The Problem
Everyone calls you "the heart and soul of the business." They think it's a compliment. You smile, nod, and feel sick inside—because you know that's not how it works. Saying you're the heart and soul of the business is like saying you're the heart and soul of one of your children. It's category error. Your organisation has its own heart and soul—you birthed it, you can feel it, you know it's real—but it's invisible to everyone else because you haven't captured it and handed it over.
So you stay. You interpret. You remind. You course-correct. New people come in with their playbooks from their last company. They strategise. They execute. And you watch it drift, because they're not working from the true intent—they're working from whatever they learned at business school or their last startup.
Every strategic decision runs through you. Every hire is a gamble—will they "get it" or won't they? Every piece of content, every product, every partnership requires your instinctive yes or no. You can't take a sabbatical without the organisation drifting. You can't delegate the most important parts. You certainly can't exit.
You are the bottle.
And that's the problem.
The karmic obligation that drove you to create this thing—the inflection point that grabbed you by the throat and said "you must do this"—it never resolves. It just keeps cycling. You're personally holding what should be held organisationally. And the unicorn? It stops running. Or runs in circles. Or bucks you off entirely.
What Hasn't Worked
Mission/vision statement?
Too generic, no roots, anyone could copy it.
Brand strategist?
Captures surface, not soul — gives you fonts and voice guidelines, not constitutional DNA.
Founder therapy?
Helps you (good!), doesn't transfer anything to the organisation.
Elaborate onboarding docs?
Information without transmission — people read it and still don't feel it.
Just being around more?
Exhausting, unsustainable, doesn't scale, keeps you trapped.
Hoping the right people will just ‘get it’?
They won't. Not unless you give them something to get.
The Root Crop
Source Essence is the root crop of your organisation. It lives below ground. It's where the organisation draws its nutrients, its direction, its tone, its decision-making integrity. It's built from the actual inflection moments—the ones that really happened, with all the feelings you've been embarrassed to name—alchemised into organisational DNA that others can sense, feel, and be held accountable to.
It is not a mission statement.
Not a brand story.
Not a values list.
Not a founder's memoir.
Not content for your website.
Those things derive from it later. Source Essence is objective. It's what actually happened. It's what actually drives the organisation. Everything above ground must be fed by what's below ground. If it's not, you get generic drift. Strategies that seem smart but feel wrong. A brand that looks good but has no jing.
The Other Side
You stop being the stand-in.
People can make aligned decisions without you in the room. They've learned to sense the essence. They know what's constitutional and what's not. The root system is doing the approving.
Strategy emerges from source essence, not someone's playbook.
Instead of endless debates about direction, you ask: "What does source essence want to do next?" It's not your opinion versus someone else's—it's collective sensing of organisational evolution.
Hiring gets real.
Candidates read the Source Essence Document. They either go "yes, this is exactly what I've been looking for" or "this isn't for me." Self-selection. No more gambling.
You can actually step back.
Hand over CEO duties. Take a sabbatical. Move into other work. The organisation keeps running true because it has its own heartbeat, its own jing, its own evolutionary purpose—and it's fulfilling it whether you're in the room or not.
The karmic weight lifts.
You've completed the handover. The obligation is now held organisationally, not personally. You dissolve karmic inflections through organisational impact, not just personal spiritual work. You become unburdened. The unicorn runs. The bridge gets built.
That's what makes your unicorn a unicorn.
Without it, you've just got a well-funded horse.
And the thing that can't be faked? An organisation with captured source essence has a tone and feeling so deeply rooted and genuine that it becomes unmistakable. Customers feel it. Partners feel it. New leadership can't just "rebrand" or "pivot" on a whim. The root system holds. The organisation remembers what it is.
The Deliverable
This is a facilitated excavation and handover. We go into the inflection moments—the real ones, not the sanitised brand-story versions. The rage, the grief, the vow you made that you stopped mentioning because it sounds too dramatic, too woo, too personal, too raw. That's root crop. That's what we're after.
We capture them with full emotional context, shift them from "I" to "the organisation," and alchemise them into a Source Essence Document—the constitutional DNA of your organisational being. It contains:
The Origin Story
The inflection moments written as the organisation's journey of coming into being.
The Karmic Obligation & Intent
What this organism is here to resolve, transform, and create in the world.
The Deal
The explicit exchange between founder and organisation: what you give, what it gives.
The Pillars/Chambers
The distinct qualities of source essence, each rooted in a specific moment.
The Evolutionary Purpose
The public-facing distillation, born from source, not invented in a branding workshop.
The Constitutional Truths
The non-negotiables that, if violated, mean the organisation has betrayed its essence.
The Signature Page
Everyone who joins signs it, committing to sense and uphold the essence.
This document becomes the root system. Everything grows from it. Nothing contradicts it. Every new hire studies it. And then you're free.
The Process
3–4 hours
We go through the inflection moments together. I hold space while you stay in the imaginal realm instead of flying to strategy. We find the pillars, the vow, the war cry, the karmic obligation.
2–3 hours
We take what you've excavated and shift from "I" to "the organisation." Your experiences become its origin. Like Saving Mr. Banks—"Give her to me. Trust me with your precious Mary Poppins." That's the alchemy.
2 hours
First draft review. I help you sense where it's still too personal, too generic, or where the real essence is hiding under acceptable language. We refine until it's feelable.
2 hours
How to teach your team to sense it. What derivative documents you need. How to make signing the Source Essence Document a ritual, not just paperwork.
Monthly · 3–6 months
Troubleshoot resistance. Identify drift. Make sure it's becoming the root system, not a Google Doc people read once.
The Trippers
This is for the trippers—the hippie weirdos, the plant medicine people, the animists, the ones who see souls in things that shouldn't have souls. The ones who are deeply, perhaps uncomfortably, untamable. You got tripped—by a moment, a vision, a breaking open, by pain that wouldn't let you look away, by love that demanded manifestation, by a karmic obligation you didn't ask for but can't refuse.
If you think organisations are just economic entities, this isn't for you. If you've always known yours is alive in ways you couldn't explain—this language will feel like coming home. We're building bridges between heaven and earth here. This is not metaphor. This is how it actually works.
A Warning
If you're just beginning:
Do this now. Before you hire your first team member. Before investors. Before you get too far down the road and have to do the much harder work of soul retrieval.
If you're already running:
The longer you wait, the more the organisation drifts from essence, the more painful the realignment.
If you're scaling fast:
Stop. Pause growth for a quarter if you need to. Because scaling without source essence is just scaling misalignment. And then you'll have to scale back down to fix it, which is brutal.
Your organisation has a soul. It's time to let everyone else feel it.
Initial call: 30 minutes, free • Timeline: ~2 months • Investment: TBC
Let's Capture Your LightningOr keep being the smartest person in every room. See how that works out.
Let's capture your lightning and set your unicorn free.