions with no guaranteed answer.
She is the founder of StoryKeys, the founder and executive producer of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, and the author of The Twelve Creative Keys. She is currently studying narrative coaching with David B. Drake, PhD, founder of the Moment Institute and a pioneer of the field.
Start here
What is the hard thing you are trying to figure out?
Start there. Tell me what is happening, what feels consequential, and what you cannot yet see clearly. We will decide together whether coaching, advisory, applied research, or some combination is the right way to work.
Book a conversation