Soul-businesses — the catalog
Mike named it: "30+ products we can build together." We aim for 33 — the number has weight in the missional frame. Today 27 of 33 are sketched or shipping. Six slots are open by design, to be claimed by what emerges in future working sessions and pilot learnings.
Why this page exists
Soul Forge is one product. The soul-extraction methodology underneath it is a substrate — once a founder\'s soul is surfaced, the same identity becomes a filter that applies to every consequential decision the company makes, internal and external. The catalog of those filter applications is the catalog of soul-businesses. Phase 1 ships the first; everything else rests on it.
This page honors Mike\'s thirty-year methodology by naming the scale of what we\'re building toward, not just what ships first. It is also intentionally incomplete — the six "frontier" slots invite future unlocking from real conversations and real pilots.
Core — what's shipping in Phase 1
The foundation. Everything in the other 30 entries rests on these three substrate pieces.
Soul Brand Guide
The Phase 1 product. Discovery → Soul document → Communications Guide. The leadership tool that produces marketing artifacts as outputs.
Communications Coach (subscription)
Doug's commercial defense: the system is a coach, not an author. Recurring subscription model; human still polishes the writing. Sidesteps liability + opens recurring revenue line.
Source: Doug — May 7
Sound bites + content corpus
Discovery conversations capture voice samples, story narratives, defining-moment recordings. These become voiceover material, explainer-video content, founder-talk extracts. Marketing content the founder didn't have to "produce."
Phase 2 — measurement layer
Soul Forge produces the identity. The Dashboard ensures the identity is lived, measured, and evolved. Build kicks off after Phase 1 MVP onboards.
Intelligent Dashboard — CEO reality engine
Unified marketing intelligence: sentiment everywhere as architectural principle, advisory-board avatars, dual prediction (accountant brain + visionary brain), neighborhood-aware strategy, soul-filtered output.
Culture measurement via "touch types"
Specific interaction moments (customer service calls, tech-visit reports, NPS surveys, meeting quality) analyzed for whether the company is walking the talk. The operational instrument for "are we living our values?"
Source: Doug — Mar 11
Soul-renewal triggering
When sustained behavior drifts from the surfaced soul — or when life events suggest identity may have evolved (generational handoff, ownership change, founder transition) — system flags renewal rather than letting the soul go stale.
Strategic drift detection
Surfaces when business decisions diverge from the surfaced mission. Not a rulebook — a signal. Doug's "discipline of no" becomes operationally measurable.
Phase 3 — ethics signal across company processes
Once soul is surfaced (Phase 1) and lived-authenticity is measurable (Phase 2), the same soul becomes the filter the company runs every consequential decision through — internal AND external. Doug's May 7 framing: gray areas of ethics signaled, not black-and-white rules enforced.
Hiring decisions filter
Candidate values vs. surfaced soul alignment. Gray-area flags before the offer. Not auto-rejection — illumination of where divergence might matter.
Vendor + partner choice filter
Same identity that filters marketing copy also filters who you do business with. Doug's framer-and-general-contractor pattern: comfortable treating unfair partners differently than fair partners — that judgment is gray-area soul-aligned, not rule-aligned.
Source: Doug — May 7
Internal communications voice consistency
Helps internal docs, all-hands talks, Slack culture, memos sound like the company. Surfaces drift when language stops matching the soul. Same Communications Coach surface, internal-facing instead of external.
Strategic decisions — operationalized "discipline of no"
When a yes diverges from who the company actually is, the soul signals. Not veto — context. Founders gain a tool that holds the strategic line their own values would hold if they had time to think about it.
Customer service operations
Handles unfair-treatment situations as gray-area signals rather than rulebook violations. Maintains the founder's actual judgment patterns at scale, across an entire CS team.
Crisis communications response
When a crisis hits, the soul filters response drafts: would the founder actually say this? Does it sound like a PR-trained corporate voice or like the founder's lived voice? Difference is everything during a trust event.
Multi-stakeholder brand support
Co-founder companies have two souls. The system supports both, surfaces alignment, flags divergence honestly rather than collapsing into one synthetic identity.
Proactive PR risk prevention
Surfaces gray-area communications before they ship. Prevents the "what were we thinking" moments by signaling them earlier. Pairs with the Dashboard's sentiment-everywhere layer.
Specialized applications
Soul-extraction methodology redeployed to high-leverage moments where authenticity matters disproportionately.
VC founder evaluation — soul-based due diligence
Pitch decks are theater. Founder-soul artifacts surfaced through discovery are not. Soul-based diligence for VCs evaluating founders — beyond financial models, before personality interviews.
Corporate retreat facilitation
Leadership-team retreats currently rely on facilitators improvising. With Soul Forge, the retreat has a substrate — founder + leadership-team souls surfaced beforehand; retreat works ON the surfaced material instead of FROM scratch.
Source: Mike — adjacent to coaching practice
Leadership team alignment workshops
When a founder's soul and the leadership team's souls diverge, the company fragments slowly. Tool surfaces the divergence before it becomes operational dysfunction.
Succession planning + generational transfer
Family businesses with the next generation taking over. The soul of the parent generation gets preserved as artifact; the next generation's soul gets surfaced and honored. Transition becomes intentional rather than improvised.
Source: Doug — "soul renewal" framing
M&A culture-fit assessment
Most acquisitions fail on culture. Soul-extraction on both sides pre-close surfaces alignment / divergence before the wire transfers. Acquisition becomes diligence-able on the dimension most acquisitions actually fail on.
Board governance alignment
Board meetings have a stated agenda and a real one. Soul-filtered board materials force the real agenda to be visible — surfaces drift between stated mission and current trajectory.
Investor narrative consistency
Founders sell different versions of the company to different investors and lose track. Soul-grounded investor narrative stays consistent across pitches, decks, follow-up emails. Investors notice consistency; they punish inconsistency.
Channel + distribution
How Soul-businesses reach the people they're for. Each is a partnership pattern, not a separate product — but each requires its own deal architecture and lives as a distinct surface.
Executive coaching white-label
Mike's existing network: ~200 one-on-one clients across twenty years, plus hundreds more through his C12 and conference-circuit work. Coaches use Soul Forge under their own brand; the methodology stays Mike-authored.
Source: Mike
Marketing agency partnership pipeline
TargetHeart's clients + every agency we partner with. Agencies route their clients through the Soul Brand Guide; deeper engagements route back to the agency. Revenue compounds for both sides.
Source: Doug — Phase 1 channel
Christian leadership network distribution
Mike's C12 + Missional AI All Believers + Good Friday breakfast communities. The thirteen-year prayer-breakfast network is real distribution. Faith-aligned founders find the methodology through faith-aligned channels.
Source: Mike
Pastoral / faith-based business community channel
Parallel to executive coaching but more pastoral than business-mentor: helping faith-led founders translate the missional dimension of their work into communications and culture. Soul-extraction respects the faith register rather than secularizing it.
AI-First Company OS integration
Dima's framework for AI-first operating models. Soul Forge surfaces the soul; AI-First Company OS replatforms the company's operating layer around it. Pair-bundle: companies that adopt both get the soul AND the operating discipline.
Source: Dima — AI-First Company OS routine
Frontier — six slots to unlock
Mike named 30+; we set the target at 33 (the symbolic weight resonates with the missional frame). Six slots are open — to be claimed by what emerges in future Mike-Dima-Doug working sessions and from pilot learnings. Page updates when each frontier slot fills.
— to unlock —
Open slot for what emerges from Pilot Zero learnings (July 17 onward).
— to unlock —
Open slot for what emerges from Mike's methodology integration.
— to unlock —
Open slot for what emerges from Phase 2 Dashboard pilot.
— to unlock —
Open slot for what emerges from a customer asking for it.
— to unlock —
Open slot for what emerges from a partnership conversation.
— to unlock —
Open slot. The thirty-third surface is held open intentionally — it's the one we haven't imagined yet.
Why 33
Mike said "30 plus" at the April 15 Business Formation working session, and again at the April 10 Dima-Mike conversation when sketching the Universal Business Consultant vision. We chose 33 because the number carries weight in the missional frame Mike and Doug both hold — and because aiming three slots above the floor signals intent: we\'re not stopping at the minimum named.
The six frontier slots are not placeholders — they are invitations. Each one fills when a real conversation surfaces an application of soul that wasn\'t in the catalog yet. The page updates; the number stays at 33; the substrate stays the same.
How this evolves
Every entry on this page has a "source" line when it comes from someone specific. Mike + Doug + Dima all author here. As pilots run and partnerships develop:
- Sketched → in-dialog: when an entry moves from "we mentioned it once" to "we\'re actively shaping it"
- In-dialog → phase-3: when an entry has enough scope to become a concrete next-product
- Frontier → sketched: when a real conversation claims an open slot
The catalog is not a roadmap. It\'s a surface area. The roadmap (/roadmap) sequences which surfaces we build when. This page shows the territory those surfaces live in.
What to do with this page
If you\'re Mike or Doug: name what\'s missing. The page is intentionally partial — your additions are what make it complete. Each unlocked frontier slot is a conversation we had that I captured here; the ones still open are conversations we haven\'t had yet.
If you\'re a partner reading this: the page is the answer to "what\'s the surface area of the JV?" Phase 1 ships the foundation. The other thirty-two entries are what makes this worth multi-year co-building.
If you\'re an engineer: notice the substrate. Every entry on this page uses the same soul-extraction methodology underneath. The work you\'re shipping in Phase 1 compounds across all 33 surfaces — that\'s the architectural payoff of getting the foundation right.