The Filter — Left Brain Consulting

Your leadership team will make hundreds of decisions this year.
Most of them won't hold.

Without a shared system, urgency masquerades as importance — and there's no defensible way to say no.

The Filter installs the decision layer above your existing tools — a scored intake, ranked priorities, and weekly cadence, in 4 weeks — so the important ones actually stick. Every initiative visible, owned, and seen through to delivery.

Most companies can expect to reclaim $500K–$2M+ in annual execution capacity by killing the rework, duplicated efforts, and abandoned initiatives that quietly erode EBITDA.

4-Week Setup · Money-Back Guarantee
Left Brain Consulting
Track Record

Built inside a Fortune 50 transformation — $200M investment, Big 4 (EY) engagement, VP-level decision governance.

Forged in an ERP crisis recovery across a $15B ARR enterprise — zero critical defects, every financial close protected.

Crystallized across a four-company integration — ~$5M of duplicated effort reallocated to protect ~$45M of delivery capacity. Still running without me a year later.

The Problem

Every company has two jobs.

Job 1 — Always Wins
Keep the lights on.

Delivery. Customer commitments. Day-to-day operations. Loud, urgent, never stops demanding attention.

Job 2 — Always Loses
Improve the business.

AI implementation. Better systems. Process upgrades. Always important, but lost in the stack of other important ideas.

The result
Everyone knows what needs to happen.
Nobody agrees on what's first.
The Chaos Tax

What this replaces
for a $50M business.

These numbers use conservative assumptions. The real cost is usually higher — because misaligned priorities don't just waste time, they delay the work that actually moves the number. Every quarter this runs unaddressed is a quarter of execution capacity you don't get back.

$780K
Leadership time spent on the wrong priorities
6 leaders × $250K loaded cost × 20% of time on low-ranked work = $300K direct cost. Add 3 hrs/week per leader in meetings trying to agree on what the priorities are: another $480K annually.
$420K
Sunk cost on initiatives abandoned mid-cycle
Strategic initiatives abandoned mid-cycle because a new fire got treated as a priority before it was validated. The work already started. The team already context-switched. The outcome never came.
$650K
High-value work delayed because authority beat merit
High-value initiatives delayed because someone with more authority in the room won the argument. The important work waited. The urgent-but-lower-value work got resourced first. One deferred quarter on a high-impact initiative at $2.6M ARR impact = $650K of revenue that started later than it had to.
Estimated annual cost of misalignment
$1.85M+

The Filter costs $35,000 and installs in 4 weeks. The math isn't complicated. What's complicated is the first time a leadership team has to rank everything against everything else — and make real calls in the open, while the system is still earning its authority. I run those sessions. Someone with no stake in the outcome holds the process steady until your team can hold it themselves.

$35K
Remote · 4 Weeks
The Problem — Visualized
Strategy and execution exist.
The connection doesn't.

Strategy lives in decks. Execution lives in tools. The improvement work that should connect them lives in a pile of competing opinions that nobody can prioritize without starting an argument.

Strategy
Annual goals
OKRs
Board priorities
Vision deck
The Gap
AI chatbot
Upgrade CRM
Fix onboarding
New dashboard
SOC 2 compliance
Expand capacity
Automate reporting
Customer portal
abandoned · relitigated · stalled · nobody owns it · started twice
Execution
Engineering team
Weekly sprints
PM tools
Daily standups
The gap is not a lack of ideas. It is the absence of a trusted decision system.
The Solution — Visualized
The Filter bridges the gap. Here's how it works.

Every improvement idea — AI projects, system upgrades, process changes — gets submitted to a single intake system, scored against the same criteria, and ranked by the model. The ranked list starts the conversation. Leadership finishes it in one meeting. Only what the team can actually absorb gets activated.

When every initiative is visible and ranked, capital stops leaking. That's how EBITDA gets protected.

Strategy
Annual goals
OKRs
Board priorities
Vision
The Filter — Priority Stack
9.2   Install Agentic AI CRM Plug-in
8.7   Data Warehouse for Refreshable KPI Management
7.1   Customization Request from Strategic Customer
5.5   Bring in Consultants for Change Management
4.2   Onboarding Process Improvement
Capacity check
Available bandwidth vs. already allocated
Execution
✓  Right work activated
✓  PM tools get fed
·  Queued — no bandwidth
·  Deferred — scored lower

Capacity-aware by design.

A high score doesn't mean it starts Monday. The Filter only activates what the team can actually absorb. A 5.5 that fits right now beats a 9.2 that requires six months of prep. That's not a bug — that's the system working.

What gets prioritized gets owned. What gets owned gets visible.

1hr
per week to run it
The Filter · How It Works

One intake. One list.
One hour a week.

A quality input system — not a decision-making system. The Decision Authority still decides. Intuition and judgment still matter. The Filter ensures that when a decision gets made, it's made on structured, shared understanding — not a hallway conversation or whoever asked loudest.

01 — Intake
Capture
Everything enters through one door. No side channels.
Standardized form — title, description, scoring rationale
Active work and pipeline on the same list
Incomplete submissions returned immediately
Golden rule: if it's not on the list, it doesn't exist
02 — Prioritize
Score & Rank
Every idea evaluated against the same criteria.
Impact × Urgency × Audience weighted scoring
Ranked list surfaces at the weekly forum
Score is input, not verdict — leadership still decides
Capacity check before anything activates
03 — Activate
Own & Deliver
Only what the team can actually absorb gets started.
Named owner assigned at activation
Definition of done agreed before work begins
Weekly status: green / at risk / off track
WIP limits enforced — active list stays honest
04 — Release
Land & Stick
Done isn't done until the organization has absorbed it.
Demo at monthly forum — show the work to the room
Centralized communication through the cadence
ROI check — did the estimated value materialize?
Change management built into the release step
The Spreadsheet
Single Source of Truth
Intake tab, scoring model, exec dashboard, ROI calculator. One list. Everything active, scored, owned, and visible. Lives in your existing stack — no new tools.
The Decision Log
Institutional Memory
Every activation, deferral, and kill documented with reasoning. No silent decisions. The log is what makes the system defensible six months later — and in a data room.
The Fast Track Protocol
For Genuine Urgency
Three-question test → 15-min Decision Authority sync → named displacement. Nothing bypasses the system. It moves through it faster.
If it's not on the list,
it doesn't exist.
This is the single rule that makes everything else work. Every bypass is a test of whether the system is real or performative. Hold it every session, every cycle.
Where The Filter Came From

Three environments.
One system, productized.

Tap each step to read the story →

Fortune 50 · $200M Investment · $2B ARR Line of Business

Operating infrastructure for a $200M investment to modernize a $2B ARR line of business — with EY running the engagement.

MetLife committed $200M to modernize a $2B ARR line of business. EY ran the engagement. I was the only MetLife FTE embedded on the team — my functional boss an EY Senior Manager, my reporting line into the Head of IT for the transformation. Every request, every scope decision, every cross-functional dependency moved through one operating system I architected, built, and ran. A VP of Business and a VP of IT Delivery both ran their decisions through it.

1,000+ requests. Clear intake rules, scoring criteria, a decision-authority structure, a weekly cadence. The system held. The transformation delivered.

This is where the idea that would become The Filter first proved it worked.

Fortune 275 · $15B ARR Enterprise · Failed ERP Consolidation → Governance Rebuild

I owned the recovery of a failed ERP consolidation. The delivery earned the trust to install real governance after — an early form of The Filter.

After a merger, the enterprise spent years trying to consolidate two legacy ERPs onto Oracle. It failed. By the time leadership reverted to a dual-ERP model, the original architects and SMEs were gone, documentation was fragmented, and finance systems were under heightened scrutiny.

I was brought in to own the recovery — execute the rollback, stabilize financial operations, and re-engage fatigued teams with no institutional memory to lean on. I sequenced every release around month-end and quarter-end and ran the enterprise-wide communication that kept 100+ stakeholders aligned. Zero critical defects across every production deployment. No disruption to a single close.

That delivery rebuilt something the failed migration had destroyed: trust. And it bought the authority to fix the deeper problem — there was no shared layer governing how work entered the environment or got sequenced after go-live. So I installed one: intake rules, decision authority, scored sequencing, a weekly cadence. The same backbone I'd run at MetLife, now sharper.

The recovery proved I could be trusted. The governance that followed is where the concepts behind The Filter took real shape.

Fortune 275 · $100M ARR Business Unit · 1,000-Person Org · Four Acquisitions · $50M Expense Base

Four acquired companies, one operating layer. ~$5M of duplicated effort eliminated and reallocated. The system became a product.

Four acquisitions, never properly integrated. A combined org of 1,000 people on ~$50M in annual expense. Multiple teams — business intelligence, automation, process harmonization, what data could go to customers, regulation & compliance, IT enhancements — competing for the same resources, duplicating each other's work, with leadership reversing decisions meeting to meeting and no shared record of why.

I built one centralized intake for every enablement request, a single review board to score and sequence it, and a unified release cadence so change stopped overwhelming the people absorbing it. Tradeoffs got made in the open. Pet projects surfaced and stopped. Roughly $5M of duplicated effort was eliminated and reallocated to protect the remaining ~$45M of productive capacity.

The teams stopped fighting. The operating story got cleaner. And leadership started to trust execution again — not because the dashboards improved, but because what got committed actually got delivered, and what was supposed to be worked on was clear. Watching it hold across four warring orgs is where I knew it wasn't a personal method anymore. It was a product. I named it The Filter.

It's still their way of working — and I haven't been in the room in over a year. That is the whole design.

Productized · Installable in 4 Weeks · Runs Without Me

Three complex scaled environments. One system that kept working. So I built it to stand on its own.

A $200M transformation. A failed ERP pulled back from the brink at a Fortune 275. A 100m ARR business unit with four acquired companies that had never operated as one. Different industries, different stakes, different names for what I was running — but the same system underneath every time. One intake. One ranked list. Decisions made in the open. Change paced to what teams could actually absorb.

By the last one, it wasn't something I improvised. It was something I could hand to a team and walk away from.

So I productized it — documented, installable in 4 weeks, built to run without me. No retainer. No new tools. About an hour a week to maintain. I called it The Filter.

Now I install in weeks what took me years inside those rooms to learn to build by hand.

How to Eliminate The Chaos Tax
Stack Install
Install
The Filter.
$35,000
Remote · 4 Weeks

Roughly 10 hours of working sessions over 4 weeks.

The whole system fits in a spreadsheet your team already knows how to use and takes one hour a week to maintain — that's not a limitation, it's the reason it survives contact with a real organization.

Active work, the backlog, and every new request live on one list — so incoming demands face up against what's already in flight instead of jumping the queue.
By Week 2 the entire portfolio is captured, scored, and ranked — that cleanup alone usually pays for the engagement.
It sits above whatever you already run. Nothing to rip out, nothing to replace.

By the time we're done, the system doesn't feel installed. It's just how you now operate. Because it works.

Let's Talk
On-Site Workshop Available
$42,000

For teams already operating in person — we come to you to run the Week 2 portfolio review and decision workshop live. Travel included. Everything else runs the same.

The Guarantee
A fully re-baselined portfolio by Week 2 — or your money back.

Every active improvement project — plus the queued backlog — captured, scored, and ranked, with your leadership aligned on the list. The low-impact work gets set down so your team's capacity flows to what actually moves the business. That clarity alone is worth the engagement. If we don't get there, you get a full refund. The only requirement is that your team shows up.

Common Questions

That's the symptom. When everything is a priority, the loudest voice wins and nothing moves. ~10 hours over 4 weeks is the full cost of fixing that permanently.

Every team does — in theory. The question is whether it produces decisions or produces meetings. If your team agrees on the strategy but still can't agree on what gets worked on first, the process isn't working.

The playbook is free and it will work. What's complicated is getting a leadership team to agree on what's first — and then hold that agreement when the next urgent thing walks in the door. That takes someone who has no stake in the outcome. That's what the engagement is.

That's the whole design. A trained internal operator runs it from Week 5 — and once the system is in place, maintaining it is light work. The system, rules, and cadence stay. I exit. The capability doesn't.

About 10 hours over the 4-week engagement. One kickoff session, some homework, one workshop, one business as usual cadence, one monthly review. In between, your team uses The Filter in the conversations they're already having. These 10 hours usually replace other meetings with similar agendas. The system runs inside the work, not on top of it.

No. The Filter is built inside your existing stack wherever possible — no new software, no new logins, no new overhead. If you already live in Google Sheets, MS Office, or pretty much any project management tool, that's where it lives. The system is the structure, not the software it sits on top of.

Built inside your existing stack if we can. No new tools. No new logins. No new overhead (if anything, less overhead).

Nathan Harris
NH
Nathan Harris. Founder & Principal.
Tested Operator. Real System.

I've been in the room for thousands of decisions. From EVPs running $2B ARR lines of business down to line managers just trying to hold a team accountable — with hundreds of decision makers in between. And then was the primary operator trusted to ensure the most critical items decided were seen through from idea to delivered outcome.

The Pattern I Kept Watching
01 — No Defensible Way to Say No

Smart people making avoidable decisions — not because they were bad at their jobs, but because they had no shared framework, no rank order. Just whoever asked loudest, or whoever had the most authority in the room that day.

02 — Infrastructure That Couldn't Keep Up

The supporting infrastructure — meeting cadences, communication chains, delivery visibility — never quite kept pace with what successful execution actually required. Decisions got made. The system to follow through didn't exist.

I built The Filter to reduce that friction. And watched what happened when you gave organizations a structured way to make decisions out loud. The decisions started to hold. Work finished on time. Stakeholders could plan accordingly. The noise stopped competing with the actual work.

Outside of work: competing in jiu jitsu, exploring Colorado with my wife, son, and dog, and trying to be present for all of it.

Free — No catch
The Playbook

The full system.
On us.

I give you the whole system upfront — free, no strings. It's complete and it will work.

There's a difference between buying the book and spending a few hours with the author. Having someone explain it, facilitate the sessions, support the team in between, and enforce new standards from a neutral position — that's what the engagement is.

The intake system, scoring model, and full rules document
The operating cadence — weekly, monthly, quarterly
Setup guide — six weeks, step by step
The pre-engagement briefing — what you're actually signing up for
The Filter spreadsheet — intake, scoring, dashboard, ROI
Get the Playbook
Free. Instant access.
No spam. Just the playbook.
Left Brain Consulting · The Filter

The system exists. The call is free.
The cost of waiting isn't.

No pitch deck. No discovery questionnaire. Just a conversation about whether this fits.