AI coaching and leadership advisory for executives
We coach executives to put AI to work on their real work, and we’re the trusted, independent partner they can think out loud with, so they get hours back for the decisions and people that matter.
Hands-on, confidential and built on your own work. No hype.
Programs
AI coaching
Practical, hands-on coaching that shows executives and their teams how to use AI safely in their everyday work.
Leadership advisory
Sometimes the most valuable thing a leader can have is a trusted, independent person to think out loud with.
Also available: Lean Six Sigma training, strategy and operations. See all services
Not sure where to start? We’ll help you choose in 30 minutes.
Book a 30-minute discovery callWhy PomFig
Roots, trunk, branches, fruit and rings: how we help leaders grow capability that lasts.
AI coaching
Most organizations already have access to AI. Few use it well. Our AI coaching shows leaders and teams how to use AI in their everyday work to save hours, reduce errors and make better decisions, without the hype.
Track one
Executive and leadership briefings on where AI creates real value, how to weigh the risks, and how to lead people through the change.
Track two
Hands-on training for everyday staff, built around the tasks they actually do, inside the tools they already use.
A short pilot on one real workflow, typically 2 to 6 weeks, that measures the time and errors saved before you invest further.
Leader briefings and team training to spread what works across the organization.
A custom AI playbook, quick-reference guides and follow-up sessions, so good habits outlast the training.
Find where AI will save the most time and effort in your real workflows, and where it shouldn't be used.
Rebuild repetitive processes around AI, with human review where accuracy matters most.
Clear, simple rules for data privacy, accuracy checks and responsible use, especially in regulated environments like pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing.
Training leaders in AI adoption
Malik, an advanced everyday AI practitioner, has helped leadership teams across a broad range of organizations adopt AI in practical ways that cut the time and effort of routine work and reduce errors.
Leadership advisory
Sometimes the most valuable thing a leader can have is a trusted, independent person to think out loud with.
The higher you go, the fewer people you have to think out loud with. PomFig offers confidential one-on-one advisory and coaching for senior leaders working through complex decisions, organizational change, growth and transformation.
Talk with MalikWant a thinking partner for the hard calls?
Book a 30-minute discovery callFour connected capabilities, each one strengthening the others. We focus on pharmaceutical, medical device and other regulated manufacturers, along with growing mid-market organizations.
Operations
We remove friction, improve performance and build operating systems that scale, then help your teams keep improving long after the project ends.
Strategy
We help leadership teams turn ambition into clear choices, priorities and action, and keep the plan alive once the offsite is over.
Transformation
When the organization needs to change, we help leaders understand what must change, why, and how to make it stick.
Leadership
Confidential, one-on-one support for senior leaders working through complex decisions, change and growth.
Tell us what you’re trying to fix. We’ll tell you honestly if we can help.
Book a 30-minute discovery callLean Six Sigma training
The best improvement programs outlast the consultant. We train your leaders and teams to find problems, fix them and keep improving on their own.
Training is led by a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt with more than 25 years of experience running real operations, so every concept is grounded in how organizations actually work. Programs can be delivered on-site or virtually, and tailored to your industry and goals.
Our focus is pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, where quality, validation and disciplined training matter most. Training goes beyond Lean Six Sigma too, including operations and quality teams and validation teams.
For senior leaders and sponsors
How to choose the right improvement projects, sponsor them well and build a culture where improvement sticks.
Half-day briefing
For teams and frontline managers
The core language and tools of Lean Six Sigma, so everyone can spot waste and contribute to improvement.
One-day workshop
For managers who lead improvement
The full DMAIC method (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control), learned by completing a real project inside your business.
Multi-week cohort with a live project
For improvement leaders and program owners
One-on-one mentoring for those leading complex projects or building an improvement program across the organization.
Ongoing coaching
Participants work on challenges from your own business, so training pays for itself while people learn.
Practical and decision-focused. Enough statistics to be rigorous, never so much that it loses the room.
Follow-up coaching helps new skills take root, so improvement continues long after the training ends.
Solving today's problem should never create tomorrow's. We help leaders solve today's challenges while strengthening the organization for what comes next.
The pressures are real
The PomFig philosophy
Sustainable results
The measurable outcomes a healthy organization produces, year after year.
Strategy and growth
The strategic choices that decide where the organization goes next.
Leadership and organization
The leadership, structure, accountability and decision-making that hold everything together.
Operational foundation
The systems, processes, capabilities and disciplines that keep the organization healthy.
We don't just optimize the fruit.
We strengthen the roots.
Most clients don't arrive asking for a service. They arrive with a situation. Which one sounds familiar?
Processes that worked at half the size start to strain, and the same problems keep resurfacing. Where we usually start: operating model design, process improvement and growth planning.
Decisions take too long, handoffs multiply and nobody is quite sure who owns what. Where we usually start: organizational design, Lean Six Sigma and decision-rights clarity.
The market, the technology or the strategy has shifted, and the organization needs to shift with it. Where we usually start: transformation planning, change management and strategy execution.
The people and the plan look right, but results lag. Where we usually start: root-cause diagnosis, operational excellence and performance management.
Restructuring, consolidation or a hard reset on priorities. Where we usually start: organizational restructuring, cost optimization and confidential executive advisory.
The PomFig method
What is actually happening?
Where is the friction, risk or opportunity?
What should the future look like?
How do we make the change last?
About Malik
An operator who has spent 25+ years running real operations. Malik helps executive teams put AI and Lean Six Sigma to work, and leaves behind people who can keep improving without him.
Strategy is easy to write down. Execution is where it gets tested. Malik has spent his career in that gap, and that is exactly where he helps your company.
Today he runs daily operations within a Fortune 200 organization and has worked across 40 cross-functional areas, from sales, marketing and enrollment to contact centers and government partnerships. He knows how problems travel between teams, and how to train people to stop them at the source.
What Malik can do for your company
01
Build AI into the work your leaders and teams already do, such as reports, analysis, summaries and writing, with clear guardrails.
02
Use Lean Six Sigma to trace recurring issues across functions to their real cause, so they stop coming back next quarter.
03
Set the operating rhythm, owners and measures that turn strategy into weekly work people can act on.
04
Train internal champions and leave playbooks behind, so your company depends less on consultants, not more.
05
A confidential, independent sounding board for senior leaders working through hard decisions.
What the first 90 days can look like
Every engagement is tailored, but most follow this shape so you see results early and keep them.
Weeks 1 to 2
Weeks 3 to 6
Weeks 7 to 12
Why executives trust him
Working with Malik
Talk directly with Malik about your leadership team.
Book a 30-minute discovery callIt's to endure.
Organizations that endure can adapt without losing the foundations that make them strong. PomFig helps leaders build those foundations.
Build for today. Prepare for tomorrow. Design for generations.
The first story comes from Malik's own career. The others are illustrative scenarios based on situations organizations commonly face, showing how we think and work.
From Malik's career: regulated product manufacturing, China and the U.S.
Malik played a pivotal role leading the team and operations behind a new facility in China built to make feminine hygiene products for U.S. consumers.
Illustrative scenario: building materials distribution, Dubai
A distributor importing building materials from China and selling across the Middle East had outgrown the way it planned, bought and stocked.
Illustrative scenario: medical device manufacturing, AI adoption
A mid-size medical device manufacturer wanted to use AI to ease the documentation load on its quality and operations teams, without putting compliance at risk.
Want results like these in your organization?
Book a 30-minute discovery callNot a blog. A place to show how we think about the problems leaders actually face.
Rooted strategy. Lasting results.
You don't need the answer before you reach out. Tell us what you're trying to solve, and we'll start there.
Strategy
Most strategic plans don't fail in execution. They fail on the day they're finished, in the conference room, while everyone is nodding.
The plan looks complete. It has a vision, a handful of pillars, a set of initiatives and a timeline. The leadership team leaves the offsite energized. Six months later, very little has changed, and the plan quietly becomes a document people refer to rather than a direction they follow.
When that happens, leaders usually blame execution: people weren't disciplined, priorities shifted, the market moved. Sometimes that's true. More often, the plan was never executable in the first place.
A strategy is a set of choices. It says where the organization will compete, how it will win, and, just as importantly, what it will stop doing. Many strategic plans contain almost no real choices. They list everything the organization would like to be true, carefully balanced so that no part of the business feels left out.
If your strategy doesn't make anyone uncomfortable, it probably isn't making any choices.
The test is simple. Read each priority and ask what you will do less of because of it. If the answer is nothing, it isn't a strategic priority. It's a wish.
Write your strategy as choices, not aspirations. Limit yourself to three to five priorities, and name what each one replaces. Build the budget from the strategy, not alongside it. Give every initiative a single owner and a measure that will tell you, early, whether it's working. Then put the plan on the calendar: a short monthly review that asks what has changed, what is stuck and what needs to be decided.
Finally, try the Monday test. Ask a manager two levels below the leadership team what they will do differently on Monday because of the strategy. If they can't answer, the plan hasn't failed yet. It simply hasn't started.
Operations
When work slows down, the instinct is to look at the process. Orders take too long, approvals pile up, projects stall, so someone maps the workflow, finds the bottlenecks and redesigns the steps.
Sometimes that's exactly right. But in many organizations, the process isn't the problem. The process is simply where an unmade decision becomes visible.
Anyone who has used Lean Six Sigma knows that waiting is one of the biggest sources of waste. What's less often noticed is what people are waiting for. Frequently it isn't a machine, a system or a missing input. It's a decision: an approval, a sign-off, a judgment call that nobody feels authorized to make.
Consider a common pattern. A customer asks for a non-standard price. The salesperson needs approval from their manager, who escalates to a regional head, who copies finance, who asks for a margin analysis, which goes back up the chain. Five people touch a decision that one person with the right information could make in ten minutes.
You can redesign that process as often as you like. Until someone owns the decision, it will keep slowing down.
Start by listing the decisions that recur in the area you want to improve. For each one, ask four questions. Who decides? Who must be consulted? What information do they need? And what is the threshold above which it moves up the chain?
Then push each decision as close as possible to the information. The person nearest the customer, the order or the data is usually best placed to decide, provided they have clear limits and know they will be backed up.
Only then redesign the process. With clear decision rights in place, many process steps simply disappear, because they existed only to move a decision around until someone was willing to make it.
Better processes make work flow. Clear decisions are what allow it to keep flowing.
Longevity
A pomegranate or fig tree can bear fruit for generations, long after the person who planted it is gone. Most businesses can't say the same. Many depend so heavily on their founder that the founder's absence, even for a few weeks, is felt in every corner of the organization.
That dependence is natural. Founders build businesses by holding everything together: the key relationships, the hard decisions, the instinct for what matters. But the qualities that make a business succeed in its first decade can limit it in its second.
Founder dependence rarely looks like a problem from the inside. It looks like responsiveness and care. The founder knows every major customer, approves every important hire, and has the final word on pricing, product and people. Things move quickly because one person decides.
Until they don't. Growth multiplies the number of decisions, and the founder becomes the narrowest point in the organization. Talented people leave because they can't grow. Customers expect the founder on every call. And the business's value, to buyers, lenders or the next generation, is limited by how much of it walks out the door each evening.
The goal isn't to remove the founder's judgment. It's to make that judgment part of the organization.
Here is a useful exercise for any founder or owner. Imagine stepping away completely for ninety days. What would stall? Which decisions would wait? Which relationships would wobble? Which knowledge exists only in your head?
The answers are a map of what to build next. Working through them doesn't diminish the founder's role. It changes it, from the person who holds everything up to the person who planted something strong enough to keep growing.
About PomFig
You've probably sat in this meeting. A strategy everyone agrees with. Clear goals, confident timelines, a room full of nodding heads.
And then Monday comes.
I've spent my career in the space between that meeting and that Monday, where strategy meets execution and good plans either take root or quietly fade.
I started in 1999, at the intersection of marketing and technology, just as the internet was changing how businesses reached their customers. Over the years my work moved steadily closer to the engine of the business: operations, programs and strategy.
More than a decade ago, I helped lead the team that stood up a manufacturing facility in China making feminine hygiene products for the U.S. market. Getting machines validated was the easy part. Getting people trained, aligned and confident was the real work.
Today I run daily operations within a Fortune 200 organization, working across 40 cross-functional areas, from sales, marketing and enrollment to contact centers and government partnerships.
Problems rarely start where they show up. A spike in calls to the contact center can trace back to a step in enrollment. An enrollment issue can trace back to a promise made in marketing. Fix only the symptom and it comes back next quarter, sometimes somewhere else.
The fruit tells you something is wrong. The roots tell you why.
That's the idea behind PomFig. Named for the pomegranate and the fig, two trees that bear fruit for generations, it exists to help organizations perform today, adapt tomorrow and endure for the long term. We don't just optimize the fruit. We strengthen the roots.
The most valuable thing I can leave behind isn't a report. It's people who can do the work without me.
That's why PomFig puts training at the center of everything. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Scrum-certified leader, I teach teams to find problems, fix them and keep improving on their own. And as AI changes how work gets done, I've helped leadership teams across a broad range of organizations adopt it in practical ways that save time and reduce errors.
The lesson is the same either way. Tools don't change organizations. People who know how to use them well do.
You work directly with me, not a team of juniors. Expect candid conversation, rigorous thinking, strict confidentiality, and recommendations built to work on Monday, not just in the meeting.
If you're somewhere between the strategy and the Monday, let's talk.
Malik