DarkHorse 1:1
Private executive coaching for founders, CEOs, and proven operators whose next constraint is no longer what they know, but how they operate.
We work on you and everything you are responsible for.
Who it is for
Operators who have already proven they can win, and are beginning to ask what winning will require from them next.
You have built something real, largely through your ability to carry extraordinary amounts of responsibility. Effort, intelligence, intensity, endurance, force of will. Everything works because you carry it. And you are starting to realize you cannot carry your way into the next version of it.
The problem rarely announces itself as one thing. It shows up as a team that still routes every decision through you. A marriage getting the leftovers. Health you keep promising to get to. A plateau you keep trying to work your way through. Success that has quietly become another thing to maintain.
What changes
The destination is self-governance: leading yourself before trying to lead everything around you.
- You see patterns earlier and stop negotiating with truths you already know.
- You stop responding to discomfort by automatically working harder, controlling, fixing, spending, withdrawing, or manufacturing urgency.
- You distinguish responsibility from over-responsibility, compassion from carrying, leadership from rescuing.
- You build owners. You set standards without policing everything. Difficult conversations happen before resentment.
- Your health stops being the first sacrifice. The people you love get more than what is left.
- Success stops feeling like something you have to desperately hold together.
We are not trying to make you more successful. We are helping you become someone your success no longer costs so much to be.
How it works
We begin with reality, not the presenting problem. A 90-minute Operating Assessment maps how you actually function: what you believe you are responsible for, what your calendar and decisions show you are doing, what your ecosystem rewards, and what you are protecting. From there, weekly sessions follow the problem wherever it meaningfully goes.
Every meaningful insight is expected to produce observable change. Something stops. Something gets delegated. A conversation happens. A decision is no longer postponed. We track a small number of commitments and review them honestly. At 90 days we look at the evidence together. At six months we make an explicit decision: continue, reduce cadence, or graduate.
The work may examine business, identity, marriage, health, money, faith, and family. It does not pretend to clinically treat what requires licensed expertise. When something is outside our scope, we say so.
Structure and price
- Investment
- $2,500 per month
- Commitment
- Six-month initial commitment ($15,000)
- Sessions
- Weekly 45-minute private sessions with Dustin
- Onboarding
- 90-minute Operating Assessment
- Between sessions
- Direct async voice and text access
- Evidence
- Contextual review of relevant business and personal evidence
- Actions
- Individualized actions and behavioral experiments, with simple commitment tracking
- Reviews
- 90-day review; explicit six-month continuation, reduced-cadence, or graduation decision
- Capacity
- Eight to ten operators at a time, determined by Dustin's ability to genuinely know each one
Boundaries
1:1 is coaching. It does not quietly become fractional executive work. If what you need is someone analyzing ad accounts, directing employees, building operating systems, or owning functional execution, that is Advisory or a specialist, and we will tell you.
If you have one consequential decision rather than a recurring pattern, the Intensive is probably the right room.
The goal is never to make you better at needing DarkHorse.
Apply
We are not trying to get you in. We are trying to determine whether this is the right room for the work.
The application takes ten to fifteen minutes. Dustin reads every one. If it looks like a fit, you will hear back with a real response and, when appropriate, an invitation to a conversation. No calendar until then.