A business story is not messaging. It is behavior over time.
We help leadership teams build the organizational conditions that make strategy, values, and promises credible in everyday work.
We exist because the recommendation was never the hard part.
We help businesses make their story real by turning intention, vision, and promise into how the organization actually operates every day.
Novel Work Co. partners with leadership teams to turn the story they are telling into a sustainable operating reality, aligning strategy, structure, and delivery so what a business stands for is reflected in how it actually works.
Novel Work Co. started in 2015. Before that, our team led companies through accelerated growth, consulted for public and private entities with Accenture, and built and shaped leadership inside both for-profit and nonprofit organizations.
That experience shaped a specific conviction: most leadership teams already know roughly what they should do. What they lack is an organization structured, staffed, and practiced enough to do it consistently.
The gap shows up in ordinary places. Priorities that compete, decisions that stall a level too high, teams doing the same work twice, a customer promise that holds in one region and not another. None of it is solved by another recommendation.
So we developed proprietary methods aimed at true organizational transformation rather than short-term gains, and we stay through design and implementation, under real operating pressure, until the new way of working survives a normal week without us standing next to it.
- Founded
2015
- Based in
Dripping Springs, Texas
- Prior experience
Accenture consulting, operating leadership, nonprofit governance
- Method
Proprietary, built for durable transformation
Every business tells a story.
A story isn't what's written on a website. It's what shows up in decisions, systems, and behavior, every day.
When strategy says one thing and operations say another, the story breaks. We exist to prevent that by building the conditions that let it hold up over time. And when the story isn't clear yet, we help name it before we help build it.
A business's story only matters if the organization can support it.
Story means the strategy, values, promises, decisions, systems, behavior, and customer experience that reveal what a business really is.
Senior attention is not an upgrade.
The people who shape the work are the people accountable for delivering it. There is no team behind the team, and no handover from the people who sold the engagement to the people who run it.
That has practical consequences. Context is retained rather than re-briefed. Decisions are made in the room. Ownership is obvious, because there is only one place it can sit.
Fewer handoffs
One team, start to finish.
Faster decisions
The practitioner in the room can decide.
Retained context
Nothing is re-learned mid-engagement.
Clear ownership
You always know who is accountable.
Five habits you can hold us to.
- 01
Listen before prescribing
We spend the early weeks understanding how the organization actually runs before we suggest changing any of it.
- 02
Make complexity usable
Analysis that a leadership team cannot act on is unfinished work. We reduce it to decisions people can make.
- 03
Stay close to implementation
We work where the change lands: the operating rhythm, the roles, the meetings, the measures.
- 04
Adapt the path while keeping outcomes clear
The route changes as conditions change. What we are accountable for does not.
- 05
Build ownership inside the client organization
The goal is a team that no longer needs us. We hand over capability, not dependence.
The people you meet are the people doing the work.
Jared Kinchen
As founder and CEO of NWC, I have the great joy of leading a small but mighty team of passionate and creative professionals who mature our clients' brands so they can sustainably deliver upon their story.
Shay Smith
Shay designs the operating structures, roles, and rhythms that turn a strategy into everyday work, and writes on defining the right problem before designing the fix.
Matt Wallace
Matt works with leadership teams on priorities, decision rights, and the sequencing that makes a plan executable.
Pragmatic idealists.
We believe a business can be genuinely good at what it says it is, and we are unsentimental about what that takes. Those two things are not in tension.
In practice that means we will ask why an assumption is being protected, name the thing the room is avoiding, and then stay and help fix it. We take the outcomes seriously. We try not to take ourselves too seriously along the way.
Bring us the story the business is trying to live.
We will help you find the structures, priorities, and behaviors needed to make it hold.