40.1642° N · 105.0974° W · Longmont, Colorado
I work with founders and technical leaders negotiating organizational change – leadership transitions, teams that stop trusting each other, risks that nobody's willing to name out loud.
I'm part confidant, part consigliere. I get pulled in when things stop working the way they used to – and nobody inside can see it clearly anymore, or is willing to say it.
Because herding cats is too easy.
Recognition
Your CTO and CPO haven't agreed on anything in months – and the team has started working around them instead of with them.
Decisions get made twice. Made in a meeting, then quietly revisited in the hallway, then made again the following week. Nobody's sure which version is the real one.
AI tools are spreading across the company. Some people are excited, some are nervous, and nobody has a clear answer for what's actually allowed or who's responsible.
A new technical leader is struggling. Your best engineer just got promoted and it's not going well. Everyone can see it. Nobody wants to say it.
The founder has become the default mediator for everything – every disagreement, every priority call, every stuck decision routes back to one person.
Strong-willed leaders have stopped listening. Not because they don't care, but because they've stopped trusting that the other side is hearing them.
This isn't a talent problem. You hired well. The people are capable, driven, and smart.
This is an alignment problem. And it tends to get worse, not better, on its own.
Not sure? There's a six-minute way to find out.
Why It Works
Proximity blindness
People inside the organization are too close to see what's actually happening. The dysfunction has become the baseline. It doesn't register as a problem anymore – it just feels like "how things are." The founder, the leadership team, the board – they're all operating inside the same system, with the same blind spots.
Political paralysis
People inside the organization can see the problem – but they aren't willing to name it. Maybe it's the founder's behavior. Maybe it's a VP who's become untouchable. Maybe it's a decision that was made badly and nobody wants to reopen. The cost of speaking up feels higher than the cost of staying quiet. So everyone stays quiet. And the problem compounds.
Both of these require the same thing: someone trusted, external, and willing to be candid. Someone with no internal politics to protect. Someone who can walk into the room, see what's actually going on, and say it clearly enough that the right people can act on it.
That's my role. Part confidant, part consigliere. Not a consultant who produces a report and leaves. Not a coach who asks how you feel about it. The person you call before it becomes a crisis.
The Work
Every engagement starts the same way: a conversation. No pitch, no proposal, no commitment. I ask hard questions and show you what I see. If there's a fit, we go from there.
~2 weeks
A structured diagnostic across leadership alignment, cross-functional friction, decision architecture, and AI governance. The goal is to surface what's really going on – where decisions break down, where friction shows up, and where the real risks are. The deliverable is a candid verbal brief and a clear picture of what needs to happen next, in what order.
This is not a 40-page report. The value is what gets said in the room – synthesis and judgment, not documentation.
30–45 days
Sometimes the assessment reveals friction that needs hands-on work to resolve. When it does, this is a targeted engagement scoped to the specific issues – a leadership communication breakdown, addressing identified risks, AI governance foundation work, or something else entirely. Scope is defined by what the assessment actually revealed.
The goal is forward motion on the right things. Not a promise that everything is fixed – a promise that you'll know exactly where you stand and what comes next.
Individuals or Teams
Long-term access to judgment. Available when something feels off, pulled into meetings when significant decisions are being made, providing real-time perspective on leadership dynamics, negotiation situations, AI decisions, and organizational risk.
Not a project. A relationship. The kind where you have someone in your corner who maintains enough context to be genuinely useful – not just reactive. Some clients get here after an assessment or intervention. Some know from the first conversation that this is what they need.
About
Mercier, K. · Longmont, Colorado
Thirty years at the intersection of technology and business taught me one thing: the technology is rarely the real problem. The misalignment is.
Leaders stop trusting each other. Decisions won't stay decided. Risks everyone can see, nobody will name. I help founders and technical leaders see what they're too close to catch – and say it before it becomes a crisis.
What Others Say
Korey was brought in to not only build an IT team but support an entire organization going through rapid growth across the board. He was successful in both endeavors. I appreciated his attitude and passion for a positive work environment for his team and its members. If I was starting a new business Korey would be one of my first calls.
Korey built an incredibly talented IT team and oversaw the implementation of the infrastructure to support diverse IT and information security needs. He is skilled at seeing the big picture as well as all the details and excels at explaining his concerns in a very understandable, straightforward manner.
Korey's love of architecture, security, and brilliant problem solving brought about solutions that benefitted multiple aspects of our business. His positive attitude, energy, and ability to affect change made him invaluable to our program team. Total rock star!
In all of Korey's interactions, he speaks like an educator, and his thoughtful consideration of issues engages others and fosters a collaborative team environment. He excels at bringing together the right people for a common purpose.
Thinking in Public
Upcoming Talk
Cyber Cheyenne 2026 · Oct. 16, 2026
A solo session at Cyber Cheyenne, a one-day summit for regional IT and security leadership. Every company has an AI strategy now, usually several – one per department, bought separately, governed by nobody. What that looks like from the technical side of the gap, why the risk conversation keeps happening after the incident, and what leadership has to agree on before any policy is worth the paper.
Article
LinkedIn · Jul. 2026
Organizations don't fail all at once – they fail in layers. The seven-layer networking model, repurposed for tracing visible breakdowns – priorities that won't hold, decisions made twice – to the layer where they actually started.
Talk
RMAIIG Marketing Subgroup · Jul. 2026
The fear of foreign models “calling home” is legitimate – it's just aimed at the wrong layer of the stack. What changes when an organization runs AI on hardware it controls – privacy, cost, model provenance, and who owns the guardrails when there's no cloud vendor in the loop.
Most of the founders I work with don't arrive with a clear diagnosis. They arrive with a feeling – something isn't right, and they can't quite put their finger on it. That's normal. That's actually the right time to have a conversation.
If you'd like to put words to the feeling first, the signal read takes six minutes.
He is skilled at seeing the big picture as well as all the details – and excels at explaining his concerns in a very understandable, straightforward manner.
