An introductory program
A program that formalizes what strong leaders actually do under regulatory uncertainty, built from a doctoral study of ten leaders across ten regulated sectors. It includes one private working session with Dr. W.E. Da'Cruz.
$997 through 30 September 2026. $1497 from 1 October.
The program opens 15 September 2026. You are enrolling in advance, at the founding rate.
Dr. W.E. Da'Cruz, DBA, University of Michigan-Flint. Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Strategy, University of Michigan-Dearborn. Co-founder, The Mushroom Angel Company. TEDxDetroit speaker. Senior international consultant, UN Economic Commission for Africa.
The problem
They carry the heaviest regulatory load with the fewest people to carry it.
Most advice treats that load as an administrative cost. Something to file, something to outsource. That framing is why capable leaders get blindsided.
Regulation is dynamic, geographically uneven, and ambiguous. It decides which markets you can enter, which partners will take you, and how fast you can move. That is not a cost line. That is your strategy.
Where this began
I co-founded The Mushroom Angel Company in Eastern Market, Detroit, and scaled a mushroom first food manufacturer from a home kitchen into more than one hundred retail locations across six Midwest states. No lobbyist. No government affairs team.
We were onboarded to Whole Foods, and then a category wide regulatory issue surfaced that I did not have the know how to navigate at the time. The opportunity pulled back. Not because of our product. Because of interpretation.
Pursuing high end food service meant clearing distributor requirements before we could even compete. Access was gated by paperwork and reading, not by whether the product was good.
So I spent three and a half years formalizing what I wish I had known, in a doctoral study at the University of Michigan-Flint. This program is that study, made usable.
Doing what I studied, studying what I do.
What the study found
Your relational capacity. How you mobilize your team, peers, regulators, and partners under uncertainty. In small firms this is what substitutes for the political access you do not have.
Your interpretation of what the rules actually require. The most referenced and most connected dimension in the study. It converts outside complexity into an inside decision.
Your systems and routines. Necessary, load bearing, and in the data almost entirely disconnected from the rest. That finding will change where you spend money.
Outcomes did not follow from any one of the three. They followed from how the three were aligned, with interpretation at the center. No case in the study achieved legitimacy through one trade alone.
What you get
Sixty minutes, one on one, with Dr. W.E. Da'Cruz. You bring the actual document and the actual decision. We run it through the framework together, with a second set of eyes on your reading, and you leave with a named first move. This is a working session, not a call.
About ninety minutes of instruction, on demand, yours permanently.
The participant workbook. Five exercises, including the Talents Audit and the Translation Exercise, built to be reused every time a new requirement lands on you.
Four working templates: the Regulator Conversation Guide, the Interpretation Register, the Internal Sentence Template, and the Routine Specification Sheet.
A scored instrument across the three trades, with a written read of your configuration and the correction it calls for.
Configuration profiles from the study itself, showing how four leaders in four different regulated sectors actually arranged the three trades, and what it cost them.
Completing this program is how you are considered for a place in a Class.
The session
Because interpretation is the hardest thing to do alone.
When you read a requirement by yourself, you are checking your own reading against your own reading. There is no friction, and the places where you are most confident are exactly the places you will not examine.
That is the most common reason capable, careful leaders get caught. Not negligence. Unexamined confidence in a private interpretation.
I lost a retail placement to exactly that.
So this program does not end with a video. It ends with an hour in which somebody else reads it with you.
Outcomes
Fit
Enrollment
$997
through 30 September 2026. $1497 from 1 October.
Opens 15 September 2026. Your place is held from the moment you enroll.
The founding rate is real and it has a reason. The first Class shapes this program. Your situations become the worked examples that sharpen it for everyone who comes after, and that is worth something to me.
Pay in full, or in two payments of $525.
Enroll, $997 in fullRefundable in full at any point before access is granted on 15 September. After that the material is yours and the fee is not refundable. If your circumstances change later, write to me and I will look at a credit toward another At The Desk offering.
Questions
15 September 2026. Enrolling now holds your place at the founding rate and gives you the full program, the four documents and your Desk Executive session from that date. Nothing is released before then.
$997 holds until 30 September 2026. From 1 October the rate is $1497. Enrolling before the program opens costs the same as enrolling in the two weeks after it opens, and it is the last time this program is $997.
You can ask for a full refund at any point before the program opens and your access is granted. That is the whole pre sell window, from now until 15 September. Once access is granted the material is in your hands and the fee is not refundable, which is the ordinary position for a program you can read, download and keep. If something changes in your circumstances after that, write to me. I will look at a credit toward another At The Desk offering on the facts of your situation.
About ninety minutes of video and roughly two hours of exercises. Most people work through it across two or three weeks and hold their session at the end.
As soon as the program opens. Book three to four weeks out and move it if you need to. A date on the calendar is what turns a purchase into finished work.
If an outside body sets conditions you have to meet, a funder, a certifying agency, an insurer, or a major customer's compliance department, this applies. The word regulated is broader than the licensed industries.
Yes, by Module 2. Any real requirement currently affecting you.
No. This is the introductory program, and it is how you are considered for a place in a Class.
Dr. W.E. Da'Cruz. The framework is her doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan-Flint. She teaches entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and co-founded a food manufacturer that scaled to more than one hundred retail locations.
$997 through 30 September 2026. $1497 from 1 October. Opens 15 September.