The Filter — A Prioritization System for Growing Companies

Your team isn't short on strategy. It's short on a system to decide what gets worked on first.

The best ideas are buried behind the loudest ones. Without a lightweight system to cut through that, a 50-person company loses at least $322,000 a year to the wrong priorities. The Filter fixes that and the right work becomes obvious.

Built across 20+ lines of business in Fortune 500 and enterprise settings — now available for $20M–$500M companies that want to make better decisions, faster, with less friction.

Now includes AI governance — keep reading
Left Brain Consulting
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
Smart teams. Plenty of ideas. Real ambition.
No system to decide what gets resourced first.
So the best ideas stall, the loudest ones win, and every decision becomes a political negotiation.
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
Strategy and execution exist. The connection between them doesn't. And it's costing you more than you think.
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.

Strategy
Annual goals
OKRs
Board priorities
Vision
The Filter — Priority Stack
9.2   AI implementation
8.7   Fix onboarding
7.1   Upgrade CRM
5.5   New dashboard
3.2   Rebrand
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.

1hr
per week to run it
The Chaos Tax

What the gap costs you.

For a 50-person company — $322,000 a year. The money isn't missing. It's just pointed at the wrong things.

What it looks like on your team

2 out of every 10 people are working on the wrong things. Fully paid. Fully busy. Pointed in the wrong direction. That's not a people problem — it's a targeting problem. And recapturing that 20% is worth 2 FTEs you don't have to hire.

Wasted effort on wrong priorities
10 people × $75K loaded cost × 20% on misaligned work
$150,000
Leadership spending 3 hours a week trying to agree on what matters most
5 leaders × 3 hrs/week × $150/hr × 50 weeks
$112,000
Abandoned initiatives that never should have started
2 per year × 3 people-months × $10K/month
$60,000
Annual Chaos Tax — 50-person company
$322,000
Annual chaos tax
$322K
Every year. Without a system.
Wrong hire cost
$75K
To fill a gap that didn't need to exist.
vs
The Fix
A fraction
of this.
Fixed price. Four weeks. Done.
The system pays for itself the second you make one better decision from it. For most, that happens by week 2 or 3 of the installation process.
How to Eliminate The Chaos Tax
Stack Install
Install
The Filter.

Approx. ~10hrs to install over 4 weeks. Each week builds on the last. By the time Nathan's gone, the system doesn't feel installed. It feels like yours. That's the point.

Let's Talk
On-Site Workshop Available

For teams already operating in person — Nathan comes to you for the portfolio review and decision workshop. Everything else runs the same.

The Guarantee
A running system by Week 4 — or your money back.

Full initiative inventory captured, scored, and sequenced. Trained internal operator. A decision cadence your leadership has already run. If it isn't done, 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 already — in theory. The question is whether it's producing decisions or producing meetings. If the backlog of is chaotic, that process isn't working.

The playbook is free and it will work. The system doesn't fail because it's incomplete — it fails the first time a senior leader's pet project scores a 4.2 and someone has to tell them that is not the best use of company time. That's easier when it's not your job on the line. What you're hiring is neutrality.

That's the whole design. A trained internal operator runs it from Week 5. The system, rules, and cadence stay. Nathan exits. The capability doesn't.

About 10 hours over the 4-week engagement. One kickoff session, 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, Notion, or a 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. No new tools. No new logins. No new overhead.

Key Case Study
$100M ARR Enterprise

Work was entering from everywhere.
Nothing was getting finished.

A 1,000-person organization. Dozens of uncoordinated intake paths. 25%+ of effort duplicated across teams. Strategic initiatives stalled mid-flight. Leadership making decisions in meetings that got unmade in the next one.

The Filter got installed. One intake system. Every initiative scored, sequenced, and owned. A weekly cadence that forced the decisions leadership had been deferring for months. Within weeks, the noise stopped competing with the work — because the work finally had a rank order everyone had agreed to.

Two years later, the system is still running without Nathan. That's the whole point.

25%+
Wasted or duplicated effort eliminated
397
Ideas through one system
1,000
Person organization
2yr+ later
System is still running
Nathan Harris
NH
Nathan Harris.
The operator behind the strategy.

I have witnessed thousands of strategy decisions get made live in the room.

EVPs running $2B+ ARR business units. Managers just trying to hold a team accountable. Hundreds of decision makers in between.

Decisions that made people quit. Decisions that got people promoted. Political decisions that protected someone's "kingdom" at the expense of the business. Decisions that led to health events — from those making them, and from those on the receiving end.

I was at the center of all of it. Trying to positively influence where I could.

The pattern I kept seeing: decision making is the most emotional part of running a business. When decisions touch culture, careers, politics, and money — emotion wins more than it should.

I took everything I watched and built a system to change that. The Filter.

Ideas get ranked by impact, urgency, who they affect, and what happens if you do nothing. One hour a week to maintain it. The pressure moves off the authority in the room and onto the framework.

This isn't about removing emotion from your business. It's about making sure emotion isn't the only thing making your decisions.

MetLife + IQVIA — Three promotions at MetLife, two at IQVIA. Associate Director at a Fortune 500 by 25.
EY (Big 4 Client Side) — Only non-EY operator on a $200M investment to modernize a $2B ARR business unit. Built the operating layer across business, IT, and audit that became the origin of The Filter. Principles of system still in use at EY Insurance Advisory.
20+ lines of business — Same system. From 10 people to 1,000. Still running.
Free — No catch
The Playbook

The full system.
On us.

Most systems like this cost thousands before you see a single document. We give you the whole thing upfront — free, no strings.

The playbook is complete and it will work. What it can't give you is a neutral operator in the room. The system doesn't fail because it's incomplete — it fails the first time a senior leader's pet project scores a 4.2 and someone has to hold the line. That's a lot easier when it's not your job on the line. That's the part you hire.

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
AI governance framework — how The Filter makes AI stick
The Filter spreadsheet — intake, scoring, dashboard, ROI
Get the Playbook
Free. Instant access.
No spam. Just the playbook.
Added Bonus

The Filter is also how AI actually sticks.

Most companies don't have an AI problem. They have a prioritization problem — and AI is just the latest thing caught in it. IT evaluating vendors. Marketing using tools nobody approved. Engineering running experiments. All competing for the same resources, with no shared cadence and no definition of done.

The Filter doesn't care if it's an AI initiative or a rebrand. Everything goes through the same system. Scored. Owned. Visible. That's what makes AI governable — not a separate framework, just the same discipline applied to one more category of work.

01

Full portfolio visibility

Every improvement initiative on one list. Including AI. Scored. Owned. Visible. You can't manage what you can't see.

02

Honest ROI tracking

Did the estimated $200K efficiency gain actually materialize? Now you know.

03

Change management built in

Change doesn't stick when it comes from all directions. Centralized releases to staff through the cadence fixes that structurally.

04

AI-enabled decisions

The AI Insight column collapses every row of signal into one executive-ready decision line. The system reads the noise so you don't have to.

Too many priorities?
Too much friction?
Not enough clarity?
Let's fix that.