Greg
Woods

I help leaders make the decisions they can’t afford to get wrong. No matter what, it is about how to improve, whether it be operational, leadership or other challenges, they all lead to financial improvement. Sometimes that’s a negotiation, sometimes it’s a strategy, sometimes it’s simply telling someone the truth no one else in the room will say. Across more than 30 industries, the challenges may be different, but the patterns are the same. When the stakes are high and the margin for error is thin, my job is to make sure that a sustainable outcome holds up long after I’ve left. The billion dollar-plus in value isn’t the goal. The goal is what happens when the right questions are asked and the right solutions are deployed.

I am brought in when an organization faces problems that don’t have an obvious answer and can’t afford a wrong one. By the time someone brings me in, they have usually exhausted the easy options. What they need isn’t more noise, it’s focused thinking, judgement, and discretion. I’ll say this plainly: the confidentiality isn’t a formality, it’s part of the value. The people I work with trust me precisely because I don’t talk about them or their challenges. So, I’ll tell you the shape of the work, but never the names and honestly, that’s the whole point.

They think it’s about winning. It isn’t. A deal you “win” at the other side’s expense tends to fall apart the moment the leverage shifts. Real negotiation is about understanding what the other party actually needs, often something they haven’t said out loud, and building an outcome both sides will still honor years later. Most people negotiate the price. I understand people, their true motivations, both known and sometimes unknown, and negotiate the relationship to create a winning, equitably valuable deal. That’s why the agreements last.

Both start with the same question: what’s missing to make this the most effective it can be and can I build it? The patent came from seeing a problem that no existing tool solved. The firms came from seeing advice being delivered in a way I thought could be done far better, again, built around better relationships with clients and our own teams. I’m not content to just diagnose something—I roll up my sleeves and want to build the thing that fixes it. Having one of those firms sold was validation, but the building is what I actually enjoy.

The same way I end up doing everything else—I forged a great relationship with some people who had developed a story worth telling and were putting together the right people and team to tell it. Executive producing isn’t as far from advising as it sounds. You discover something worth putting your time and resources into, then you assemble the right talent to help bring it to life. Josephine’s Pearl mattered to me, so I got behind it. I’ve never been interested in being uni-dimensional, and this fit into my overall vision. A “Yes” to being an executive producer was easy.

Everything I do traces back to it-everything. The Navy taught me how to lead, how to gain perspective by walking in another man’s shoes, how to have disciplined focus, how to be the best servant leader that I could. It gave me a proving ground to develop composure when the stakes are real, discipline and doing the right thing when no one’s watching, and discretion as a way of life. The leadership and integrity instilled aren’t credentials you hang on a wall-they are a state of mind and being. You learn to hold sensitive things carefully and to act without theater. Decades later, that’s still exactly how I operate and why my relationships with all my clients and the teams in which I have worked are still strong today.

Honestly, this is an industry where the need is greatest and the attention is least. Independent funeral home owners are being squeezed out and either closing their doors or selling to consolidators who strip away everything that made them matter to their community. These are people who have graciously served families for generations during their most difficult time, and no one is helping them achieve a better balanced life and the value that they could have. I could take my expertise to any industry, but I chose this one on purpose. That’s not a step down from the rooms I usually work in, it is a decision about where that expertise is needed most.

Their independence. Closing means giving up, and selling means handing your family’s name and legacy to someone or something who only sees it as part of their inventory. LionStar creates the third path—funeral home owners keep their business, name, legacy and standards. More importantly, they get the enterprise-level business, leadership and operational guidance they never had access to before now. We built it on four pillars: Choice, Capacity, Control, and Care. In practice, owners tend to win back 10 to 15 hours a week and lift profitability 10 to 15 percent, or more. The real value comes when the owner has the bandwidth to determine which path is right for them, their business, and the legacy they want to leave. We get them there.

Kim is truly one of the sharpest strategic minds and operators I have ever worked with-and I have worked with “the best and the brightest” across all the top-tier consulting firms and client companies. She has spent 25 years in the C-suite, working with nearly 600 leaders, over 125 corporate executives, 300,000 team members, and has been a KPI strategist to more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies. She sees the machinery of a business and can dissect it so quickly in a way that no other strategic advisor can. She’s the one asking what’s possible; I’m the one who builds the relationships, operations and systems that make it real. We don’t overlap much, we complement each other perfectly, which is exactly why we are so effective.

It taught me that how we say goodbye should be honored as a way we valued a life. Kim’s father received a full service with 300 people and the military honor he earned. My mother was laid to rest during lockdown with little more than a quiet online notice. It highlighted the disparity between the events through two completely different farewells. That contrast never left us. It is why LionStar exists, so the people who help families truly honor a life can remain open and thrive long enough to keep doing it. This isn’t a business plan. It’s personal not only to us, but to everyone on this planet as there is nothing more certain than every single human will require the services of a funeral for someone they love and eventually themselves. It’s personal and should be for all of us.