Aligning the fields within us to
transform the work around us
FACILITATION
Most Gatherings Move the Agenda.
We Move the Room.
Real participation doesn't happen by accident. It is designed, held, and shaped before anyone walks in the door. We facilitate both the outside work and the inside work of organizations — and in both cases, our goal is the same: to make the intelligence already in the room accessible, honest, and useful.
The outside work — customer gatherings, prospect events, roundtables, salons, and strategic conversations — helps organizations build trust, deepen relationships, and create experiences people carry forward long after they leave the room.
The inside work — leadership retreats, team alignment sessions, offsites, and facilitated conversations — helps organizations move through growth, complexity, tension, and change without losing coherence or each other.
Most people who convene others know the feeling: the agenda ran, the time filled, and yet something essential never got said. The right voices stayed quiet. The real question never surfaced. People left politely, maybe even happily — yet nothing shifted.
The most important conversation in the room is usually the one that never happened.
What We Bring
Pre-event design: structure, flow, and the conditions that make real participation possible. Facilitation that draws out the quieter, sharper voices, not just the loudest ones. The ability to slow a group down enough to reach the conversation beneath the conversation. Skilled, steady moderation of strategic, sensitive, or charged topics. The capacity to create immediate belonging without manufacturing it. Pattern recognition in real time, reading what a room needs before it knows itself.
We don't impose a process on a group. We design conditions that allow a group to do its best thinking, building, and deciding together.
The Range
We work across scales, formats, and industries — from intimate dinner salons to large industry convenings, from single-day offsites to multi-day leadership retreats. The through-line is consistent regardless of format. The format changes. The quality of what we create inside it does not.
"Across two days and 25 partners, The Fifth Field created the conditions for real conversations — the kind that don't happen in ordinary retreats. We left with unified goals, greater clarity, and truths that needed to be said."
— Eric Schnell, Founder, BeyondBrands
"Investing in your people in a retreat setting and bringing ideas together is where the real magic happens. I thank The Fifth Field for being fantastic facilitators."
— Christie Vanderveen, COO, Big Bold Health
Every room you bring people into is an opportunity — to build trust, surface truth, and move something forward. We make sure that opportunity doesn't go to waste.
THE ALIGNED ACQUISITION MODEL™
The first model in CPG built to protect the brand by designing for the humans inside the transaction.
Most deal structures are built to protect the investment. Very few are built to protect what made it worth investing in. Our Aligned Acquisition Model™ is designed to protect both, preserving brand integrity, cultural continuity, and consumer trust through ownership transition, so the asset that justified the investment doesn't erode in the execution of it.
The deal closes. The brand doesn't always survive it.
Cultural integration issues destroy measurable value in over 70% of transactions. Not because the strategy was wrong. Because the human system that carries the brand — the founder relationships, the team's institutional knowledge, the consumer trust built over years — wasn't architected to survive the transition. That doesn't live in the data room. It lives in people.
Two Paths. One Through-Line.
The Aligned Acquisition Model runs in two directions depending on where you sit in the transaction.
The Exit Path is built for founders, investors, and boards building toward an exit that delivers on both value and legacy. From diligence through close, every phase is designed to protect enterprise value, transfer authority deliberately, and ensure the brand arrives at close as a coherent, high-trust system — worth more than it was at signing.
The Strategic Path is built for acquirers who have identified a brand the market already trusts and have the capital and conviction to take it further. From letter of intent through integration and into the portfolio, every phase is designed to protect what made the brand worth acquiring — the culture, the relationships, the consumer trust — while the acquirer's scale activates its full potential.
Each path runs three phases. Each phase produces board-level documentation — diagnostics, briefs, plans, and audits built to hold up in a boardroom, not just advise leadership. Phases are available as standalone engagements or as a full architecture from the start.
What Makes This Different
Kate LaBrosse and Carlotta Mast bring a combined 40 years inside the natural products industry — Kate from the brand and broker relationships that determine whether a funded brand holds its value through transition, and Carlotta from the institutional vantage point that shaped how the entire industry understands growth, disruption, and market leadership.
They are the only firm bringing both sides of the transaction into the same room.
Human alignment is the last unmodeled advantage in M&A.
The Aligned Acquisition Model™ turns a well-executed transaction into a lasting competitive position.
THE INTEGRATED EXPANSION MODEL™
Most organizations don't stall because strategy is wrong. They stall because the human system wasn't built to carry it.
Growth exposes what misalignment has been absorbing. Decision-making slows. Coordination fractures. People who were capable inside a smaller system start working around each other instead of with each other. The structure that got you here can't hold what comes next.
The Integrated Expansion Model™ is how we rebuild it.
This is not a strategic planning process. It's a redesign of the human operating conditions that allow strategy to land — starting with an honest read of reality, moving through vision, structure, roles, and culture, until alignment isn't aspirational. It's operational.
We work through nine phases, from grounding the leadership team in what's actually true, to designing the decision authority, rhythms, and cultural conditions that allow the organization to move with shared direction — and sustain it under pressure.
The outcome isn't a plan. It's a living system where people, teams, and the organization operate in alignment with what they say they value.
This work is for organizations entering a new chapter — scaling through a growth inflection, absorbing a structural change, or operating inside complexity the current system wasn't designed to hold.
GROUP COHORT PROGRAMS
One leader changes a room.
A cohort changes an organization.
Most leadership development asks people to learn something new. This work asks something different — that leaders develop the internal range to carry what they're already responsible for, without fragmenting themselves or the people around them.
We design and run custom cohort programs for organizations investing in a defined leadership group over time. Built around four foundational capacities — grounded presence under pressure, self-awareness in the moments that matter, the ability to hold complexity without forcing false certainty, and leadership that stays aligned across values, role, and impact — these programs develop the kind of collective intelligence that changes how a team moves together long after the container closes.
This is not a content series or a speaker lineup. It's a structured field where leaders work with real situations, real decisions, and real stakes — alongside peers who are navigating the same level of responsibility.
The result is a leadership group that trusts each other, thinks more clearly under pressure, and stops losing energy to the dynamics that slow most teams down.
Programs are designed to fit your organization's specific conditions — the size of the group, the complexity of the moment, and what the work is asking of your people right now.
INDIVIDUAL LEADERSHIP COACHING
Work today doesn't just demand your expertise. It demands your nervous system, your judgment under fire, your ability to stay honest when pressure wants you to perform.
The leaders who find us are usually carrying more than their current operating system was built for. A new role. A company at an inflection point. A team that needs something from them they haven't yet learned to give. The capability is there. The internal range to lead from it consistently — under pressure, in complexity, across relationships that matter — is what we build.
This is not advisory work or accountability coaching. We work on the operating system beneath behavior — the patterns, the nervous system responses, the relational dynamics, and the internal authority that determine how a leader performs when stakes are high.
Engagements are designed around what you're actually navigating. Most include a combination of regular coaching sessions, diagnostic work to map the leadership system clearly, and integration support between sessions so the work compounds in real conditions rather than staying in the conversation.
This is where leadership stops being something you manage and starts being something you author.