DEATH DOULAS
(FOR BUSINESS)

Guidance and strategic planning for graceful business
closures, leadership transitions, and other exits.

Get in Touch

About

Don't Die Alone

Our professional lives are full of little deaths: Businesses close. Projects end. People leave. We don't usually plan ahead for these inevitabilities, and we rarely process the emotional losses.

Death Doulas for Business are trained practitioners that accompany you in the moments that matter: the big decisions, the hard conversations, the wind-down, and the transition into whatever is next.

We believe that everyone can live and lead better when they learn how to end well at work.

Services

What is a Death Doula
for Business?

We invented this idea! It's a role modeled after the end-of-life doula—someone who provides emotional, logistical, and relational support during the dying process. Applied to business, a death doula is an executive coach specializing in professional transitions, closures, and exits.

The goal is to help founders, teams, and stakeholders make difficult decisions with grace, clarity, and intention. The outcome is measured in ease, confidence, dollars and time saved, and relationships preserved.

01

Decision Making

Structured support for the hardest calls: when to close, what to prioritize, how to sequence the wind-down. Values-based frameworks for clear, consistent, and confident decisions about high-stakes trade-offs and obligations.

02

Transition Planning

Strategy for operational unwinding: off-boarding staff, ending leases, managing finances, filing paperwork. Guidance on asset transfers, IP, and data handling.

03

Communication

Crafting and delivering the hard messages — to employees, investors, clients, customers, and the public. Transparent, compassionate communication that protects relationships and reputation.

04

Facilitation & Mediation

Structured facilitation of conflict, unresolved emotions, and competing interests among co-founders, partners, and other valuable stakeholders. Getting everyone to a fair and clean ending.

05

Meaning-Making

Articulating a closing narrative that honors the business's impact, evolution, and legacy. Facilitating rituals, documentation, or celebrations to mark the transition with intention.

06

Grief Support

A safe, non-judgmental space to grieve, reflect, and process the complex emotions of closure — shame, failure, relief, identity loss, regret. An opportunity to grow.

We are not lawyers, accountants, or compliance officers — and we don't do legal counsel, tax planning, or state and federal regulatory filings. What we do is help you find the right people for all of that, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks while you're navigating one of the hardest periods of your professional life.

We work with organizations of every size, and leaders across all industries.

  • Founders closing a company under duress
  • Leaders proactively planning succession or acquisition
  • Nonprofits undergoing sunsetting or mission transition
  • Small business owners retiring or shifting career paths
  • Creative studios or collectives ending after a period of collaboration
  • Family businesses dissolving across generations

How We Work

Never too early,
never too late.

The most resilient founders think about endings before they arrive. A death doula's perspective belongs at every stage — when you're just starting, when you're scaling, and yes, when you're ready to close.

Some of the most profound insights come after the end, while reflecting and exploring new beginnings. Wherever you are in the lifecycle, there's value in having someone who knows how to hold the whole arc.

Planning Launch Startup Growth Inflection Maturity Inflection Closing What's
Next
00 First Step Free

Free Consultation

Not sure where to start? Begin with a free 30-minute conversation. We'll listen to where you are, share how we work, and help you figure out whether this is the right fit. No pressure, no obligation, no cost — just a conversation.

01 One-on-One Sliding scale:
$150–$500/hour

Coaching Sessions

For founders actively navigating a closure, wind-down, or leadership transition — and for anyone who waited too long to ask for help. Together we work through the grief, the identity loss, and the practical decisions — in the right order, at the right pace. Available as a single session or ongoing monthly support.

Are you a wind-down service provider? We partner with companies and advisors to bring coaching to clients at the moment they need it most.

02 Peer Group $500/month

Founder/CEO Cohorts

The isolation of business endings is real and underestimated. Cohorts bring together small groups of founders to share experience, exchange wisdom, and support each other through the process. Structured but not rigid. Well-suited for founders in active wind-down or post-closure founders navigating transition.

03 Immersive Inquire for details

Peak Retreat

A retreat for leaders at their peak who are willing to sit with the questions most people spend their whole careers avoiding. Professional mortality. Legacy. What you're actually building — and why.

Once a year, a small, curated group of founders and CEOs step away from their successful, growing businesses to consider the inevitable. Participants leave with a concrete legacy or transition plan, meaningful peer connections, and a new perspective on business life and death that changes how they lead every day.

The Doulas

A network of practitioners,
matched to your moment.

Every practitioner in our network is both a trained end-of-life doula and an experienced entrepreneur working as a business strategist, coach or consultant. Clients are matched to the right person for their situation, sector, and stage.

Adam Katz INELDA Trained

Adam Katz

Business Strategy & Founder Coaching

A former agency owner who has survived a few business deaths — a music festival, a bookstore, a creative agency. Not all were full of grace. Over the last several years, Adam has counseled and supported other creative businesses as they navigated their own deaths — some elective, others more like terminal illnesses. He brings end-of-life doula training to bear on the work of strategic planning, founder coaching, and graceful exits.

Danya Shults Sacred Crossings Trained

Danya Shults

Executive Coaching & Founder Transitions

A veteran of multiple industries — nonprofit, tech, and venture capital — Danya is also the founder of the following shuttered businesses: a pop-up restaurant, a company in the spirituality space, and a digital zine. She now works as an executive coach and startup advisor. Danya believes in beginning with the end in mind, and that every ending is the start of something new. Her death doula training deepens the comfort, clarity, and practicality she brings to leaders and their teams as they wind down their companies with intention.

DOULA_NAME

Organizational Transitions & Mediation

SHORT_BIO — background, approach, and the specific kinds of endings this practitioner specializes in supporting.

What we are reading
and writing.

View All Resources

Contact

Let's talk
about the end.